What began as a personal project for two young founders has evolved into a financial research and learning platform. Sarthak Verma and Prateek Singh are building MarketDeck to bring company research, quantitative analysis and interactive financial learning into one connected experience.

Sarthak Verma wasn't initially trying to build a startup. He was trying to learn finance.

As he explored quantitative analysis and the mathematical side of financial markets, he began encountering a problem. The tools needed to experiment with these concepts were often spread across different platforms, and accessing several research tools through paid subscriptions wasn't practical as a student.

One platform might offer charting, another company fundamentals, and another options analysis. Exploring portfolio risk or testing a mathematical idea could require additional tools or calculations.

For Sarthak, the issue wasn't simply the cost. It was the difficulty of connecting different parts of financial research.

"I wasn't looking for a magic buy-or-sell signal. I wanted to understand the company, the assumptions and the maths," he explains.

That distinction became the starting point for MarketDeck.

Sarthak, 23, studied BBA at Amity University. While exploring ways to make his own financial research easier, he began considering whether he could build a stock screener himself.

AI-assisted coding was becoming increasingly capable, making software development more accessible to people working in small teams.

Sarthak decided to give it a try and brought the idea to his co-founder, Prateek Singh, who studied B.Tech at IIIT Kota.

Prateek's technical background helped them approach the engineering challenges, including backend development, servers, hosting and infrastructure.

The original plan was straightforward: build a decent stock screener they could use themselves.

They weren't setting out to create a financial technology company. They wanted a better way to explore the questions they were already asking.

But the project gradually grew beyond its original purpose.

The first product led to new questions.

Company screening opened up possibilities around financial research. Charts introduced another dimension of analysis. Futures and options brought in derivatives, while portfolio analysis required more extensive mathematical modelling.

Each addition created opportunities to explore another part of financial research.

Over time, Sarthak and Prateek began thinking less about individual tools and more about how those tools could work together.

That was when MarketDeck started taking shape as a broader product.

Today, the platform brings together five research areas: fundamental screening, charting and technical analysis, futures and options, market commentary, and digital asset research.

It also includes a Research Terminal, portfolio analysis tools, educational material and interactive financial experiments.

The idea is to give users different ways to investigate financial questions without treating every research activity as an isolated task.

For example, researching a company can involve examining its financial statements, comparing it with peers, exploring valuation assumptions and documenting a research thesis. Connecting these activities can make the process easier to follow.

For the founders, however, expanding the product also changed the nature of the work.

Building something for personal use is different from creating software that other people need to understand and rely on. Reliability, documentation, infrastructure and usability become increasingly important.

The question was no longer just whether they could build the features they wanted.

They also had to consider whether MarketDeck could become a sustainable business.

Sarthak and Prateek approach MarketDeck from different starting points.

Sarthak's work begins with the financial question behind a feature. What should the tool measure? Which assumptions matter? What inputs should users be able to change? How should the results be interpreted?

His work spans financial models, quantitative analysis, product planning and the user experience.

Prateek's engineering background supports the technical work required to turn those ideas into functioning software, particularly across the backend, hosting, infrastructure and integrations.

Their responsibilities aren't separated by a rigid boundary. Both founders participate in product decisions and problem-solving.

The distinction between their backgrounds nevertheless brings two important perspectives to the same product.

A financial model can be technically sophisticated without being useful to the person using it. Equally, a good analytical idea cannot deliver much value if the software implementing it doesn't work reliably.

As Sarthak explains, a technically impressive feature isn't necessarily useful, and a good financial idea isn't much use if the software cannot deliver it properly.

For MarketDeck, connecting those two sides is part of the building process.

AI has played an important role in making MarketDeck possible with a small team.

According to Sarthak, it has helped with application code, interfaces, service integrations, numerical implementations, testing and feature development.

This has allowed the founders to experiment across finance, mathematics and software engineering without needing a large team to undertake every task.

