Ex-Paytm employees join crypto-focused Transak as it doubles down on its India expansion plans

• Transak has hired two ex-Paytm employees to help with the company’s mission to boost crypto adoption in India.
• Rajat Mehrotra and Sharad Agarwal, both of whom worked with Paytm Money, will be heading the engineering and product design teams at Transak respectively.
• Transak currently has 50 employees based out of India and plans to triple that number this year by hiring across all verticals.

Transak, a company that’s making it easier for customers of decentralised applications (dApps) to turn their conventional currency into crypto tokens, is doubling down on its expansion in India.

The global team has added two ex-Paytm employees — Rajat Mehrotra, who used to be the AVP of Engineering at Paytm Money, and Sharad Agarwal, who used to be AVP of Product within the same vertical — to their payroll in an endeavour to make India one of its key markets.

Mehrotra, an IIT Kanpur alumnus, has nearly two decades of experience building tech products for fintech and e-commerce companies. At Transak, he'll be at the helm of the company’s engineering team to build out the company’s product even further.

Agarwal, who is also an IIT Kanpur alumnus, will be heading the product, design and data team to boost customer adoption across the globe. In his 14 years of experience, Agarwal’s built game-changing products for not just Paytm, but also Flipkart, Intuit and Synopsys.

The ‘Razorpay of crypto’ is looking to build an India team

Transak, also referred to as the ‘Razorpay of Cryptocurrency’ with operations expanding across more than 100 countries, is looking at India as the next driver of crypto mass adoption.

“We see the Indian market becoming one of our top three markets in the world,” Sami Start, Transak’s second co-founder, told CNBC in an interview. The company already has around 50 employees based out of India and is planning to triple that number before the year comes to an end.

Unlike other tech companies that hire in India, Transak’s focus on India is not because it’s a place to source cheap talent. “We see India as a place to get the best talent, full stop,” said Start.

Driving mass adoption of crypto in India

Last month, Transak introduced unified payments interface (UPI) integration to make the onboarding process of customers as simple as possible for web3 developers trying to acquire new users — basically a way for people to buy cryptocurrency from within a dApp.

The company already has Polygon, a major player within India’s decentralised finance (DeFi) ecosystem, on board as a partner. DApps hosted on Polygon expand from business solutions to non-fungible token (NFT) projects to cryptocurrency-powered blockchain games, like Hike’s Rush Gaming Universe.

According to a report by law firm Khaitan and intelligence company CREBACO, India’s crypto asset market is worth over $15 billion. As of 2021, India’s crypto community consisted of over 6 million users, which is less than one percent of India’s eligible population. Transak aims to serve as the bridge to bring more Indians to crypto by simplifying the process of buying crypto tokens with a single point of contact to convert rupees into crypto tokens.

SEE ALSO:
Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge halted after a massive $600 million hack
MicroStrategy’s subsidiary takes on a $205 million loan to buy more Bitcoin