For CoinSwitch Kuber's Ashish Singhal, simplicity is the mantra for success

Singhal, whose company became a unicorn last month, is determined to reach out to sceptics who have FUD - crypto slag for fear, uncertainty and doubt, writes Ritwik Sharma

Sometimes one has to work at becoming a god. Even Kuber, the pot-bellied god of wealth in Hindu mythology, had to perform penance to become a deity. This nugget makes sense when Ashish Singhal explains the rationale behind the name, CoinSwitch Kuber, the cryptocurrency trading app that he heads.

Crypto firms in India didn’t have to expiate for any perceived sins, but they endured a murky phase from April 2018, when banks were forbidden from dealing in such virtual currencies, until the Supreme Court struck down the ban in March 2020.

The court verdict was a godsend for CoinSwitch. In June 2020, the company launched its India platform and app, CoinSwitch Kuber. And 16 months on, it has over 12 million users — a majority from outside metros — and about 60 per cent market share.

I am meeting Singhal, co-founder and CEO of CoinSwitch Kuber, over lunch at the China Kitchen in Hyatt Regency Delhi. He arrives around 1.30 pm with a much bigger appetite for a conversation than a meal and says he’s had breakfast only around noon.

As I pore over the mobile-scanned virtual menu, swiping pages, he opts for starters and lets the waitress recommend: garlic prawn dimsums, chilli chicken served with bullet chillies and nuts, and a berry blast mocktail. I order a claypot chicken, mushroom and water chestnut in mustard sauce, and egg and vegetable udon fried noodles.

Singhal sports the stubble, smiles often (and why shouldn’t he?), and his semi-formal attire includes a black round neck T-shirt and greyish blue blazer, all suggesting he is comfortable in his own skin and in charge of a four-year-old start-up.

I can’t help wondering that he has a Dhoni-like voice and lilt, except that he speaks faster and has more to say than the famously reticent icon. Like Dhoni, and much of his company’s user base, Singhal comes from a small city, Meerut. It isn’t a coincidence that a recent ad featured Ranveer Singh in a Gully Boy guise with an appeal, “Kuchh toh badlega” (something will change), to youths across cities and strata.

Singhal says the company, which became a unicorn last month, started out with an aim to simplify so that people who were used to ordering food online could invest in cryptocurrency just as easily. In an earlier ad campaign, CoinSwitch Kuber encouraged people to ask about crypto. “We were the first (company) to come out of the shadows and promote crypto education, whether you invest or not. Secondly, we let users start with investing Rs 100. So we are targeting a young audience across tiers,” he says.

Singhal, who graduated from Delhi’s Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, earlier worked with Amazon for four years, building backend systems and leading a project that developed a one-hour delivery for users. In 2015, he started his own company, Urban Tailor, but had to shut down a year later. For a year he also worked with home interior and renovation firm Livspace.

In Bengaluru, where has lived all his working life, he also took part in hackathons, winning several contests. “The idea of CoinSwitch started as a hack, which we built for ourselves, made it public and then realised the potential. I never thought of it as a company,” he tells me.

The youngest of three children, Singhal wanted to be a doctor, like his father. But he loved maths, so he veered towards engineering. It was helped by his first encounter with Google around 2004 when he was a tenth grader. “It completely changed my mind. How could something be so simple and give you access to the entire world?”

The food arrives and as we tuck in, I am struck by the mild flavours where each ingredient appears to retain its identity. The chicken is perfectly cooked and the noodles are light. The bullet chillies stand out like tiny ornaments and I discover they are nowhere close to lethal despite the name.

Singhal helps himself to just the starters, despite my requests to sample the main course. I realise I’d be doing more of the eating, so I ask him why he thinks crypto will be a game changer for Indian businesses. “Crypto is not just about an asset class, but building the framework for Internet 2.0. It is about creating the infrastructure for building companies,” he says.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) solved problems of hosting and scaling for businesses, and ethereum is a decentralised AWS, he explains. “When you think about building a decentralised program combining supply and demand, you don’t have to build your own blockchain. You can simply do it on the ethereum blockchain. That would become the base of the internet, and you’ll never have to think about issues like scaling and data security,” he says, adding that in the next decade an entrepreneur would probably only have to figure out the business logic to succeed.

CoinSwitch Kuber’s attempt is to build a platform that will offer investment opportunities to everyone. “In India, we have to build an infrastructure of financial knowledge and an ecosystem where your (user’s) success is our success.”

A majority of CoinSwitch Kuber’s users (whose average age is 25) are young. “As they evolve, we know they will diversify into other asset classes. So, how do we build a base layer to help them make financial decisions? Tomorrow there might be a new asset class, we may add that as well,” Singhal says.

Singhal feels the government has valid concerns on remittances and that crypto, whose trading is unregulated, is best utilised as investment and not currency.

When I ask him about the volatility of cryptos and fears of going bust, he says market cycles are unavoidable. “Our advice is to invest money that you can risk,” he says, adding that start-ups are similar to crypto — both are risks, but with the right team, product and market they can succeed.

He also doesn’t anticipate crypto as legal tender in India, “because we have a stable government and currency”, but hedges his bets on central bank digital currency or a version of it as a solution for a robust digital payment infrastructure.

CoinSwitch Kuber’s soaring growth, which it owes to “customer obsession” according to Singhal, has come in the wake of the pandemic when its staff strength shot up from 20-odd to around 380.

In a start-up, there is nothing personal for a founder, Singhal says. Keeping up with the pace of change has been chaotic, and he is yet to meet 90-95 per cent of the employees in person as remote working remains the norm. When it gets hectic one tends to take on more work, but Singhal says 60 per cent of his time goes into hiring new people. “In most companies, failure is bad. But even in interviews, we love to ask ‘what was your last failure?’ If a person talks about failure as passionately as success, then he or she would be a good fit,” he argues.

We’ve been chatting for an hour, and while Singhal has barely nibbled at the food I feel suitably fed. I ask how he winds down. Pat comes the reply: “I love solving problems, I think that refreshes me.”

I learn that his wife, who is also from Meerut and is a product manager at Microsoft, loves problem-solving, too. Married for four years, both are used to waking to morning meetings. As an example, he says that the couple devised an osmotic way of automatically watering their plants. He also credits his wife for “a lot of my product thinking”. “When we are having a funding round, she is beside me with a white board and corrects me if I miss something.”

Simplicity is a mantra for success for both Singhal and CoinSwitch Kuber. But how does one measure it? His mother, who was a teacher, invested within a week of Kuber’s launch and without telling him. Singhal says it was a moment when he knew the company had kept things simple and done “something right”.