Cryptocurrency exchange platform CoinSwitch Kuber has raised $260 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Coinbase Ventures, and existing investors like Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global in a series-C funding round. With this, the company — now valued at $1.9 billion — became the second crypto platform in India to turn into a unicorn. Earlier, CoinDCX was valued at $1.1billion when it raised a $90-million round in August.
CoinSwitch Kuber will use the funds to increase its customer base and introduce new crypto products. It also plans to hire people across engineering, product and data. Its CEO and co-founder Ashish Singhal said that it plans to have an employee strength of 1,500 by the end of this fiscal, from current 350. A third of the talent will be engineers, specialising in data, security, and solving other complex engineering problems.
There is a growing interest among institutions to enter the crypto market, which IT industry body Nasscom estimates can have an economic value addition of $184 billion by 2030 in India.
“CoinSwitch Kuber is on a mission to build wealth for Indians by making crypto more accessible. I believe simplifying crypto investments for the Indian youth has helped us to stand out. 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,” Singhal said.
Despite regulatory uncertainty around crypto in India, Singhal believes that global investors have seen similar instances play out in various countries and are looking at the longer-term horizon.
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