CoinSwitch Kuber- Simplifying the Whole Process of Crypto Trading In India!

1. Overview

In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis of the population on trading in cryptocurrencies, especially among youngsters & millennials. It is impossible to have a conversation with someone about trading or investments and not talk about cryptocurrency. Indeed they are the most happening new area of focus for investments globally, even regarded as the “future currency”. According to a study made by the Deutsche Bank called Imagine 2030, banks cited cryptocurrencies are currently just additions to the current money payment system. However, in the next decade, they could be replacements.

Currently, the global cryptocurrency market is estimated at over $2 trillion, with over 11,000 cryptocurrencies being traded all across global cryptocurrency platforms. In India too, Cryptocurrency investments caught quickly being an alternative for faster liquidity and growing wealth. Though there were some initial hiccups in the beginning slowly & steadily Indian population is accepting them as a safe medium of investment by the youth population aged between 22-45 years of age.

However, despite all this, there lies anonymity with the crypto technology with still a large section of the population having their reservation about crypto trading due to high risks & security issues. Therefore, CoinSwitch Kuber was launched in the year 2017 to offer a simple & secure platform for crypto trading and dissuade more information to help people to make informed decisions.

Thus, CoinSwitch Kuber is adecentralized cryptocurrency exchange aggregator platform that offers simplified processes of crypto trading to Indian investors over several common cryptocurrencies including the facility to purchase cryptocurrencywith a credit card at competitive rates, empowering users to streamline their trades. Some of the common cryptos offered on the platform are Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash, etc

After closing a Series C funding round co-led by six investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Coinbase Ventures, and existing investors Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital India, and Tiger Global, in which CoinSwitch collected an amount of $260 million, this crypto start-up entered the unicorn start-up club with a valuation of $1.9B, and the ‘30th startup’ to achieve unicorn status in 2021. Read further to find out more about CoinSwitch Kuber, its offerings, the story behind the startup, founders, investors, its growth & challenges, and many more!

Company Profile

Known as-       CoinSwitch Kuber

Headquarters- Singapore

Industry- Financial Services, Fintech, Trading Platform, Cryptocurrency

Valuation-       $1.9B+

CoinSwitch Kuber website- coin switch.co

2. CoinSwitch Kuber-About and how it works?

CoinSwitch Kuber is a cryptocurrency trading aggregator platform that is working intending to make the process of trading in cryptocurrencies faster & simple at the best rates with a click of a button. Through its innovative technologies, the order matching engine on the platform presents the best rates of products, thus making the trading process simpler & smooth than any other similar platform.

Ashish Singhal, Co-founder & CEO explains the reason behind the launch of the start-up “Early on, we found that the price of crypto fluctuates between exchanges based on demand & supplywhen trading in crypto ourselves, which makes it essential to choose an exchange carefully to earn greater profits from the crypto market. Thus, we created an aggregator platform of various exchanges which could offer real-time data so that an investor could at any time invest in an exchange that could offer the highest yield at any point in time.For better user engagement, CoinSwitch Kuber mobile app comes with a modest user interface which makes the whole process smooth like a breeze.

On the CoinSwitch Kuber platform, more than 100 common cryptocurrencies are offered to investors for trading purposes, which could be even purchased with the use of a debit/credit card at reasonable prices. Thus, every investor could download the application, and create his user profile and after the completion of KYC/AML processes, investors may reap the benefits of the pooled liquidity of India’s top exchanges to receive the best amount and trade instantly.

CoinSwitch Kuber enjoys its business presence in up to 200 locations with 18 million users in India, out of which 40% of the customers are from Tier I cities, whereas, from Tier II & Tier III cities, the crypto platform receives 36% & 24% of its clientele. Furthermore, the start-up claims that the average ticket size per user is 9,000 per month, which again differs from city to city. The average ticket size for Tier-I city is Rs.11,600 as compared to Rs. Rs 6,600 andRs 3,500  in tier II and in tier III.

What’s interesting to note is that the average age of a crypto investor on the CoinSwitch platform is 24 years of age and the fact that as many as 65% of first-time crypto investors have made their first investment in crypto apart from bank saving accounts & fixed deposits in India. Currently, CoinSwitch Kuber is one of the largest crypto start-up businesses with an employee count of between 501-1000 as evidenced through the business’s LinkedIn profile.

