CoinSwitch Kuber Success Story: India’s Largest Crypto Platform
Indians are gradually beginning to view cryptocurrencies as a secure form of investing. Cryptos are mainly attracting the interest of younger generations. The average age of cryptocurrency investors in India is reportedly about 24 years old. However, there are still a lot of unfounded rumours regarding cryptocurrency trading, and many investors find it unsettling. This is why the startup CoinSwitch Kuber was formed in 2017 to make crypto trading simpler for Indian Investors.
The firm offers INR-based cryptocurrency trading for several cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash, and many more. Download the CoinSwitch Kuber app for iOS or Android to get started trading. Let’s explore more about CoinSwitch Kuber, the story behind the startup, and what the startup is offering.
Industry
According to research firm Chainalysis, India is one of the marketplaces for cryptocurrencies that is expanding the fastest. Between July 2020 and June 2021, the market for cryptocurrencies in India grew by a staggering 641 per cent.
About CoinSwitch Kuber and How it Works?
A platform for trading cryptocurrencies called CoinSwitch Kuber promises to make investing in cryptocurrencies easier. CoinSwitch Kuber consolidates major Indian and international crypto exchanges’ liquidity. Trading is now easier than ever thanks to the platform’s order matching engine, which offers traders the best prices at the touch of a button.
Users can trade among more than 100 cryptocurrencies with CoinSwitch Kuber. On the CoinSwitch platform, customers may purchase cryptocurrencies at affordable costs using a credit or debit card. Customers can access the pooled liquidity of India’s leading exchanges to get the best rate and execute trades immediately after completing the KYC/AML procedures.
A straightforward user interface on the CoinSwitch Kuber mobile app makes trading cryptocurrencies a snap.
Customers utilise its platform to invest in cryptocurrencies from more than 200 locations in India. Tier I cities account for 40 per cent of its consumers, while tier II (36%) and tier III (24%) cities make up the rest of its clientele. The average ticket size per user on CoinSwitch is 9,000 per month; however, this varies by city. Tier I tickets typically cost Rs 11,600, tier II tickets cost Rs 6,600, and tier III tickets cost Rs 3,500.
The average age of a crypto investor on CoinSwitch is 24 years old, and Singhal asserts that for 65 per cent of his clients, crypto represents their first investment outside of savings accounts and fixed deposits. This is either intriguing or alarming, depending on your point of view.
Co-Founders
Vimal Sagar Tiwari, Govind Soni, and Ashish Singhal developed CoinSwitch Kuber in 2017.
Ashish Singhal
The co-founder and CEO of CoinSwitch Kuber is Ashish Singhal. Ashish Singhal, a former employee of Amazon who worked as an intern at Microsoft, is a computer science graduate of Delhi’s Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology.
Ashish developed enterprises such as CRUXPay (an open-source protocol for blockchain naming services) and Urban Tailor, which are the first of their kind at-home tailoring services, in addition to performing other technological positions in businesses like Livspace.com and Reap Benefit. He resigned from his role at Urban Tailor in September 2016; however, he remained with CRUXPay until April 2020.
Govind Soni
Govind Soni is the co-founder and CTO of CoinSwitch and a former employee of Amazon and Livspace. Along with Ashish and Vimal, Govind co-founded CRUXPay in addition to CoinSwitch Kuber. Soni attended the same college as Ashish and majored in computer engineering. Before leaving CRUXPay in January 2021, Soni worked as the company’s co-founder and CTO.
Vimal Sagar Tiwari
Vimal Sagar, co-founder and COO of CoinSwitch, has experience working with companies like Accenture and Zynga. He received his degree in information technology from Jaypee University. Vimal holds the responsibilities of Co-founder and COO at CRUXPay, in addition to being one of its co-founders.
To launch a new project that will provide information to web3 investors, the CFO, CBO, and SVP resigned from their positions. According to reports from July 8, 2022, Sarmad Nazki, Sharan Nair, and Krishna Hegde of CoinSwitch Kuber have not yet decided on the startup’s name. Almost a year has passed since Nazki took over the job. While Hegde joined the unicorn cryptocurrency startup in September 2021, Nair joined CoinSwitch Kuber shortly after the company was founded in 2017.
Nair held many jobs over his lengthy tenure. The posts of CFO, CBO, and SVP will be filled by Ramesh Bafna, Rishav Dev, and R Ventakesh, according to CoinSwitch Kuber. To raise a seed round, the trio has already contacted Web3-focused investors.
According to its Linkedin site, the CoinSwitch Kuber team has somewhere between 501 and 1000 employees.