But Sarthak doesn't describe the process as simply entering prompts and receiving a finished financial product.

The more important work involves deciding what needs to be built and verifying whether the result is correct.

In financial software, a calculation can execute without producing an error and still answer the wrong question.

A portfolio's money-weighted return, historical risk and the output of a hypothetical simulation are different measures. Presenting them without understanding those differences can lead users to misinterpret the results.

The founders have also encountered practical engineering problems. Sarthak recalls interactive visualisations that appeared promising during development but failed to render or respond properly when users interacted with them.

These experiences reinforced an important distinction: AI can accelerate software development, but it doesn't automatically establish that a calculation is mathematically appropriate or that a feature works as intended.

The founders still need to examine their implementations, validate assumptions and ensure that the results are presented in a way users can understand.

For MarketDeck, AI is a tool that expands what a small team can attempt. Product judgement, mathematical reasoning and engineering discipline remain essential to making that work useful.

Among the different parts of MarketDeck, quantitative portfolio analysis stands out as one of the areas Sarthak identifies as particularly challenging to build.

Showing a portfolio's return percentage is relatively straightforward. Understanding that return alongside volatility, downside risk, diversification and exposure to different factors requires a more detailed analytical framework.

MarketDeck's portfolio analysis workspace organises this work into eight research perspectives:

The analysis draws on quantitative concepts such as covariance, correlation, Value at Risk, factor models, mean-variance analysis and Black-Litterman methods.

Each addresses a different aspect of portfolio research. The challenge is not simply to implement the calculations but to make their meaning and limitations clear.

A historical measure of risk, for example, describes a particular set of observations and assumptions. It should not automatically be interpreted as a prediction of future market behaviour.

MarketDeck's approach is to make the analytical process more transparent by keeping relevant assumptions, data windows and model limitations visible.

The Research Terminal follows a related idea. It brings together company financials, charts, valuation and research notes within a connected workspace.

Both products reflect the founders' interest in making financial research more comprehensive without reducing it to a single score or signal.

MarketDeck also approaches financial learning through experimentation.

Concepts such as diversification, Monte Carlo simulations and options Greeks can be difficult to understand through definitions alone.

A learner might understand that correlation affects portfolio risk or that an option's sensitivity changes with market conditions. Seeing how those relationships behave when the underlying assumptions change can provide a different kind of understanding.

MarketDeck's interactive labs are designed around this idea.

Users can change inputs and observe how the calculations or visualisations respond. They can explore relationships between assets, investigate different possible simulation paths and examine how options-pricing models respond to changes in price, time and volatility.

Sarthak says the approach reflects what he wanted when he was learning finance himself.

Reading an explanation provides one kind of understanding. Being able to experiment with the assumptions provides another.

The objective is to give students and curious investors a place to ask questions, test ideas and explore mathematical relationships rather than simply memorise terminology.

It also connects the platform's educational material with its more advanced research tools.

The same concepts introduced through an interactive experiment can become relevant when someone begins examining portfolio risk or exploring a financial model in greater detail.

MarketDeck is being developed for people with different levels of familiarity with financial markets.

A commerce or MBA student might begin with educational material or interactive experiments. Someone researching Indian companies might use the screener, charting tools or company financials. A more experienced user might explore portfolio risk, factor exposure or valuation assumptions.

For Sarthak, the common thread is curiosity.

He doesn't see a reason to build entirely separate products for people at different stages of their financial learning. Someone beginning with basic concepts may eventually want to explore more advanced research.

The challenge is making the starting point accessible without removing the analytical depth that more experienced users need.

That also means paying attention to usability.

An interactive model that works well on a desktop but becomes difficult to use on a mobile screen can undermine the learning experience. A sophisticated calculation is similarly limited if the person using it cannot understand what the result represents.

These are practical problems the founders are continuing to work through.

For a product built around making financial research more accessible, the experience of using the tools is as important as the underlying mathematics.

MarketDeck is currently free, reflecting the problem that inspired its creation.

