The Big Idea (CoinSwitch): Trust by design

For Singhal, the proposition resonated because of a personal experience years earlier. As a student from Meerut, he and his mother had spent weeks trying to secure a Rs 2 lakh education loan, only to be caught in endless paperwork and bureaucracy. “If there are rules, they should apply equally to everyone,” he says. The promise of a financial system where access was determined by code rather than connections stayed with him.

Three years later, that idea evolved into CoinSwitch, now one of India’s largest crypto exchanges. Singhal, Govind Soni and Vimal Sagar Tiwari came from small-town India and bonded over building products. They spent their college years participating in hackathons across the country. “Any hackathon in India that you can think of, we would have won it,” Singhal recalls. In 2015, they won Sequoia Capital India’s hackathon with an app analytics tool. Although startups wanted to buy it, the trio chose to open-source the software.

Around the same time, they had started trading cryptocurrencies on overseas exchanges. They noticed identical assets were often priced differently across platforms and built a tool to identify the best rates for themselves. During a cab ride, they decided the tool could become a business.

CoinSwitch was launched in June 2017 while all three founders still held full-time jobs. Evenings were spent at Singhal’s Bengaluru apartment, coding until the early hours. “This was never supposed to be a company. We just launched it,” Soni says.

Without a marketing budget, the founders relied on Reddit, Quora and BitcoinTalk, answering users’ questions and linking back to CoinSwitch. More importantly, they handled customer support themselves. One rule remained unchanged: they would never offer investment advice.

The approach helped CoinSwitch gain traction. By the end of 2017, it had attracted thousands of users and was processing millions of dollars in monthly trading volume. Peak XV invested $1.5 million in March 2018. Days later, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) barred banks from dealing with crypto businesses, disrupting the domestic industry. CoinSwitch survived because its business was largely global.

The next turning point came in 2020 after the Supreme Court struck down the RBI circular. Instead of targeting experienced traders, CoinSwitch built an app for first-time investors with a Rs 100 minimum investment and a simplified interface. The firm expected to acquire 100,000 users in six months. It signed up 1.5 million and shut its global business to focus entirely on India.

Investor interest followed. The company raised $15 million in January 2021 from Peak XV, Ribbit Capital and Paradigm, followed by Tiger Global’s $25 million investment. In October 2021, Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures joined a $260 million funding round that valued CoinSwitch at $1.91 billion, making it India’s second crypto unicorn. The firm has raised $302 million so far.

The business has since navigated volatile regulation and markets. Revenue at Singapore-based parent Chain Labs fell sharply after India introduced a 30% tax on crypto gains and a 1% tax deducted at source. Revenue recovered 219% in FY25 to $14.6 million, though it remained below the FY22 peak. The company says the group turned profitable at the company level in Q2FY26.

Even as regulation remains unsettled, CoinSwitch has broadened its ambitions. Through parent PeepalCo, it launched stockbroking platform Lemonn in 2024. “Crypto should only

be 4-6% of an investor’s portfolio. Our idea was never to build only a crypto business,” Singhal says. Tiwari believes the next opportunity lies beyond access. “What we want to solve now is discovery and decision-making.”

Through multiple market cycles, one principle has remained central. CoinSwitch says it spends 8-10% of its revenue on security and has never suffered a breach. “It’s not by luck,” Singhal says. “It’s by design. We have been building for trust in a zero-trust environment since day one.”