About Orange
My father never got it. He worked his entire life and saved well. The bank called him to sell a credit card he didn't need but no one ever called to help him make the right financial decisions.
My sister never got it either. She is an ML engineer at one of the largest companies in the US. One of the sharpest people I know. She doesn't invest. Not because she's careless. Because nobody ever sat with her.
Neither did I.
This is why Orange exists.
You open an investing app for the first time. And this is what greets you.
Every other investing app in the market
Which of these actually matters for my decision right now?
The tooltip can't tell you. The app can't tell you. Nobody is there to tell you.
So I went to YouTube. Asked a friend from a business family. Understood large, mid and small cap in theory. It made sense. So I invested.
The shares went into loss. I panicked and sold immediately.
Nobody was there to say: this is normal. Hold.
That moment didn't just cost me money. It cost me years of believing I could do this at all.
All I wanted was someone I could just call.
More options than ever before. But which one is right for me?
The real problem
Every day 100,000 Indians open a new demat account. Most never make a single investment. Not because they can't afford to.
Information was never the problem. The internet is full of it. The problem is the moment. When your shares fall, when you get your first salary, when you finally have ₹10,000 to spare and no idea what to do next. At that moment, nobody is there.
The financial system was never broken. It was never built for most people.
Generic advice for everyone is advice for no one
Talk to millions — can't talk to you, your salary, your actual question.
Nobody has 47 minutes
Attention spans are 7 seconds. Even if you finish — just theory. Same crossroads.
They sell what pays them most
Conflict of interest is baked in. Designed around their payout, not your future.
Good advice. Not for most people.
Built for the wealthy. Normal salary and real questions? Simply not in reach.
Raghav and I are twins. At 18 we built an investing app together, scaled it to 20,000+ users and raised a pre-seed of $180K. We shut it down due to team conflict and tightening crypto regulations in India. We returned the money to our investors.
While working at Swipe (YC 21) scaling it to $1M ARR, we ended up in the same apartment in Hyderabad as Dhairya. IIT grad. Engineer at ICICI Bank, inside the most regulated financial sector in India. His story was the same. Nobody in his family invested. He started alone, put ₹5,000 blindly into a pre-IPO stock, watched it fall, turned to YouTube. Same confusion. Same silence. Same starting point.
Three people who built in this space before. Failed in this space before. Learned what breaks and why. And still came back because the problem followed us home. Our own families still hadn't invested.
We didn't discover this problem. We grew up inside it.
Meet Padii
We are building a financial companion you can call and ask anything about your money, starting with investments.
We named it Padii.
Not because it sounds cool.
In Indian families, we call our dad Papa and our sister Didi.
Mine never had anyone to guide them.
Pa from Papa. di from Didi.
The people we grew up with are in the name itself.
When Padii picks up, it's not an app answering.
It's the promise we made to them.