Edul Patel and Mudrex: Building the New Financial OS, One Battle at a Time
How an IIT Bombay grad survived an RBI ban, five company pivots, and the full crypto cycle to process $1.5 billion in payments, and what he learned about people, equity, and wealth along the way.
There is a particular kind of founder India has been quietly producing, one who does not talk about changing the world so much as quietly rewiring the parts of it that do not work. Edul Patel, CEO and co-founder of Mudrex, is that kind of founder.
He graduated from IIT Bombay in 2011, spent two years at Deutsche Bank’s FX Risk desk, and by 2013 had the itch that most engineers who end up building companies get: the feeling that working inside someone else’s system is a slow way to die. He co-founded Niffler, a hyperlocal deals platform, built a team of 25 to 30 people, and by 2015 had sold it to Tapzo (then HelpChat). Tapzo was later acquired by Amazon. The journey from small-cap to mid-cap to large-cap, as Patel describes it, played out in roughly four years.
He left Tapzo in December 2017. By January 2018, Mudrex had begun. And then the RBI banned crypto.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
Ten days before Mudrex’s exchange was set to go live, with a thousand alpha testers already signed up, the Reserve Bank of India effectively shut down crypto activity in India. Most founders would have taken that as a sign. Patel took it as a design constraint.
He pivoted immediately to building a global algo-trading platform for crypto. The logic was clean: crypto trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across every time zone, with volatility that makes manual trading emotionally and practically unsustainable. Mudrex built the automation layer. By the time Y Combinator backed Mudrex in its Winter 2019 batch, the platform had scaled to over a million users globally.
In 2020, the Supreme Court overturned the RBI’s ban. Patel turned back to India. He launched Coin Sets, a product built along the lines of index funds for crypto. He ran a Delta Neutral crypto fund for global family offices and HNIs. Then the 2021 to 2022 boom-bust cycle hit, and the company went through what Patel calls its “Year of Persistence.”
By 2024, Mudrex had seen a 200% rise in its user base and a 20x surge in monthly trading volume, reaching $200 million. Today the platform supports over 700 tokens, 500+ derivatives products, and 30 index products for more than one million investors.
I joke that this is probably the fifth company we are on inside Mudrex. One battle after another, that is the title of the last eight years.
The sixth chapter may be the most consequential.
In December 2023, Mudrex launched Saber.Money, a stablecoin-based cross-border payments infrastructure now licensed in seven countries including India (FIU), UK (S21), EU (VASP), Canada (MSB), and Australia (AUSTRAC). The business case is stark: India is the world’s largest recipient of remittances at $135 billion annually. Nearly $10 billion of that is lost to fees and settlement delays. Traditional SWIFT transfers cost 3 to 5% and take 3 to 7 days. Saber completes 93% of its transactions in under a minute, at roughly 50 basis points.
In January 2026, Saber integrated with Circle Payments Network as a Beneficiary Financial Institution, enabling instant USDC off-ramping across global markets. Saber now processes over $1.5 billion in annualized payment volume.
Crypto has gone well beyond trading and investing. It is now becoming a new OS for financial services, especially with stablecoins. The financial system is being rewritten in real time.
When I pushed Patel on what this all means for the people who build these companies, the conversation got genuinely interesting.
The Indian startup ecosystem has a liquidity problem that nobody likes to talk about plainly. Employees join early, accept below-market salaries, receive ESOPs, and then wait. And wait. The average time to a meaningful outcome has stretched past ten years. Meanwhile, public company RSUs, which are effectively cash with a vesting schedule, make competing for experienced talent increasingly difficult.
Patel’s approach is direct. At Mudrex, every employee holds equity, including customer support agents. It is non-negotiable. The average tenure is 3.5 years. His oldest team member has been with him for seven years, through every cycle, every pivot, every near-death moment.
His hiring filter is equally direct. When candidates negotiate hard on ESOPs, he sees it as a green flag. When they do not bring it up at all, he reads it as either disengagement or a sign they are using the offer to fish for a counter-offer elsewhere.
People who argue and negotiate for ESOPs, that is a clear green flag. It tells me you are valuing something that matters. If you do not talk about it at all, I wonder why you are here.
On the question of token-based compensation, Patel is more cautious than most crypto founders. He believes most businesses should not issue tokens. The moment a token exists, it puts a public, real-time number on a company at a stage when that number reveals very little that is useful and can damage morale, distort decision-making, and distract from the actual work.
Issuing a token for your business is, in most cases, a really bad idea. It puts an objective worth on your company at a time when that number might represent anything, and you will always be dissatisfied.
Tokens make sense, he argues, only in network businesses where early participants take on disproportionate risk for later-stage gains, and where you genuinely want to incentivize the builders of the network itself. Binance’s BNB token is his cleanest example: $15 million raised, a loyalty flywheel built into the exchange, and a positive loop between token utility and company growth.
For everyone else, the answer is simpler and harder: pay people fairly in cash, give them meaningful equity, build a secondary market for that equity over time, and then make the company worth something.
If your company’s ESOPs were liquid, there would be a clear answer for almost every candidate coming from big tech. You could tell them: as soon as your grants vest, there is a liquid pool available. You are not waiting for an IPO that is a decade away.
Patel ended our conversation with a question I had not expected to be the most revealing. Given a choice between Bitcoin and Coinbase stock, which would he choose?
He chose Bitcoin, because Coinbase carries company-specific risk that Bitcoin does not. But if building a portfolio, he said, he would go 60 to 70% Bitcoin and 30% Coinbase. It is the same mental model he applies to everything: separate the signal from the structure, understand what you are actually betting on, and size accordingly.
It is, perhaps, the cleanest summary of how he has built every company he has ever built.
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Your Host,
Satish Mugulavalli