The system behind the world's most powerful retirement system

Jul 24, 2025
NY, USA
Startup

Impact

  • A Enabled breakthrough, market-first product
  • B Shipped 12x faster (1 month vs 1 year)
  • C Real-time balances across every product, rail and currency

Challenge

Basic Capital is the mortgage for your retirement. A new 401(k) service that makes investment returns accessible to every worker. They needed a way to ship their service in four weeks with a four-person engineering team.

“I worked at Square, and building an equivalent set of features there would have taken five to 10 people at least a year, realistically closer to two years.”

- Anjan Karanam, Co-founder and CTO

Solution

The mortgage made home ownership possible. Basic Capital is using the same model to unlock ownership of financial assets. Building on FRAGMENT, Basic Capital bundles all the features of the most sophisticated retirement service in an app your Uncle Bob can use. FRAGMENT makes it easy for Basic Capital to power trading of stocks and bonds, IRA and 401(k) record keeping, fund management, and loan tracking, all while maintaining robust regulatory compliance.

“The thing that would’ve taken a year or two at Square took a month at Basic Capital. Engineering velocity is a huge unlock that’s directly attributable to FRAGMENT,” said Karanam.