India's Crypto Unicorns: CoinSwitch Soars to $1.91 Billion Valuation

CoinSwitch, one of India's largest crypto exchanges, was born out of frustration with traditional financial systems. Ashish Singhal, a student from Meerut at the time, remembered struggling to secure an education loan for his mother due to endless paperwork and bureaucracy.

Three years after discovering Bitcoin's white paper on Reddit in 2014, Singhal joined forces with Govind Soni and Vimal Sagar Tiwari to build CoinSwitch. The trio, all from small-town India, had previously participated in hackathons across the country, winning Sequoia Capital India's hackathon with an app analytics tool in 2015.

While trading cryptocurrencies on overseas exchanges, they noticed discrepancies in asset pricing and built a tool to identify the best rates for themselves. This experience eventually turned into CoinSwitch, launched in June 2017 while all three founders held full-time jobs.

The company's unique approach to customer support and handling questions on Reddit, Quora, and BitcoinTalk without offering investment advice helped it gain traction by the end of 2017. With thousands of users and millions of dollars in monthly trading volume, CoinSwitch secured a $1.5 million investment from Peak XV in March 2018.

However, the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) ban on banks dealing with crypto businesses disrupted the domestic industry, forcing CoinSwitch to shift focus towards global markets. The turning point came in 2020 after the Supreme Court struck down the RBI circular, allowing CoinSwitch to build an app for first-time investors.

In a $260 million funding round in October 2021, Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures joined with Tiger Global's $25 million investment, valuing CoinSwitch at $1.91 billion and making it India's second crypto unicorn. The company has since navigated volatile regulation and markets but remains committed to its core principle of trust by design.