Startup Story
The discovery by Govind, Vimal, and Ashish, three computer engineers and friends, that the price of cryptocurrencies is dynamic led to the creation of CoinSwitch Kuber. It changed a little bit on all the major cryptocurrency exchanges based on supply and demand. Therefore, they believed that users needed to pick a reputable cryptocurrency exchange if they wished to benefit from the market, particularly in scale. They decided to establish an exchange aggregator as a result. Their primary goal was to offer real-time information on the top exchanges and pricing for trading cryptocurrencies.
Ashish, Govind, and Vimal have been friends since their college days when Ashish and Govind were batchmates, and Vimal was a mutual friend of theirs. They also participated in group hacking competitions as IT experts. The group won almost all of India’s major hackathons, including those put on by Sequoia, Google, Amazon, and LinkedIn. Surprisingly, a hack that the three later made public served as the motivation for CoinSwitch.
The future founders of CoinSwitch once participated in a hackathon and produced a straightforward cryptocurrency exchange aggregator; nevertheless, they had no idea that the hack would eventually grow into a full-fledged business.
CoinSwitch Kuber was established in 2017, and as soon as it became live, it began rapidly acquiring users. According to Ashish, the users “wanted simplicity in the crypto realm,” which is what made the product’s straightforward and user-friendly design effective. Making cryptocurrency simple to grasp and widely available was the primary objective the CoinSwitch creators had while developing the product.
However, immediately after CoinSwitch was introduced as a product, the RBI issued a statement in which it asked banks to stop supporting cryptocurrencies in 2018, signalling a potential ban on these digital currencies. The inventors were compelled to promote their then-simple “CoinSwitch” product internationally as a result.
In the end, Sequoia Capital supported its business plan, turning the CoinSwitch journey into a success. Although the website was thriving outside of India, the CoinSwitch founders had their goals focused primarily on their home nation.
This became a reality when the Supreme Court intervened, overturning the prior RBI ban and opening the door for cryptocurrency-based companies like WazirX, ZebPay, CoinSwitch, and others. For them, this was more than just a lucky break. They quickly released the exclusive CoinSwitch Kuber app for the Indian market.
Mission and Vision
The CoinSwitch Kuber team is a proponent of financial inclusion, which holds that everyone should have access to money, investments, and financial education.
According to CoinSwitch Kuber’s mission statement, “Our goal is to change the current situation. Without a fancy degree or a tonne of cash, we think our platform democratises bitcoin investment so that the average person can make his money work for him.”
The vision of the company is to make crypto trading easier and more transparent.
Partnerships
In August 2021, NDTV and CoinSwitch Kuber will launch their strategic partnership to deliver comprehensive and world-class cryptocurrency content. As part of this partnership, NDTV will establish distinctive cryptocurrency sites on gadgets360.com, ndtvprofit.com, and ndtvindia.in. Every other weekend, this bridge expansion includes a revitalising programme on NDTV 24X7 and NDTV India.
As cryptocurrencies gain popularity and more people start to consider this asset class, the necessity for reliable and accurate information is more critical than ever. This partnership intends to close that gap by combining the authority and trust of NDTV with the topic knowledge and powerful trading platform of CoinSwitch Kuber.
Business Model and Revenue Model
One of the few active cryptocurrency businesses nowadays is CoinSwitch Kuber. On the cryptocurrency market, users can buy shards of a number of popular cryptocurrencies. A user can purchase bitcoin and other currencies on CoinSwitch, for instance, in little sachets for as little as 100 Indian rupees ($1.30), which is incredibly profitable for the consumers. Additionally, whereas other cryptocurrency exchanges developed solutions for traders who are familiar with order books and are knowledgeable about buying and selling orders, CoinSwitch stood out by focusing on consumers who had never seen an order book before and were unaware of what it was.
In contrast to other cryptocurrency exchanges that typically charge customers for transaction fees, CoinSwitch Kuber positions itself as an aggregator and doesn’t charge users. Instead, CoinSwitch Kuber bargains with the cryptocurrency exchanges over transaction costs in its capacity as a manufacturer.
For the first 100 days, the app provides its members with free trading, deposit, and withdrawal options. After then, a fee is added to every platform-facilitated transaction.
According to the conditions of the business, there are no fees associated with transferring digital assets to the CoinSwitch Kuber wallet; nevertheless, taking money out of the wallet may result in fees. The platform also levies fees for sending fiat money through credit/debit cards or online banking.