3. CoinSwitch Kuber – Mission & Vision

As an organization, CoinSwitch believes in the idea of holistic financial inclusion in the country which means, that wealth, investment, and financial education should be accessible & available for all. The crypto start-up envisions creating a democratic cryptocurrency investment platform so that every person could use his monetary resources better by making his “money work for him”, for which he need not necessarily hold a fancy degree or a boatload of money.

Therefore, the start-up has chosen an apt tagline and slogan which says “Buy, Sell, Trade.” And an advertisement campaign that says “Trade Kar, Befikar.”

4. CoinSwitch Kuber – Founders and Team

CoinSwitch Kuber co-founded a group of three friends namely Ashish Singhal, Govind Soni and Vimal Sagar Tiwari.

Ashish Singhal

Ashish Singhal is the co-founder & CEO of CoinSwitch Kuber. He completed his graduation in computer sciences from Delhi’s Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology in 2007. After graduation, he interned with prestigious organizations like Microsoft & Info edge systems and went on to work in several key positions in companies like Amazon, Livspace.com and Reap Benefit, etc. Apart from this, he is a serial entrepreneur who founded start-ups like CRUXPay (an open-source protocol for blockchain naming services) and Urban Tailor, which he left in 2016 & April 2020 respectively.

Govind Soni

Govind Soni is the Co-founder and CTO, of CoinSwitch DCX. Like Ashish, Govind is also an alumnus of Netaji Subash Institute of Technology from 2007-2011 where he completed his graduation in Computer Sciences. After which, he started his career as a Software Developer in Infoedge Systems Pvt. Ltd. and went on to work in companies like Amazon & Livespace, before finally co-founding CRUXPay & CoinSwitch with Ashish.

Vimal Sagar Tiwari

Vimal Sagar Tiwari is the co-founder & Chief Operating Officer of CoinSwitch. He completed his Bachelor of Technology from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology. He worked as a Software Engineer & Software Analyst for Zynga and Accenture. Vimal also happens to be the Co-founder & COO of CRUXPay, which he started with Ashish & Govind.But unlike them, who exited CRUXPay in 2020& 2021, he still retains his position in the company.

5. CoinSwitch Kuber – How did it start?

CoinSwitch is one of the largest crypto trading platforms having more than 18 million users and is recognized globally for its services.In a video interaction with BlockchainStory, Ashish narrated the whole story of the origin of the start-up idea and their initial journey.

“All three of us are computer science engineers and the story is way back. While Govind & I were batch mates, Vimal happened to be a common friend. All three of us equally loved tech and enjoyed creating new things and for this purpose, we participated in every hackathon one could think of. Google, Sequoia Capital, Amazon, etc. What CoinSwitch is today was started as a hack which was though a simple idea at the beginning, but it is one of the largest crypto platforms with more than 13M users with a valuation as higher as $1.9B”.

Though, these friends worked at prestigious organizations like Amazon, Microsoft, and Zynga. However, the allure of turning their idea into a product made them start their journey on the path of entrepreneurship. Hence, CoinSwitch Kuber was born.

The co-founders had realized that the price of crypto was slightly varied across different exchanges depending on the demand & supply factors. Thus, it became pertinent to understand that the users needed to select the right exchange, especially at scaleto get better returns. Thus, they decided to create a crypto exchange aggregator platform that could provide real-time data on the best prices and exchanges for cryptocurrencies to be traded.

Ashish further adds “We had built a simple crypto exchange aggregator in a hackathon, but we didn’t have envisioned it to become a company someday. But, when we launched the product online, we witnessed users coming on board due to its simple processes as users expected. Thus, we worked on a mission to make crypto easier to understand & more accessible to the Indian population.

But, as fate would have it, within one year RBI announced a ban on cryptocurrencies and even instructed banks not to support crypto transactions. This forced the co-founders to take their first product ‘CoinSwitch’ to the international market rather than in India after getting the initial backing from Sequoia Capital. While the business was running successfully in the global markets, Ashish & his team’s hearts were still set on the Indian markets.

