Dr. Chandra Duggirala, CEO of fintech-incubator Tides Network, began his career in healthcare, completing his medical training and pursuing a Ph.D. in Biophysics and Bioinformatics at Northern Illinois University. Initially planning to become an academic physician at the intersection of medicine and science, his passion for identifying gaps in the marketplace around financial self-sovereignty led him instead to his work today at the intersection of finance and AI with a focus on empowering a younger, digital-native cohort.
Novobionics was his first med-tech startup; it struggled due to a confluence of factors including a tax on medical device company revenues, heightened regulatory burdens, and the aftermath of the global financial crisis. After much deliberation, Duggirala decided to pivot, using his medical knowledge to launch Fuel, co-founded with Manoj Duggirala, the world’s first AI-driven nutritionist that personalized recipes for users based on their genetics, body metrics, and lab results.
His journey eventually led to Tides Network, a venture studio co-founded by Duggirala, Manoj Duggirala, and George Burke. Tides at its core develops “bleeding edge technology in transformative markets.” Duggirala says, “Although our mission sounds like it was workshopped at a McKinsey brainstorming session, it really is true. It was very important for us to keep an open mind, not just to closely monitor the changes in user behaviors that drive markets, but also about fundamental technological shifts.” Right now, Tides is leading development in two of the hottest areas in tech, generative AI wealth management, and unlocking the Bitcoin ecosystem for greater interoperability.
Leveling the investing playing field
Tides Network completed its strategic acquisition last year of RAFA.AI, a San Francisco-based startup providing generative AI-powered financial intelligence across both traditional assets like stocks, ETFs, bonds, and digital assets, including cryptocurrencies. Built by a team of former Nvidia AI engineers, RAFA.AI aims to empower Millennials and Gen Z with the same financial intelligence that institutional players enjoy. Abhinav Sinha, RAFA.AI’s founder, emphasizes the alignment of his vision with the Tides team.
“When I heard about the mission of Tides and how they were methodically going about it, to open the door like never before for younger generations currently drowning in headwinds, enabling them to access institutional-grade opportunities and find real freedom and success,” Sinha says, “we decided to join forces.”
A team of Personal AI Agents. Image courtesy of Tides Network.
Millennials and Gen Z face strong barriers to personal capital and investing. “Despite about 80% of these demographics showing interest in robo-advisory and wealth management services, only 22% understand how these services work,” Duggirala says. “The job market, inflation, and volatility make it tougher than ever for these demographics to get in the game, let alone achieve true financial freedom. The complexity and opacity of financial software, coupled with outdated technology, combine for a horrible experience overall. A stock screener, for example, has more than 150 disparate data fields. How is that approachable for someone who is 23 and never received any economics or finance training? This is one of those ‘transformative markets meet cutting-edge tech’ moments.”
RAFA.AI addresses these challenges by providing tools that enable informed investment decisions through an accessible, user-friendly interface. Duggirala says, “There’s a growing demand for personalized advice. Millennials and Gen Z are already leveraging AI in various aspects of their lives, so they naturally gravitate towards platforms like RAFA that resonate with their technological fluency.” Users can ask RAFA’s “AI agents” questions like “How would Warren Buffett typically invest?” or “Create a direct index, using between 30 to 40 stocks that mirror the S&P 500.”
The platform considers the user’s age, risk tolerance, and investment goals to generate a tailored portfolio with the push of a button. This personalized approach simplifies the complex world of investing. The platform’s capabilities also extend beyond traditional assets to include cryptocurrencies, reflecting younger investors’ growing interest in digital assets.
RAFA.AI goes beyond the current state-of-the-art transformer-based models to provide real-time, personalized insights tailored to each user’s unique investment profile. Its proprietary multi-agent architecture combines cutting-edge quantitative models with the explanatory power of large language models (LLMs). These models analyze vast amounts of data from thousands of sources in real time, offering personalized portfolio assessments and trend predictions. Unlike general-purpose LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT, RAFA’s technology equips users with actionable, real-time insights, enabling smarter investment decisions.
“What truly sets RAFA apart is the team of expert AI agents,” Sinha says. “These specialized agents, including Analyst-Pro, Quant-Pro, News-Guru, Strategy-Pro, and Options-Pro, act as personalized assistants focused on specific tasks, from fundamental analysis to technical insights, news summarization, and options screening. Together, they form a cohesive team that collaborates to provide users with unique, actionable insights. It’s like having your own team of financial experts who never sleep.”
“RAFA.AI also features a proprietary trend score system that captures intraday, short-term, and long-term market trends, to provide AI insights for traders, according to user-defined objectives,” Duggirala says.
The founder of Concordia, Uri Ferruccio says, “Unlike many other platforms, RAFA.AI isn’t driven by commissions or incentivized to make users trade more. Instead, it focuses on delivering value to users by saving time, helping them make better decisions, providing personalized insights, and fostering continuous learning. It’s a promising approach.”
The combined power Portal and RAFA.AI
Tides Network also incubated Portal to Bitcoin earlier this year, raising a $42 million investment from Coinbase Ventures, Arrington Capital, OKX Ventures, and Gate.io. The aim is to build the only custody-less interoperability layer on Bitcoin.
“Bitcoin is transitioning from being just a payment system to the settlement layer for millions of trust-minimized markets,” Duggirala says. The proprietary BitScaler technology that Portal to Bitcoin has built enables these markets to be constructed on top of Bitcoin, which he describes as “the greatest global financial platform we’ve ever seen.”
The project is currently entering its incentivized testnet phase and boasts a thriving community. It has announced a series of major integrations, and has hosted community events worldwide, including the recent Bitcoin conference in Nashville which featured President Trump. “We’re thrilled with the traction of Portal,” Duggirala says. “I think it’ll be truly astonishing to see the interplay between Portal and RAFA.AI. Imagine that your AI agents have access to Crypto wallets and can transact and trade on your behalf when instructed in natural language. With LLMs constantly improving and increasingly more digital native assets being created, we will see machine to machine markets only expand from what algorithmic trading volumes are now,” he says.
Tides’ acquisition of RAFA.AI is part of a broader strategy to integrate advanced AI capabilities into its burgeoning decentralized finance ecosystem. Brian Johnson, formerly of Republic Capital and now with Jiritsu, a real-world asset tokenization platform, says, “This kind of merger between AI capabilities with ever expanding tokenized real-world assets will lead to unprecedented opportunities for the millennial and digital native generations.”
Portal to Bitcoin’s off-chain transaction-based model, like the Lightning Network, significantly enhances the speed and efficiency of Bitcoin cross-chain transfers, allowing users to trade their assets swiftly across blockchains with minimal transaction fees. This is especially beneficial for traders requiring quick access to funds, eliminating counterparty risk and enhancing exchange process security. Users can trade directly from their wallets, ensuring they remain in control throughout the transaction.
Regarding Portal and RAFA.AI’s’ combined value proposition, Rich Rines, initial contributor to Core Chain, says “granting AI agents wallet and transaction capabilities will completely change the way DeFi [decentralized finance] is done now. Similar to how algorithmic trading completely dominated the equity markets, now every individual will have the power of institutional trading desks and more at their fingertips.”
Duggirala thinks the work being done is just the beginning. “The problems we’re tackling in finance and crypto are some of the most challenging and important of our time,” he says. “We have the team, the model, and the vision to solve them, and we don’t need to shift our focus to chase the latest short-term trend, because our edge comes from long term thinking and being well-capitalized.”
(Additional reporting provided by Virginia Van Zandt)