The founders wanted access to useful financial research tools without having to pay for several different subscriptions simply to explore their interests.

But maintaining a research platform involves ongoing costs, including computing, hosting, maintenance, support and access to appropriately licensed data.

The founders are therefore working towards developing MarketDeck into a sustainable software-as-a-service business.

They haven't finalised every pricing package. Instead, Sarthak believes users should have a clear reason to pay for the product.

That might mean saving meaningful time, connecting different parts of their research or accessing more capable workflows than they could achieve through disconnected tools.

The approach reflects a balance the company will need to maintain as it grows: making financial research accessible while developing a business model that can support the platform over time.

For now, the focus remains on building the product and understanding where it can provide genuine value.

Financial software comes with a responsibility to communicate what its results actually mean.

A convincing-looking number isn't necessarily a reliable conclusion. The source of the data, the reporting period, the calculation method and the assumptions behind a model can all affect how an output should be interpreted.

MarketDeck's stated approach is to distinguish source information from model outputs, and model outputs from predictions.

Company figures need their reporting context. Portfolio calculations depend on their definitions and historical windows. Options models and simulations illustrate mathematical scenarios rather than establish what markets will do next.

The founders also recognise that current data and stored snapshots should not be treated as interchangeable.

AI-assisted development doesn't remove the need for these checks. A working interface or functioning calculation is not, by itself, proof that the result is correct.

MarketDeck is intended for financial research and education, rather than personalised investment advice or trading recommendations.

Making assumptions and limitations visible is therefore an important part of how the founders want people to use the platform.

Sarthak's longer-term ambition is to make sophisticated financial research easier to conduct for people who may not have programming skills.

He envisions a workspace that connects company research, charting, portfolio analysis, learning and additional market integrations.

One direction the team is exploring is AI-assisted research execution.

Consider someone who wants to investigate a historical strategy based on a stock moving above its 50-day moving average. Rather than assembling datasets and writing every calculation from scratch, a user could eventually describe the research question to an AI assistant, review the proposed methodology, run a controlled experiment using permitted data and examine the results through visualisations.

This is a future direction for MarketDeck, not a claim that the complete workflow is already available.

The broader ambition is to make it easier to move from a financial question to a structured research process, with the assumptions and results open to examination.

For Sarthak, the value lies in helping people investigate their own questions rather than simply giving them an answer without context.

Despite the complexity of developing MarketDeck, Sarthak identifies distribution as one of the team's biggest challenges.

Building a product and getting the right people to discover it are different tasks.

The founders have spent considerable effort developing research tools, but potential users still need to understand what MarketDeck offers and why it might be useful to them.

The description "finance platform" can mean different things to different people. Some might expect stock tips, brokerage services or a conventional charting product. Those descriptions don't capture the full scope of MarketDeck's research and learning tools.

The team is experimenting with founder stories, educational content, communities and direct outreach to reach potential users.

It is also learning that a technically capable product needs a clear explanation of its value.

For a young company, this means moving beyond the satisfaction of building something complex and paying attention to whether people can find it, understand it and return to use it.

AI may make certain kinds of software development more accessible, but it doesn't eliminate the work of earning attention and trust.

That remains one of the founders' central challenges.

MarketDeck began with a practical problem: two founders wanted better tools for their own financial research.

Sarthak brought a finance and quantitative perspective, while Prateek's engineering background helped turn the idea into software. AI-assisted development expanded what they could attempt, and the original stock screener gradually grew into a broader research and learning platform.

The next phase requires a different kind of work.

The founders need to continue improving the product, make its value easier to communicate, understand what users need and develop a sustainable business model.

Their experience has taught them that building the product and building the business are two very different jobs.

For MarketDeck, the original question was whether they could build the tools they wanted to use themselves.

The question now is whether they can turn those tools into a connected research platform that other people genuinely find useful.

That is the business Sarthak Verma and Prateek Singh are working to build.