Crypto trading platform Coinswitch has appointed Ramesh Bafna as chief financial officer, in a bid to further bolster its senior management.
Bafna has an experience of 18 years across IT and consumer internet companies including Wipro, Flipkart and Myntra. “Bafna has built a marketplace revenue model in e-commerce companies like Myntra and Flipkart as well as led the finance workstreams at IT services giant Wipro,” according to a statement by the company.
“I have been following the fintech space for years and I am fascinated by the potential it holds for India. I look forward to contributing to (Coinswitch’s) mission to ‘make money equal for all’ in a profitable way”, Bafna said in the statement.
He takes over the role of CFO from Sarmad Nazki who decided to pursue other opportunities.
Founded in 2017 by Ashish Singhal, Govind Soni and Vimal Sagar Tiwari, Coinswitch says it is creating an ecosystem that simplifies crypto and is trusted by over 18 million users.
The crypto unicorn is backed by some marquee investors that include US-based venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz; Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Paradigm and Coinbase Ventures.
Last December, the crypto platform roped in former WhatsApp official Ashish Chandra as its General Counsel with an aim to build a conducive legal framework for the business as crypto-asset adoption continues to grow in India.
Coinswitch has also made other leadership appointments over the past near to medium-term including Jayram Krishnan as vice president – product; Jayadevan PK as senior director - communication and content; Nishant Das as global head for talent acquisition; R Venkatesh as senior VP – public policy and Zeeshan Ramlan as director and head of human resources.
The company – India's second crypto unicorn after CoinDCX – entered the much-desired unicorn club in October 2021 after raising $260 million in a Series C funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures. The investment made Coinswitch India’s 30th unicorn with its valuation pegged at around $1.9 billion.