Dhan builds richer charting experiences for India’s power traders

In India’s stock-broking market, many platforms compete on price. Dhan saw an opportunity to compete through product-led innovation in India’s fast-evolving trading market. Its most active traders wanted more than low brokerage fees. They needed low-latency performance, reliable access during market hours, and advanced tools that matched how Indian markets operate.

Dhan had already built much of its trading ecosystem in-house, including its proprietary trading platform DEXT, order management system, and risk management system. It had also invested in Artham, its in-house small language model, which powers AI capabilities across Raise FinTech Ventures, including askfuzz.ai. These investments reflected Dhan’s broader strategy to control core product experiences internally.

Charting remained the key outsourced layer. That limited Dhan’s ability to adapt the experience around trading order types, regulated trading workflows, and the way power traders build and use indicators.

As regulations evolved and trader expectations increased, Dhan wanted greater control over this critical part of the user experience. By building its own charting capability, the company could support product innovation more directly, reduce reliance on external development roadmaps, and create features tailored to Indian traders across its broader fintech ecosystem.

Dhan has built on AWS since its early days, using AWS services to support the trading systems behind its product-led strategy. To bring charting in-house, Dhan first needed to connect live exchange data to the applications that power its trading experience. It uses AWS Direct Connect to move exchange feeds from its data center to AWS, where its applications run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It uses Elastic Load Balancing with Network Load Balancer to distribute traffic and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as part of its feed services. Dhan also uses Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to manage changing trading demand and Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances to optimize infrastructure usage outside market hours.

With the infrastructure layer in place, Dhan uses Kiro, which runs on Amazon Bedrock, to help build the front-end development of its charting experience. Kiro is an agentic coding service that helps turn prompts into detailed specifications, then into code, documentation, and tests. For Dhan, that spec-driven approach is critical because charting requires more structure than code generation alone can provide. “For a platform with so many indicators and tools, Kiro was the natural choice because it helped us build from clear specifications,” says Alok Pandey, co-founder and chief technology officer of Raise Financial Services.

Kiro helps Dhan move from prompt-led coding to a more structured AI development lifecycle. The team can define how each indicator, drawing tool, and interaction should work before development begins, then break the work into smaller, buildable components. “A charting platform cannot be built without clear specifications for each indicator and tool,” says Pandey. “That is where spec-driven development becomes invaluable.”

By bringing charting in-house, Dhan has changed how quickly it can test and deliver product ideas for traders. The company developed the capability with one developer in 2 months, a project it estimates would previously have required up to 20 developers and 2 years. That speed helps Dhan test and refine ambitious ideas sooner, moving differentiated trading features from concept to market faster. “More than cost saving, the biggest impact is how quickly we can go to market with our product,” says Pandey.

Dhan also gains greater control over the advanced features it delivers to over 1 million active traders. Its platform now supports 180 indicators and close to 70 drawing tools, helping traders analyze market movements on the platform. It can also design charting around advanced order types, including iceberg orders that split large trades into smaller orders. These workflows can place more than 100 orders in less than 6 milliseconds, while giving Dhan more room to adapt the charting experience as regulations evolve instead of depending on an external product roadmap.

The impact extends beyond charting. Dhan now has 204 engineers, product managers and designers, using Kiro to support more structured development. It is also exploring Kiro-enabled workflows for automated testing, design research, quality control, bug fixes, and issue identification. As Dhan expands this approach across its product teams, AWS continues to support the infrastructure behind its trading experiences. “AWS gives us the infrastructure to focus on building better trading experiences for our users,” says Pandey.