Lightspeed and other investors fund Indonesia crypto app Pintu with USD 35 million in a Series A+ round

Pintu has obtained an amount equivalent to USD 35 million after its Series A funding round.

Image courtesy of Alfred Junus Verdio, EyeEm, Getty Images, and TechCrunch

TechCrunch has recently reported that Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from returning investors like Alameda Ventures, Blockchain.com Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Intudo Ventures, and Pantera Capital funded Indonesian platform for crypto assets Pintu with USD 35 million in a Series A+ after Pantera, Intudo, and Coinbase Ventures funded it with USD 6 million in a Series A from late May.

Pintu alongside Bibit, Ajaib, and Syfe have been receiving additional funds swiftly as more people in the Asian Southeast seek to invest in retail.

Andrew Adjiputro, chief operating officer of Pintu, told TechCrunch that Pintu did not opt for an extension of Series A or B, because it still focuses on the same development and execution of products, saying, “With the Coinbase IPO and a lot of new users onboarding, we think it’s the right time for us to raise a larger round to finance faster growth… It’s good momentum for us to launch new products and grab the market.”

Pintu will use its Series A+ to hire more people for its teams and release new services, saying that downloads of apps rose by 3.5 times, while active traders on the platform increased by 4 times during the first half of 2021.

Pintu has been offering trades on 16 cryptocurrencies, planning to add more coins such as tokens from NFT.

Adjiputro said that the successful initial public offering of Coinbase in April drew people, especially fresh investors, to crypto trading, adding, “They became curious and the bread and butter of our business is essentially education… We have a lot of education on our platform and it attracts this new breed of investors who want to learn more.”

Investment in retail in Indonesia is growing quickly because of many factors such as the desire to diversify and increase assets during the outbreak while it is still low.

Adjiputro said that the app was the first introduction to investing instead of stocks for many of its users, recently surveying current users and asking about the top five asset classes in which they have investments. Mutual funds, digital gold, crypto, and stocks came in that order.

Users echo their preference for crypto to stocks in figures released by the Indonesian Ministry of Trade that showed that over 6.6 million crypto investors, or about triple the 2.2 million public equity investors, were in Indonesia as of June 2021.

Pintu is a crypto broker with a licence from the Indonesian Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Agency or BAPPEBTI, with a low minimum rate of investment of 11,000 Indonesian rupiahs, or about 75 American cents, drawing new investors.

Timothius Martin, chief marketing officer of Pintu, was an investor for the first time when he started using it, telling TechCrunch that the number one draw was accessibility and adding, “It’s easy to start investing and also withdraw assets. In Indonesia, we are now at a stage where people have heard about crypto, about Bitcoin, are very interested and may already want to invest, but there are not many options that are easy enough for them to understand.”

Pintu presents users with educational materials instead of encouraging them to make an investment when they open the app for the first time, with Pintu Academy, a collection of articles and videos, as an example. It is also drawing older investors such as traders of stocks that want to learn more about the fundamental rules of crypto trading while it caters mainly to millennial investors.

Adjiputro said Pintu focuses on education that distinguishes it from other Indonesian crypto platforms such as Indodax and Tokocrypto.

Pintu seeks to launch new features such as Pintu Earn, a crypto-asset account that lets users earn interest on a variety of crypto assets, and e-wallet integration for easier deposits and withdrawals as well as what coins to add next.

Martin said, “We’re very selective in terms of the coins we introduce, because this is a platform for first-time investors and beginners, so we want to protect them, not only in terms of our UI, but also the selection of coins we have”.

Pintu looks for crypto-coins with a high cap on the market or relative adoption in the mainstream, a long duration in the business, and its liquidity, with plans to expand in Indonesia before trading elsewhere in the Asian Southeast.

Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed, said in a statement, “Lightspeed has invested in over 17 crypto and blockchain companies globally including FTX, Blockchain.com, Offchain Labs, and more. We believe crypto is at an inflection point to become an important asset class globally and will give rise to massive companies that will become regional leaders. Pintu has created the strongest market brand, best user experience, and hands down one of the strongest teams we’ve ever come across in this market”.