The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a lawsuit against Srinivas Koneru, Triterras Fintech Pte Ltd’s founder and owner.
The SEC’s complaint, seen by FX News Group, was submitted on November 7, 2025, at the New York Southern District Court.
The action involves a fraudulent scheme by Koneru in connection with the November 2020 business combination of his private company, Triterras Fintech Pte. Ltd., with Netfin Acquisition Corp., a Nasdaq-listed special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that generated $60 million in cash to Koneru and, ultimately, substantial losses to investors.
The complaint alleges that Koneru made numerous deceptive and misleading statements about the nature and details of Triterras Fintech’s business before and after the Business Combination to create a false picture for investors. As a result of this conduct, Koneru violated the federal securities laws.
Triterras Fintech’s principal asset was its online commodities trade and trade finance platform “Kratos.” To persuade Netfin’s shareholders to vote in favor of the Business Combination and accept the exchange of their Netfin securities for securities to be issued by the surviving public company (rather than redeem them at a price of around $10 per share), Koneru allegedly made highly misleading statements about Kratos.
Koneru, as Triterras Fintech’s founder and owner, portrayed Kratos to investors as transforming the physical commodity trade and trade finance industry with its two modules on which it charged fees: a “Trade Discovery” module that allowed small and medium enterprise (“SME”) traders to conduct and document trades and a “Trade Finance” module that delivered access to trade financing for SME traders from lenders on the platform.
Koneru held out Kratos’s Trade Finance module as a solution for a claimed $1.5 trillion annual shortfall in trade finance funding for SME traders. The ability to link traders with third-party lenders was a key feature of Kratos and a focus point for investors.
Koneru represented through communications with investors and his approval of public filings that, by August 2020, Kratos had onboarded ten lending funds to its platform with billions of dollars in assets under management and that the volume of financing by lenders in Kratos’s Trade Finance module totaled $1.1 billion.
In reality, the SEC says, these and other similar representations about Triterras Fintech’s Kratos platform were misleading. In fact, only around 10% of the reported Trade Finance module volume and associated revenue involved the Ten Lending Funds that had been purportedly onboarded to the platform. Moreover, the limited financing involving any of the Ten Lending Funds consisted of either lending to entities majority owned by Koneru‒‒namely, Rhodium Resources Pte. Ltd. and its subsidiaries —or lending by a Koneru owned trade finance fund, TAPL LP Interest Ltd.
Further, much of the financing by the Ten Lending Funds to Rhodium had been arranged without using the Kratos platform. The SEC alleges that, as part of Koneru’s scheme, he directed that some of these loans to Rhodium be added to the Kratos platform after the fact, creating the false impression that those loans originated on the platform and thereby deceiving investors.
Rather than connect traders to the Ten Lending Funds or other third-party lenders for financing, approximately 90% of the reported Trade Finance module volume consisted of transactions between the trade counterparties themselves—a fact that Koneru concealed because it did not support the business case for Kratos’s Trade Finance module that he promoted to investors; namely, that the module would help close the substantial funding gap for SME traders in the international physical commodities trading markets.
The SEC further alleges that Koneru knew or recklessly disregarded that the statements he made omitted all of this material information, thereby leaving investors with a false impression of the extent to which the demand for Kratos’s Trade Finance module had been proven.
Based on this false picture of Triterras Fintech’s business, Netfin’s shareholders overwhelmingly voted to approve the Business Combination on November 10, 2020, and less than 3% of Netfin’s public shares were submitted for redemption at a price slightly above $10 per share.
As a result, Koneru received $60 million in cash consideration, obtained a controlling equity stake in the surviving public company, Triterras, Inc., and became Triterras’s CEO and Executive Chairman. Following the Business Combination closing, Triterras shares and warrants began trading on Nasdaq on November 11, 2020.
Koneru, through communications with investors and his approval of Triterras public filings, then continued to make misleading statements to the investing public that touted Kratos’s Trade Finance module volume while concealing material facts.
Ultimately, Netfin and Triterras investors suffered substantial losses. By June 2022, after being delisted by Nasdaq, Triterras stock was trading on the over-the-counter markets at below $1 levels. In 2025, all the public securities of Triterras were acquired for $0.10 per share by a company owned and controlled by Koneru and Netfin’s former CEO.
The SEC accuses Koneru of violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 (“Securities Act”) [15 U.S.C. § 77q(a)], Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (“Exchange Act”) [15 U.S.C. § 78j(b)], and Rule 10b-5 thereunder [17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5].
The regulator seeks a final judgment: (a) permanently enjoining Defendant from violating the federal securities laws and rules that this Complaint alleges he has violated; (b) ordering Defendant to disgorge all ill-gotten gains; (c) ordering Defendant to pay civil money penalties; (d) prohibiting Defendant from serving as an officer or director of any company that has a class of securities registered under Exchange Act Section 12 [15 U.S.C. § 78l] or that is required to file reports under Exchange Act Section 15(d) [15 U.S.C. § 78o(d)], pursuant to Securities Act Section 20(e) [15 U.S.C. § 77t(e)] and Exchange Act Section 21(d)(2) [15 U.S.C. § 78u(d)(2)]; and (f) ordering any other and further relief the Court may deem just and proper.
Koneru, age 65, is a United States citizen. During 2020 and 2021, Koneru was a resident of Singapore, and he now lives in Dubai. Koneru co-founded Rhodium, a commodities trading firm, in 2012 and founded Triterras Fintech in 2018. Prior to the Business Combination, Koneru was the CEO, sole director, and sole indirect shareholder of Triterras Fintech.
