New Crypto Unicorn is Born in India, Backed by a16z and Coinbase

Source: Adobe/coffeemill

Indian crypto exchange CoinSwitch Kuber said it raised over $260m at a valuation of $1.9Bn.

“A [USD] 1.9 Billion Crypto Dream! We are officially India’s largest CRYPTO UNICORN,” CoinSwitch Kuber tweeted today, announcing the funding round.

The round was led by US-based venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and the venture capital arm of major crypto exchange Coinbase. It also included existing investors Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global.

The Company was valued at over USD 500 million in its Series B financing round in April 2021, which earned it investments of USD 25 million.

This will also be a16z’s first investment in India.

Ashish Singhal, CoinSwitch Kuber’s co-founder and chief executive, told TechCrunch that the team will use the capital raised to add more asset classes to invest in its app, but did not say which ones. They are also working to provide institutional clients with support in using the app, and want to hire more employees, including in leadership positions.

According to the Economic Times, citing a statement from the company in September, CoinSwitch Kuber claimed that it had become the largest crypto asset platform in India, having taken more than 10 million users on board since it began operations in June 2020. Around 7m of these are active users, it said.

According to blockchain data platform Chainalysis, India is the second of the top three countries in Central and South Asia in Chainalysis’s Global Crypto Adoption Index, behind Vietnam and ahead of Pakistan. However, their report found that India’s crypto market appears to be more mature than that of the other two countries. It has a large market, as well as a much larger share of activities on decentralized financial platforms (DeFi).

In addition, India is a kind of market where the crypto community has managed to grow and attract investment from outside, with Chainalysis saying that they see “more development and use of innovative projects like DeFi protocols” there.

Meanwhile, some CoinSwitch Kuber users have complained about the exchange’s service, claiming that the withdrawal feature has been disabled, and the support team assured them that they are working on improving the service.