Interview with Khaleelulla Baig, co-founder and CEO of Koinbasket

What inspired you to start this business?

Be it equities, commodities, forex or crypto, retail investors across the world are the most poorly served community despite being the largest of all. Since my corporate days in the insurance and capital market industry, I’ve witnessed retail investors struggle due to rampant mis-selling and biased investment advice. This led me to take up the mission to empower them with powerful tools otherwise available to only institutional and high net-worth individuals (HNIs). I did it for stock market investors in my previous startup, and now I’m doing it for crypto investors via KoinBasket.

What are some of the challenges you faced when starting off?

Choosing the right advisors, investors and team for a fairly new crypto industry was a major challenge due to a scarcity of genuine experts and talent. As the founder of a company, building and nourishing professional relationships in  the formative years is a major moat to avoid judgmental errors in choosing the right resources and partners.

What is the core concept driving Koinbasket?

KoinBasket helps novice retail investors invest in handpicked crypto baskets in a hassle-free manner. Users need not worry about complex research, portfolio building and risk management, as KoinBasket does all the heavy lifting. It lets you invest in diversified cryptocurrency portfolios and indexes, implementing a proprietary algorithmic approach to pick the best from thousands of crypto products in real time. There is no ‘know your customer (KYC) hassle as the platform accepts the secure onboarding by crypto exchanges such as Coinbase that it has partnered with.

Give us an overview of your funding and how you plan to utilise it.

KoinBasket has raised $2m in a pre-seed round from investors, including AngelList Quant fund; Kube VC; Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal; the MD of Ripple, Navin Gupta;  and former director of Binance, Omar Rahim. We’ve been deploying funds to scale our MVP (minimum viable product), hiring our leadership team and cracking exchange partnerships globally. In order to fuel our global ambition, we are focused on hiring multicultural teams, organic user acquisition and compliance preparedness with a presence across Singapore, India, the UAE and US.

What are some of the expansion plans you have in your pipeline?

We’ve gone live in the US with Coinbase, and are soon launching in the UAE. We will expand across the MENA region. Our growth will be propelled via alliances and partnerships with global and regional crypto exchanges and data aggregators.

What’s your outlook on the crypto industry in the region?

The UAE, especially Dubai, has emerged as the world’s leading capital for the crypto ecosystem. The UAE government is ticking all the right boxes in this direction. It’s attracting global entrepreneurs to the region, building a thriving Web 3.0 community via events, summits and exhibitions and providing regulatory clarity so entrepreneurs can scale their businesses without having to worry about uncertainties around compliances. What Dubai is doing for Web3 is what Israel, South Korea and the US did to propel the industrial revolution a few decades ago. I see UAE continuing to leap ahead in this race by fuelling R&D spend and encouraging entrepreneurship over the next decade.