Pintu, a mobile-first crypto wallet and trading platform in Indonesia, has secured US$35 million in an extended Series A financing, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Existing investors, including Alameda Ventures, Blockchain.com Ventures, and Castle Island Ventures, also joined the round.
The first tranche of this round came from Pantera Capital, Intudo Ventures and Coinbase Ventures in late May — bringing Pintu’s total Series A investment to US$41 million.
With the fresh capital, Pintu aims to aggressively employ fresh people across all major functions and build Indonesia’s “largest cryptocurrency exchange”.
Besides, Pintu also plans to develop new products and features to improve user experience and make inroads into other asset classes, as well as to conduct mass-market education programmes.
“As the fourth-most populous country in the world and with only 1-2 per cent of Indonesians having exposure to cryptocurrencies, there is an immense opportunity for retail investors to gain access to diversified and dynamic investment opportunities through Pintu’s unique crypto assets trade offerings,” said Jeth Soetoyo, co-founder and CEO of Pintu.
Also read: Coinbase Ventures, others invest in Indonesia’s crypto exchange Pintu
Founded in 2020, Pintu provides solutions to deal with the pain points of investing in crypto-assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum for millennials and retail users. It “offers comprehensive trading tools, simple UI/UX, advanced security features”, and educational content to assist investors in trading, analysing, managing assets, and learning about cryptocurrencies.
Pintu also claims that its app downloads saw a 3.5x rise in the first half of 2021, accompanied by a 4x rise in active traders on the platform — all through organic growth.
The platform currently supports 16 different dynamic cryptocurrencies for trading. It intends to add more coins in high demand by investors, including NFT tokens.
According to the Indonesian Ministry of Trade, there were over 6.6 million crypto investors in Indonesia as of June 2021, almost twice the country’s 2.2 million public equities investors.
Government support has been the strong tailwind for Indonesian crypto-assets development as it promotes regulations to ensure safe and responsible crypto asset investing activities through legally licensed crypto-assets brokers such as Pintu.
In 2018, the Indonesian Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Agency (also known as Bappepti) under the Ministry of Trade of the Republic of Indonesia has elected to regulate bitcoin and other crypto-assets as commodities.
Other Indonesian cryptocurrency exchanges are Indodax, Tokocrypto, and Binance.
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Image Credit: Pintu
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