However, they finally felt a sense of relief when the Supreme Court of India overturned the ban imposed by the RBI on cryptocurrency trading and opened doors for crypto-based businesses like WazirX, ZebPay, CoinSwitch, and others. Soon, CoinSwitch launched its CoinSwitch Kuber app solely for Indian markets.

6. CoinSwitch Kuber – Partnerships & Key Competitors

Tie-Up with NDTV 24X7 to create awareness for crypto

Early on, CoinSwitch realized that though there are huge growth prospects for crypto trading in India, it is essential to spread awareness & education about crypto investments, and the TV news channels being an important part of people’s lives, could make a huge impact. Thus,it entered a strategic partnership with a leading news channel NDTV 24X7, which will offer comprehensive and best-in-class cryptocurrency programming in August 2021. In pursuance of this partnership, NDTV will create unique crypto destinations on channels such as Gadgets360.com, NDTVprofit.com, and NDTVindia. Etc. including a new refreshing showon NDTV 24X7 and NDTV India each weekend. Hence, with the credibility and confidence of NDTV & the subject expertise of CoinSwitch, the start-up aims to bridge the gap between Indian investors & reliable information on cryptocurrency.

CoinSwitch Kuber Partners with Karnataka Government

CoinSwitch has been added as a partner with the Blockchain Hackathon, Building Future Cities &Tejasvi Surya, Bengaluru South MP, under the initiative by the Startup Karnataka of the Karnataka government.

This initiative has been aimed toward the recognition & resolution of blockchain-based problems and bringing them to the citizens of India all across the nation. Interestingly, the Hackathon initiative has also been backed by Sequoia Capital.

Key Competitors

Here is the list of top ten competitors of CoinSwitch Kuber –

• Unocoin
• WazirX
• CoinDCX
• Instamojo
• Glidera
• ZebPay
• SmartCoin
• IPaxful
• Bitxoxo Bitcoins
• Coinbase

7. CoinSwitch Kuber – Business Model and Revenue Model

CoinSwitch Kuber is one of the key players in the cryptocurrency trading business and enjoys a huge following from its users. CoinSwitch has been distinguished in its approach to target users who never have seen an order book or do not know about it, as compared to the other crypto exchanges that came up with products for the traders who are acquainted with the order books and are well-versed with buying/selling orders.

CoinSwitch Kuber presents itself as an aggregator of exchanges on its platform, and unlike other crypto exchanges, it doesn’t charge transaction fees from the users. Instead, it negotiates with the crypto exchanges on transaction fees.Explaining the business & revenue model of CoinSwitch, Ashish, and Founder & CEO stated “We offer exchanges at a fixed price to our users &aggregate supply on the backend, and our prime business revenue comes from the execution engine. But, in the coming years, the revenue model may evolve with newer innovations and regulations.

Further, CoinSwitch allows its users to purchase shards of various cryptocurrencies on the crypto market, which means that a user may purchase cryptocurrencies with a minimum investment that goes as low as Rs. 100 or (1.30 dollars).

Apart from trading, CoinSwitch Kuber offers other facilities to its users including deposit & withdrawal facilities to its users which are on a free basis for the first 100 days. After the expiry of the first 100 days, there is a certain fee charged on transactions on the platform. CoinSwitch doesn’t charge a fee on the transfer of digital assets but the transfer of digital assets to the CoinSwitch Kuber wallet & withdrawal may attract charges on the platform. Alternatively, CoinSwitch also charges a fee on the transfer of fiat currency through credit/debit cards or net banking.

8. CoinSwitch Kuber –Expenses & Revenue Breakdown

For CoinSwitch the fate turned dramatically after the Supreme Court of India lifted the RBI ban, and thereafter the crypto start-up saw an increase in its users & revenue through its platform. Within two years, CoinSwitch has been able to gain 18M users with an active user count of 7M+ users with a transaction worth $5B transaction in the last 11 months. According to the financial statements of the company, the almost entire revenue of CoinSwitch Kuber is generated from India.

Unlike, other business industries & businesses that witnessed a slump in the last two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, CoinSwitch witnessed a profitable year in FY21.In FY21, the start-up saw a 5.5X growth in its revenues amounting to Rs 71.32 crore as compared to Rs 12.93 crore in FY20. Similarly, the profits also ramped up by 3.7X reaching Rs. 23.6 crores in FY21 as compared to Rs 6.3 crore in FY20.

