Who founded Unocoin? The story from one of the four co-founders

Unocoin was founded in Bangalore in December 2013 by four co-founders: Sathvik Vishwanath, Harish B V, Abhinand Kaseti and me, Sunny Ray. We launched it at a Bitcoin conference our meetup group organised in Bangalore that December, and it became India's first Bitcoin platform. It's still operating today, thirteen years later.

Sathvik is our CEO and leads engineering. Harish handles compliance, including KYC. The company is backed by Tim Draper, Barry Silbert and Blume Ventures. That's the short version. The longer one starts with an engineer from Toronto who had no plan to start an exchange.

The short answer

• Founded: December 2013, Bangalore.
• Co-founders: Sathvik Vishwanath, Harish B V, Abhinand Kaseti and Sunny Ray.
• Today: Sathvik is CEO. The company is Unocoin Technologies Pvt. Ltd., based in Bangalore.
• Backers: Tim Draper, who led the Series A, Barry Silbert and Blume Ventures.

How an engineer from Toronto ended up in Bangalore

I was born and raised in Canada, with roots in Kolkata. I studied electrical engineering and spent eight years in robotics, building and selling systems around the world. Around 2011, my CEO asked me to go to India and help the company expand there. So I moved to Bangalore.

I didn't go looking for Bitcoin. Around 2012, I found it, and fell down the rabbit hole the way a lot of engineers did back then. The idea of money that runs on open software, with a fixed supply that nobody can change on a whim, made immediate sense to me. And once it made sense, I wanted to talk about it with other people.

The meetups that turned into a company

So we started Bitcoin meetups in Bangalore, among the first in India. At first they were in coffee shops. Then we outgrew the coffee shops.

We made a decision that sounds funny now. Back then, most people thought of Bitcoin as funny money. Instead of meeting in someone's basement, we asked: what if we met at the nicest place in town? So we moved the meetups to the Leela Palace. About a hundred people came every Saturday. The setting sent a signal that this was something to take seriously.

We tried a lot of things in those years. At one point the group pooled some bitcoin and sent someone to New York to bring back a couple of Avalon mining machines. That project failed. We kept trying anyway.

Four co-founders, one question

There was one question we heard at almost every meetup: "Can I buy some bitcoin?"

We didn't have a good answer. You could try Mt. Gox or Bitstamp abroad, but getting money there from India was hard. There was one very basic local site run by a friend. It worked, and I was desperate enough to use anything, but it wasn't something you'd send an ordinary person to.

Then, in a conversation one day, David Johnston asked me: "Sunny, is there anything like Coinbase in India?" I couldn't answer. And I thought, well, that's probably a pretty good idea then.

Sathvik, Harish, Abhi and I came together around that question. We wanted to build the place where an ordinary Indian could buy Bitcoin simply, in rupees, with a company they could hold accountable.

December 2013: launch

By December 2013, the meetups had grown into a large event. We called it the Global Bitcoin Conference, and we owned the domain. That's where we launched Unocoin.

The start was rough. Within days of launching, about 30 people from the tax department showed up at our office. We were a team of a handful of people. A couple of weeks later, the RBI posted a notice warning the public about the risks of virtual currencies, which effectively shuttered the industry for a while. We had to fight our way back and reopen.

That pattern of pressure and recovery kept repeating. In 2018, the RBI told banks to stop serving crypto businesses. We laid off about a hundred people to survive. Many others left. Harish and Sathvik decided to fight the RBI in the Supreme Court, and on 4 March 2020 the court set the banking ban aside. Our page on the Supreme Court case has that story, with the documents.

What each of us still does

Sathvik is CEO and leads our engineering team in Bangalore. Harish looks after compliance, including KYC, which matters more every year: Unocoin is registered with FIU-IND as a reporting entity under the PMLA. Abhinand was one of the four of us at the start, and his name is on the company's founding story with ours.

I started the meetups that led to all of this, and today much of my time on Unocoin goes into connecting it with partners and telling this story. I'm co-founder of Unocoin, and I write here as one of the four people who started it.

From "can I buy some bitcoin?" to what Unocoin is today

The original idea was simple: a place in India where you could buy Bitcoin in rupees without wiring money abroad or trusting a one-page website. Everything since has grown out of the same instinct, make Bitcoin usable for an ordinary person in India.

Today that means a few things I'm proud of.

• The Systematic Buying Plan. India's first Bitcoin SIP. You can buy from ₹10, daily, weekly or monthly, with ₹0 SBP fees. It borrows a habit Indians already trust and applies it to Bitcoin.
• Self-custody built in. You can move your Bitcoin to your own wallet anytime with zero-fee transfers. We never wanted to be the only place your coins could live.
• The Lightning Network. Send and receive Bitcoin quickly at a fraction of a rupee.
• Cold storage. Unocoin states that it keeps 95% of assets in cold storage with multi-signature wallets and regular security audits.

None of that existed when the four of us launched at that conference in December 2013. What existed was a question people kept asking, and a group of friends who thought India deserved a good answer.

Crypto products are still unregulated in India and can be highly risky, and there may be no regulatory recourse for losses. Starting small, learning first and never sharing your OTP or recovery phrase are the habits we'd want any first-time buyer to have, whichever platform they choose.

What thirteen years taught me about founding

If you'd told the four of us in 2013 what was coming, the tax visit, the RBI notices, the banking ban, the layoffs, the court case, I'm not sure we'd have believed you. Running a company is hard in any industry. In this one, it often felt like the whole world was against us: the government, the banks, investors, hackers, sometimes even customers.

We stayed because the question from those Saturday meetups never went away. People in India still ask, "Can I buy some bitcoin?" The difference now is that there's a real answer, from a company that has been here since the beginning. The site states 2.26M+ verified users.

If you want to know whether that history makes Unocoin a platform you'd trust, don't take my word for it. Our page on what you can check about Unocoin lists the facts and the sources, and the full timeline is on our story section.

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Sources

• Inc42: Unocoin people