India crypto platform raises $25m Series A
Indian cryptocurrency borrowing and lending platform Vauld has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Valar Ventures, a firm co-founded by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Valar is a financial technology investor whose exposure to Asia includes Indonesian micro-retail sector supplier BukuWarung. It is active in the crypto space through investments in US financial services provider BlockFi and Bit Panda, a similar company based in Austria.
Several crypto specialists also joined the Series A, including Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, CMT Digital, Gumi Cryptos, New Form Capital, Robot Ventures, CoinShares, and Cadenza Capital. The company has raised $27 million since its inception in 2018, with previous investors including Better Capital, Cryptos Capital, and LuneX Ventures.
Vauld is headquartered in Singapore but most of its team is in India, which is its core market. The company claims its platform offers the best rates for earning interest by lending crypto (up to 12.68% annual percentage yield) as well as no deposit, withdrawal fees, or fixed cap on daily withdrawals. There is also an automatic investment plan with about 30 cryptocurrencies supported.
The company claims to have seen more than 200x growth in its global user base (spanning 160 countries) in the past year. Assets under management are said to have grown 124% quarter-on-quarter from the first to the second quarter of 2021. The fresh capital will be used to build out the team, with a view to filling at least 100 new roles as part of a global expansion push.
“What cemented the deal is Vauld’s global positioning and ambitions and the vision [CEO Darshan Bathija] and his team have for building their customers’ wealth through crypto,” Andrew McCormack, a founding partner of Valar, said in a statement. “We look forward to Vauld benefiting from our team’s expertise in understanding how to build a global business across emerging tech hubs in Europe, Asia, and North America.”
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