Lightspeed leads $35m round for Indonesia crypto player

Local investor Intudo Ventures and Alameda Ventures, a unit of US-based quantitative trading firm Alameda Research also participated. They were joined by several blockchain specialists, including Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, and Blockchain.com.

Pintu positions itself as a millennial-facing service for both professional crypto investors and novices, with a simple user interface and tools for trading, analyzing, managing, and learning about 16 popular cryptocurrencies. The platform is also touted as specifically designed for the Indonesian market, allowing for transactions as small as IDR11,000 ($0.76).

Downloads of the app are said to have grown 3.5x during the first half of 2021, while the number of active traders grew by 4x. Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed, said the company has the potential to be a leader in its segment across Southeast Asia within a few years.

The new capital will be used to recruit additional staff, pursue strategic partnerships, and develop new products with a view to improving user experience and expanding into adjacent asset classes such as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

Funds will also be allocated to a public education campaign. In a statement citing Ministry of Trade data, the company observed that Indonesia was home to more than 6.6 million cryptocurrency traders, triple the number of public equity investors.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Financials
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Indonesia
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Intudo
• blockchain
• Cryptocurrency
• Financial Services