Priyanka Ranjan and Harshit Khandelwal had the kind of resumes most people spend a career chasing. She was part of the quantitative strategy team at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. He spent seven years as a senior engineer at Amazon, building systems that drove more than a billion dollars in annual revenue. Both had already made it, by any conventional measure.
Then, just as their corporate careers were skyrocketing, they decided to start over. By creating something they knew would be unique and valuable. What did they create? PiTrade. And right about now, people are starting to find it. As it turns out, just in the nick of time.
The Bet They Made
That decision wasn’t a cheap bet. Between them, Ranjan and Khandelwal gave up roughly $700,000 in combined annual compensation, along with the stability and prestige that come standard with their portfolios. Ranjan speaks about the pressure that most founders feel at that career milestone, but frames it as clarifying rather than crushing. When there’s no cushion, there’s no time wasted on work that doesn’t move the company forward. As she notes, that’s what successful portfolio management requires too. Otherwise, it simply blends in with the crowd, and something they wanted to avoid.
Ranjan and Khandelwal kept running into the same frustration from opposite corners of the finance and tech world. Friends and colleagues constantly would ask for stock tips, with no real framework for risk, goals, or when to get out of a trade. This reflects the ever-elusive “sell discipline,” which over time can turn a retirement party for a 65-year-old into one for a 50-year-old (same person).
Priyanka felt as if she could never answer her friends’ questions in simple terms. In investing, each individual has a unique set of goals, circumstances, attitudes, and emotions about money. With this in mind and through months of user conversations, the founders took to the whiteboard, ultimately materializing PiTrade.
Investing… Without The Guesswork
PiTrade is a platform built around goals instead of tickers. As the firm’s tagline says, Stop Picking Stocks, Start Building Portfolios. Rather than opening an app and searching for a stock, PiTrade users start by naming what the money is for, whether that’s retirement, a child’s education, a home, or a trip. An important distinction.
Each goal becomes its own portfolio with its own risk profile, because a thirty-year horizon and a three-year horizon call for completely different strategies. These assessments and strategies used to require a real financial advisor to manage. More importantly, it translates Wall Street jargon into a language consumers can understand, saving younger investors hours they don’t have. By providing this accessibility, users can move through the make-or-break goal-setting and investment selection with confidence and clarity.
PiTrade also lets users share portfolios so others can mirror them in real time. These moves and decisions can be observed at the same time and at the same price for everyone.
Read that again. Most tools built around watching and following other investors don’t work that way, and followers often end up paying more than the person they’re mirroring. For Ranjan and Khandelwal, eliminating such unfair advantages that retail investors are forced to accept was as important as the goal-based structure itself.
How Tim Draper Caught Their Pitch, And Made Them Heroes
Getting external validation for the creation of PiTrade didn’t come from a single successful pitch, but from five weeks of being watched closely under pressure.
Ranjan and Khandelwal were first spotted by Tim Draper’s (the venture capitalist behind early bets on Tesla, SpaceX, and Skype) investment committee while pitching at an AWS pitch competition, which led to an invitation into Draper University’s Hero Training Program. The program hosted just 60 founders from 19 countries for five weeks, on-site in San Mateo, California, where distractions would be minimized and C-suite skills honed.
PiTrade’s team immersed themselves in company-building sessions, worked directly with a network of VCs and fellow founders, and worked alongside the Silicon Valley icon Tim Draper himself. Every element of PiTrade’s vision was put under the microscope, including business models, resilience, passion, and growth potential. PiTrade’s aspirations received a major accolade shortly afterward, when DraperU Ventures invested in the relatively unknown fintech startup.
Turning Skeptics Into Believers
Investor validation is an essential part of an entrepreneur’s growth path. Conviction is one kind of validation, while industry collaboration and buy-in is another. PiTrade has successfully checked both boxes during its first two years.
Early on, a major trade signal provider accepted a meeting but was openly skeptical of the platform. Ranjan and Khandelwal didn’t try to talk them out of it. They simply implemented the famous Steve Jobs quote: “People Don’t Know What You Want, Until You Show It To Them.” By demonstrating execution speed, security architecture, and reliability directly, then building features based on the feedback that came out of those conversations, that provider’s initial skepticism transformed into genuine advocacy.
This would foreshadow similar collaborations that have now made PiTrade one of the most intriguing existing fintech platforms. These collaborations include connections like Rob Isbitts, a veteran investment risk manager, former investment manager, and founder of Sungarden Investment Publishing, better known now for his ETF Yourself Substack site and investing column at Barchart. Isbitts spent decades in the RIA business and retired from the advisory business in 2020. He came to PiTrade first as a prospective user and left as a collaborator, eventually integrating his own proprietary risk scoring system (ROAR: Return Opportunity And Risk) into the platform.
Isbitts, whose career on Wall Street spans 40 years, had a straightforward assessment of the PiTrade founders… “This pair is without a doubt in their own class,” he wrote. “As people and professionals, they exude a level of competence, patience, and trustworthiness that will be self-evident in the fiduciary world.”
Two People, One Company
Ranjan and Khandelwal’s partnership works through the good old-fashioned method of “divide and conquer.” Khandelwal, as Chief Product and Technology Officer, owns product and all technical development. Ranjan, as CEO, owns customers, traders, investors, marketing, and operations, drawing directly on her finance background. Their domains rarely overlap, and when disagreements come up, they get resolved by whoever has deeper context and knowledge on the specific goal at hand, not by title or seniority.
PiTrade’s formula for efficiency and accuracy promotes lightning-fast but cogent decision-making, in an industry that demands it. This is a company where speed has mattered from day one, whether methodically moving through the rigorous SEC registration process or building fast enough to earn the trust of those skeptical early partners.
What Comes Next
The Draper program, the skeptics turned believers, the six-figure pay cuts, wouldn’t mean much if it weren’t in service of something bigger than two impressive resumes. Ranjan and Khandelwal didn’t leave Goldman Sachs and Amazon because the startup world needed two more founders. Instead, they saw a vital gap to fill.
In the golden age of retail investing, a rebuild has still awaited. The two believed they were among the few people poised to create it. The résumés got them in the room. Five weeks under Draper’s watch, a signal provider’s change of heart, and a fiduciary veteran’s endorsement have been critical milestones on the path to building the powerhouse. Now, as they accelerate, there’s no telling how far they can drive self-directed investors toward their individual dream destinations.
Spencer Hulse is the Editorial Director at Grit Daily. He is responsible for overseeing other editors and writers, day-to-day operations, and covering breaking news.
