A consumer-grade fix for the richest poor problem in tech
Right now, somewhere in San Francisco, a Tesla engineer is staring at a brokerage screen where 80% of a life's savings rides on one ticker. Srikanth Narayan built a company for exactly that person. Cache, his SEC-registered brokerage, has one product line and one obsession: people who own too much of a single stock and can't get out without handing a fortune to the tax man.
His pitch is four words long. "Think Schwab," he says, "but exclusively for people with concentrated stock holdings." It is the kind of sentence that only works if you have lived the problem. Narayan has.
As an early Uber engineer, he watched his net worth swell and then sit, frozen, inside one company's equity. When the pandemic rattled markets, the fragility got personal - a paper fortune that could evaporate on a single earnings call. He did the obvious thing. He sold, he diversified, and he paid the capital gains. Only later did a wealth manager mention exchange funds, the elegant instrument that lets you swap concentrated stock into a diversified pool without triggering a tax event. The catch: a $1 million minimum and a $10 million net-worth gate. The tool existed. It just wasn't built for him, or for almost anyone he knew.
"There's a sense of betrayal when your whole life has been tied to one stock. It's not just numbers - it's your time, your belief, your sacrifice."
That gap became Cache. He left Waymo, where he had landed after Uber and led engineering and product work, and spent close to a year in stealth. The instinct was an engineer's: take something gated and expensive, and rebuild it as a product. Drop the minimum from $1 million to $100,000. Cut fees by half to three-quarters. Run onboarding on a schedule - biweekly closes - instead of a private banker's calendar. Build the first exchange fund organized around the Nasdaq-100. Hold the assets at a name people trust, BNY Mellon.
Self-taught in the thing he's now selling
Narayan did not arrive from Wall Street. He has a bachelor's in computer science from RVCE in India and a master's in Human-Computer Interaction from UC Berkeley - a designer's training as much as an engineer's. The finance he taught himself, the way he'd teach himself a new codebase. That outsider's read is the whole advantage. Someone steeped in private wealth would have accepted the $1 million minimum as a law of physics. Narayan saw a default waiting to be changed.
What changed when an engineer rebuilt the exchange fund
The traction caught up fast
Cache launched publicly in March 2024. Within roughly 18 months it crossed $600 million in assets, drawing clients from about 30% of the Fortune 500 and partnerships with hundreds of wealth-management firms. The average client shows up with more than $900,000 and defers more than $750,000 in capital gains. Most telling: around 90% of customers are using an exchange fund for the first time. Cache isn't winning a market so much as inventing one - converting a tool nobody knew they could use into a habit.
Investors noticed. After an $8.5 million seed at a $30 million valuation, First Round Capital led a $12.5 million Series A in 2025 at a $125 million post-money valuation, with angels including former Autodesk CEO Amar Hanspal, Bridge founder Zach Abrams, and DoorDash's Brian Hale. Narayan had also done a turn as an Entrepreneur in Residence at First Round - the bet was on a founder they'd watched up close.
"You don't have to be rich to want to stay rich. You just have to be smart."
What he's actually after
The exchange fund is the wedge, not the destination. Cache has added stock lending and a Collar Advance product to help clients monetize and protect positions, and Narayan talks about lowering accreditation barriers further and building secondary liquidity so investors can exit diversified holdings earlier than the traditional seven-year horizon. The framing he keeps returning to is a "gated garden" of wealth-preservation tools that he wants to tear the fence off of. There's an estimated $450 billion in employee equity sitting below the old private-banking thresholds. That is the number he's chasing.
It's a quietly radical idea dressed in a brokerage's plain clothes: that the smartest financial machinery shouldn't be a perk of already being rich. Narayan built the thing he wished he'd had, priced it for the people he used to work next to, and made it boring enough to trust. For a founder, that last part - boring enough to trust, with money - might be the hardest engineering problem of all.
Details worth dog-earing
His Twitter handle is, with zero ambiguity, @srikanthatcache. The man is the brand is the company.
His master's is in Human-Computer Interaction, not finance. He approached Wall Street like a UX problem.
Average client: $900K+ in. Average capital gains deferred: $750K+. The product pays for itself in tax alone.
Cache closes new investors every two weeks - a fintech rhythm imposed on an instrument that used to move at private-bank speed.
Client assets sit at BNY Mellon. New product, very old vault.
Cache built the first exchange fund organized around the Nasdaq-100 - tech money, diversified inside tech's own index.