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9. CoinSwitch Kuber – Funding and Investors

To date, CoinSwitch has raised a total sum of $300.6M over four rounding of funding. The start-up has been funded by a total of seven investors including Tiger Global, Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Kunal Shah, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. CoinSwitch Kuber has also invested in the Seed Funding round of MoHash, a crypto asset management business on Jun 30, 2022.

Their latest tranche of investment came on Oct 6, 2021, where CoinSwitch collected around $260M from a total of six investors including Andreessen Horowitz, a California-based VC firm that invested for the first time in India & Coinbase Ventures in a Series C funding round. This funding round proved to be a significant step for Coin Switch enabling it to become the second unicorn crypto start-up with a valuation of $1.9B.

Take a look below at the highlights of all funding rounds for CoinSwitch-

CoinSwitch Kuber – ESOPs

On March 21, 2022, CoinSwitch Kuber announced that it has completed its first ESOP buyback worth $2.5 million (Rs. 19 Crore). According to Ashish Singhal (Founder & CEO), the buyback was a mixture of internal & external funding resources, citing that the buyback was an effort to acknowledge the “Contribution of its employees” to the organization.

10. CoinSwitch Kuber – Challenges Faced

Though CoinSwitch happened to witness tremendous growth with its ever-growing user base within two years in the business, the journey was never easy. Here are some key challenges which the crypto unicorn had to face & resolve during its journey-

Lack of Information & Interest in crypto investments

In countries like India, crypto investment is still considered a murky area despite the lifting of the ban on the same by the Apex court of the country. Ashish Singhal believes that the main purpose of CoinSwitch is to create awareness about crypto investments & the ecosystem in the country. According to reports, CoinSwitch got into trouble with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) due to its idea of the lending & stakes feature on its platform, and had to drop it.

However, the co-founders are still hopeful that at some point they will be able to use the lending and stakes feature to gain more revenues in the future and even have started working on the plan by working with regulators and gaining their confidence.

Temporary Disablement of Deposits via Announcement

On April 21, 2021, in a sudden announcement, the crypto unicorn announced that all INR deposits in the CoinSwitch Kuber App will be disabled through its social media handles. It further announced that the start-up has temporarily blocked all INR deposits due to unexpected issues with their banking partner. Later, they announced that the problem has been solved and all the INR deposits have been enabled.

Notice from Enforcement Directorate regarding FEMA investigation

According to multiple reports, CoinSwitch along with other crypto Startups like CoinDCX were sent notices & investigated by the Enforcement Directorate under the apprehension of defying FEMA & Money laundering provisions on July 12, 2022.

Thus, the ED was trying to determine whether or not the rules & regulations were violated about foreign currencies. On these reports, CoinSwitch stated that “it had indeed received notifications from ED and was ready to cooperate with the investigation procedure”.

Inability to Support UPI Payments

Despite coming with a cleaner & better UI and UX designas compared to other applications, it was recently found out that the CoinSwitch platform does not support UPI payments which could be a little discouraging for investors.

11. CoinSwitch-Growth & Revenue

CoinSwitch Kuber is a well-known crypto aggregator platform that was born to simplify crypto investments for Indian people.Based out of Bengaluru, CoinSwitch Kuber currently has a team of around 500 people & plans to raise this number to 1500 in the coming years. Ashish Singhal, Founder & CEO stated “We started CoinSwitch Kuber with a simple objective to spread crypto education & encourage them to make informed decisions with small investments with as low as just Rs 100.

With its unique concept & performance, CoinSwitch managed to impress its investors so much so that it didn’t have to strive harder for funding, instead VC firms like Sequoia & Tiger Global Management reached out expressing their interest to invest in the business. Singhal explains “Unlike other start-ups, we didn’t reach out to Tiger Global for funding, they contacted us to express their willingness to invest in CoinSwitch. Even though we required just $25 million, Tiger Global didn’t invest less than $100M.

