How a cold email got our 2-man AI startup a meeting with Zerodha

Hey Reddit,

My co-founder and I have been building an AI multi-agent trade desk called Quantioa out of Bangalore. We just hit a massive milestone, ran straight into a regulatory brick wall, and had to make a hard pivot.

On June 1st, I sent a raw, highly technical cold email to Zerodha/Rainmatter’s leadership about how we stop retail capital loss in high-frequency environments. It actually landed us a meeting with their VP.

They loved the tech, but the conversation made it clear that SEBI’s custodial algo licensing is a multi-year, capital-heavy regulatory slog. For a two-person bootstrapped team, it’s a momentum killer.

The Pivot?

We are moving from Indian equities to crypto perpetuals. It offers the exact same structural trading problems and 24/7 liquidity, but with zero immediate custodial licensing bottlenecks.

In equities, our regime-aware AI swarm averaged a ~24.4% annualized pace with under 0.6% max drawdown across 4 historical regimes. Full disclosure: this is rigorous historical backtesting, no live capital track record yet. We're now porting this risk-first architecture to crypto.

If you’re an angel/VC investing in AI/Web3, or a founder who can help us, let's connect. Drop a comment or just DM me.