Indonesia crypto player Pintu gets $113m Series B
Indonesia crypto wallet and trading platform Pintu has raised a USD 113m Series B round from Intudo Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northstar Group, and sector specialist Pantera Capital.
Lightspeed led a USD 41m Series A last year with support from Intudo, Pantera, Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, and Blockchain.com, as well as Alameda Ventures, a unit of US quantitative trading firm Alameda Research.
Pintu targets Indonesian millennials with a platform that allows users to transact with 50 popular cryptocurrencies in increments as low as IDR 11,000 (USD 0.76). It is specifically designed for first-time crypto traders, with an offering that also includes educational content, security features, and community engagement function.
Developing economies in Asia have proven unexpected hotspots for crypto business proliferation in recent months due to regulatory openness and upside related to the technology’s financial inclusion capacities. Other standouts in this theme include Vietnam’s Axie Infinity, which has raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz, and Indian unicorns Coinswitch Kuber and CoinDCX.
In Indonesia, about 4% of the population is active in crypto trading, and this figure is expected to increase rapidly on the back of regulatory encouragement and increased grassroots awareness. The number of crypto investors in the country is estimated to have doubled in the past year to around 12m. This compares to 7m domestic public equity investors.
Pintu has leveraged this environment to increase its number of downloads from 500,000 in May 2021 to 4m currently. Much of the growth has been attributed to the Pintu Academy education program and the app’s community engagement function, which now has about 790,000 active members across platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
"Since our investment in August last year, Pintu has scaled 5x to become the country's leading retail focused crypto brokerage and hired one of the strongest teams we've seen in this market,” Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed, said in a statement. “The crypto wave is entering mainstream adoption globally and Pintu is building a generational company in this category.”
The Series B capital will be used to roll out new features, including additional tokens, supported blockchains, and related products. The company said it would also invest heavily in Pintu Academy while continuing to hire talent across all functions. This will include recruiting for leadership roles in engineering and strategy; the team size has doubled in the past year to about 200.
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