CoinSwitch Kuber has become India’s second crypto unicorn, having raised over $260 million in Series C funding round, led by American venture capital firm a16z (Andreesen Horowitz) and Coinbase Ventures, at a valuation of $1.9 billion. Existing investors Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global also participated in the round.
Bengaluru-based CoinSwitch also became the 30th unicorn startup in India, and is now valued higher than CoinDCX’s $1.1 billion valuation announced in August.
CoinSwitch Kuber will utilize the funds for onboarding 50 million Indians on the CoinSwitch Kuber platform and the introduction of new crypto products. Its primary goal is to make crypto a household name, thereby continuing to dominate the retail crypto market in India. The firm plans to achieve this through the launch of new crypto products and services such as lending, staking among others, to enable users to benefit the most out of this decentralized technology.
Started in 2017 by Ashish Singhal, Govind Soni, and Vimal Sagar, CoinSwitch was launched as a global aggregator of crypto exchanges. The company launched its India operations in June 2020. CoinSwitch Kuber’s previous investors include Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global along with notable angel investors like Kunal Shah. CoinSwitch Kuber has over 10 million users in India with a monthly active user base of over seven million.
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“The CoinSwitch Kuber team has worked round the clock to be the most preferred platform for crypto investors in India. This has helped us to reach the unicorn status in just over 14 months of operations in India. With this funding, we hope to propel ourselves further on our mission to bring crypto to every household in India.,” said Ashish Singhal, co-founder and CEO, CoinSwitch Kuber.
“CoinSwitch Kuber is on a mission to build wealth for Indians by making crypto more accessible. We wanted to remove all the complexities in crypto trading, educate consumers and give them a simplified experience of one-click buy and sell in crypto,” said Singhal.
India has a huge talent pool that can build world-class products and protocols in crypto. Currently, a strong support system to back these brilliant minds at work is lacking. As the biggest crypto company in India, CoinSwitch Kuber will be setting up an ecosystem fund to identify and enable the budding talent in the country.
CoinSwitch and CoinDCX’s unicorn valuation come at a time when the crypto industry has been at loggerheads with the Indian government. In June, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) issued a show-cause notice to WazirX, which is India’s largest crypto exchange by trading volumes. The notice accused the platform of violating exchange regulations in India with crypto transactions worth Rs. 2790 crore.
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