Accordingly, CoinSwitch has been backed by some of the well-known VC firms & angel investors in the world.In addition to Tiger Global Management’s $25M investment in April 2021, CoinSwitch raised around $300 million from global venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz,  who also backed businesses like Uber & Facebook, and Sequoia who invested in seed funding rounds of businesses like Google, Cisco, and Apple&Tiger Capital, which invested in ByteDance and Flipkart.

In terms of growth, CoinSwitch pivoted quickly to only witness tremendous growth within just 2 years after Supreme Court overturned the ban in March 2020.Due to its simplified UX design & UI, CoinSwitch Kuber has been able to onboard more users than any other crypto exchange in India with the highest number of app downloadsmore than 6.1 times. In a statement on December 28, 2021, the CoinSwitch announced “While serving primarily to retail investors, CoinSwitch has recorded a 3,500% rise in transaction volumes as more Indians have started theirjourney in crypto investment”.

Presently, the start-up claims to have a user base of 18 M+ registered users in India with a monthly active user count of CoinSwitch Kuber is over 7M+, out of which60% of its users are below the age of 28 and more than half live outside metro cities. It also claims to have handled $5 billion in transactions within the last 11 months. Singhal maintains that currently CoinSwitch is enjoying good profits. “Since we are not a Capex intensive business, we do not need too much money as our Ebitda margins are in the range of 60-65%’. Therefore, amid increasing demands for clearer rules for crypto exchanges and investors, CoinSwitch Kuber is going ahead with its plans to diversify its business segments. It aims to become a wealth tech startup that deals in Indian and US stocks, mutual funds, equity, fixed deposits, and bonds.

The exit of Key Management Executives from CoinSwitch

On July 7, 2022, the Founder & CEO of CoinSwitch announced the exit of the three key executives namely- Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Sarmad Nazki, Chief Business Officer (CBO) Sharan Nair, and head of new initiatives Krishna Hegde who resigned from their position earlier to start their new business venture which will offer insights to web3 investors, however according to reports the name of the start-up has not been finalized yet.

While Sharan Nair joined CoinSwitch in the year 2017 itself and held numerous positions during his long stint, Sarmad Nazki & Krishna Hegde served the business for less than a year. Ashish also confirmed the reappointments for CFO, CBO, and SVP which will be taken by Ramesh Bafna, Rishav Dev, and R Ventakesh. Ashish stated “After several years of building CoinSwitch, our colleagues & good friends Sharan Nair, Sarmad Nazki and Krishna Hegde have decided to launch their start-up in the Web 3 space, and we will look forward to collaborating with their business venture in future.

Signed Ranveer Singh as brand ambassador

For higher user engagement, CoinSwitch signed celebrity actor Ranveer Singh for its latest ad campaign Ab #KuchTohBadlega which ran across TV as well as on various digital media platforms including OTT platform Hotstar. The campaign was aimed towards dissuading better information about crypto investment, including methods to improve their financial well-being, benefits of investment, how to start investing, how to research before investing & how to make informed financial decisions, etc.

12. CoinSwitch Kuber – Future Plans

CoinSwitch Kuber has witnessed tremendous growth, with over 10 million users already using the platform. The firm plans to use the new funds to expand its user base to up to 50M in the coming years. For the coming years, CoinSwitch Kuber plans to double its employee strength by 1000 by the end of this year and to triple its engineering team to almost 300 by the end of the financial year. Besides engineering, the start-up is looking to ramp up its hiring in information security, product, and analytics across geographies. Ashish says“CoinSwitch is building one of the first web3 teams in India since India is a talent-rich country but the blockchain is considerably a new and evolving space. We need smart talent to build a team of specialists who could build the future of the Internet -web3 space in India. As an early mover to web3 space, we intend to play an active role in shaping the nation’s future.

The Founder & CEO of CoinSwitch Kuber has plans to turn CoinSwitch Kuber into a complete investment destination that will have options for traditional financial instruments available for both retail and institutional investors. According to multiple reports, CoinSwitch Kuber is planning to enter the stockbroking and mutual fund business, by becoming a one-stop solution for all financial needs of the generation Z and millennial investors. According to Ashish “Through CoinSwitch, we intend to offer a simplified investment platform for which there is a need of an amalgamation among crypto and traditional financial instruments, especially for the younger generation who want to explore beyond crypto investments”.