The Indian financial ecosystem is now evolving to move beyond digital wallet solutions and start trading in cryptocurrency. Unocoin, which has built a Bitcoin trading platform, has today raised around $1.5 million in its pre-series A round of funding. The current round saw participation of well-known Indian investors including Blume Ventures, Mumbai Angels and ah! Ventures.
Apart from those investors, a few international investors have also participated in this round, including New York-based Digital Currency Group, Boost VC, Bank to the Future and FundersClub.
With the funds raised in this round, the company is planning to use the funds for product development. Along with that, it is also looking to further expand its team, as well as to expand its business geographically.
Commenting on this, co-founder and CEO of Unocoin, Sathvik Vishwanath, said,
We believe that we’re at the dawn of a new evolution where money itself is being reinvented. We love seeing so many of the smartest cryptographers, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world working together to scale Bitcoin to the masses.
These are exciting times…India is the perfect home for Bitcoin and blockchain technology. Over the coming months and years, we’ll continue to build practical, useful features and tools on top of Bitcoin.
Karthik Reddy of Blume Ventures, which led the investment round, said:
In Sathvik and team, we discovered not only the leading Bitcoin company in India, but a determination to educate all stakeholders, simplify Bitcoin’s usage, and bring another frictionless layer to payments and commerce. We are confident that Unocoin will further alter the landscape and make additional inroads into remittances and e-commerce in India.
Unocoin was founded in 2013 by Sathvik Vishwanath, Abhinand Kaseti, Sunny Ray, and Harish B V when they saw an immense uprise in the technology. Their platform is a “Simple, Safe and Secure” way of buying, selling, sending, receiving and storing bitcoins in India. It currently has over 30 employees, and serving more than 100,000 customers across the country and growing exponentially.
It has not only built a trading platform around Bitcoins, but also recently launched a merchant point-of-sale(POS) app, a mobile app for trading on the go, interaction with NETKI to simplify Bitcoin addresses, and even a systematic investment planning(SIP) to mitigate users against volatilty risk. The company will continue to build practical, useful features and tools on top of Bitcoin in the coming months and years.
A significant amount of bitcoins from the user’s wallet are stored offline that are secured in bank vaults. Users can print paper wallets and import the bitcoin address to the address book and also withdraw bitcoins to paper wallets.
Earlier, in 2014, the Bangalore-based company had raised around $250,000 in its seed funding round from Digital Currency Group. Recently, the company has launched its own bitcoin Point of Sale services. With this new service, the company intends to encourage the Indian merchants to accept bitcoin payments.
Barry Silbert, CEO of New York-based Digital Currency Group, said,
Since making our first investment in Unocoin, it has been tremendous to see the company solidify its position as the leading Bitcoin company in India, as well as emerge as one of the fastest growing companies in DCG’s global portfolio of 80 Bitcoin and blockchain companies.