Growth and Revenue
Investors have been impressed by CoinSwitch Kuber’s concept and execution. CoinSwitch has received funding from Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Paradigm, Kunal Shah, the developer of Cred, and other companies, in addition to Tiger Global Management’s $25 million investment in April 2021. In October 2021, CoinSwitch Kuber attained Unicorn status with a valuation of $1.9 billion, thanks to recent funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures.
According to CoinSwitch Kuber, it received more than 6.1 million downloads in 2021, the most of any cryptocurrency firm in India.
Since CoinSwitch was created and made available worldwide following the RBI prohibition, the company has experienced a significant increase in app-based transactions. More users have downloaded CoinSwitch Kuber’s app than any other Indian cryptocurrency exchange in just two years. This rise has mostly been attributed to the app’s streamlined user experience (UX) and decision to withhold specific trading options from consumers.
Singhal notes that they did not knock on the investors’ doors like other entrepreneurs.
Kuber claims to have more than 15 million users in India, and CoinSwitch Kuber reports more than 7 million monthly active users. Additionally, it has been revealed that more than half of them are under 25. According to CoinSwitch Kuber, in the last 11 months, $5 billion worth of transactions have been processed.
In the future, the company wants to broaden its business outside cryptocurrencies.
The company states that it plans to grow into traditional finance, including equities, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and bonds, and offer a whole portfolio to retail users on its platform.
CoinSwitch Kuber Financials and Revenue
During FY21, CoinSwitch Kuber was profitable. When compared to FY20, the operating revenue of CoinSwitch’s Indian entity increased by 5.5X, from Rs 12.93 crore to Rs 71.32 crore. The company’s profits more than tripled, from 6.3 crores in FY20 to 23.6 crores in FY21. According to business statements, India is where CoinSwitch Kuber generates all of its revenue.
Funding and Investors
Over four fundraising rounds, CoinSwitch Kuber has raised more than $300 million. Now valued at nearly $1.9 billion, it is one of India’s unicorn startups. A CoinSwitch Kuber investor, Andreessen Horowitz, partnered with Coinbase Inc. to invest $260 million in CoinSwitch, making it a unicorn company for the first time ever in India. Tiger Global, Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, and others are a few additional CoinSwitch shareholders.
CoinSwitch Kuber – ESOPs
On March 21, 2022, CoinSwitch Kuber recorded their first-ever ESOP repurchase programme, worth $2.5 million. Funding for this buyback round was derived from both internal and external sources.
Competitors
Competitors of CoinSwitch Kuber are:
- Unocoin
- WazirX
- CoinDCX
- Instamojo
- Glidera
- ZebPay
- SmartCoin
- Paxful
- Bitxoxo Bitcoins
- Coinbase
Challenges Faced
Over 120 employees are employed by CoinSwitch Kuber, which has a network of more than 4.5 million subscribers. Consumers may expect a simple UI and UX from the app when compared to other products on the market. The app, however, does not now enable UPI payments, as was just recently found out.
The company posted a notice on all of its official social media pages on April 21, 2021, stating that INR deposits in the CoinSwitch Kuber App will no longer be permitted. On Twitter, CoinSwitch Kuber announced that the company has temporarily stopped any INR deposits due to unanticipated issues with their banking partner. Later, the problem was fixed, and INR deposits were now possible.
In India, cryptocurrency is a complicated subject. Even if cryptocurrency investments are now legal in India, there are still a lot of concerns and scepticism around the subject.
Ashish thinks that the company’s only challenge in terms of challenges is educating Indians about cryptocurrencies and the ecosystem.
Ashish had to abandon the loan function proposal after CoinSwitch Kuber ran into legal issues with the SEC in connection with the plan. The founders, however, continue to believe that they will be able to use the lending and stakes feature to generate income in the future. They have already begun collaborating with authorities and winning their trust to make it possible.
CoinSwitch Kuber has temporarily halted bitcoin withdrawals because there are no clear restrictions for exchanging cryptocurrencies.
Future Plans
Indians have been experimenting with cryptocurrencies since 2020, and the number is increasing daily. The crypto revolution appears to be ready to take off in India. The most recent MCA modification is the first step in the government’s ongoing efforts to create a regulatory framework to enable its smooth operation.
With more than 10 million people already using the network, CoinSwitch Kuber has experienced phenomenal growth. The company plans to increase its user base in India to 50 million individuals using the extra funding. Along with cryptocurrencies, the CoinSwitch Kuber team intends to add additional investment choices to the platform.
The creators of CoinSwitch Kuber intend to make the platform a one-stop-shop for investors, offering both traditional and cryptographic financial instruments to both retail and institutional investors.
Edited by Prakriti Arora
