Coinbase, one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, has declared its first startup acquisition in India. For an undisclosed amount, the organization is acquiring Agara, an AI-powered support platform with operations in India and the United States. The acquisition is exacted to close later this year.
Coinbase told this deal would bring Agara’s deep expertise in machine learning and simple language processing to the company’s engineering team.
“We plan to leverage Agara’s powerful Deep Learning and Conversational AI technology to automate and enhance our customer experience (CX) tools. Improving our CX remains a top priority for Coinbase — in the past few months, we have increased our support staff headcount by 5x and announced that we’ll deliver 24/7 phone support and live messaging by the end of year. Through this acquisition, we’ll be able to provide our customers with new personalized, intelligent, and real-time support options” stated Manish Gupta, EVP – Engineering at Coinbase, in a blog post.
Earlier in 2021, Coinbase announced its strategy to build out a tech hub in the country and had hired former Google Pay executive Pankaj Gupta to head its India development centre. At the time, Gupta said that they would explore startup acquisitions and acquihires to accelerate their growth plans in the country.
“We have ambitious plans for this hub shortly — we want to hire hundreds of world-class engineers in the near term. This team of engineers will be complemented by equally high-quality product and design teams, as well as support functions such as recruiting and HR to build out a sustainable, well-rounded tech hub” Gupta shared in July.
Established in 2017, Agara counts Blume Ventures, RTP Global, Kleiner Perkins and UTEC Japan amongst its investors. Interestingly, Pankaj Gupta is also named in the “board members and advisors” section on Agara’s website.
Coinbase, which went public in April this year, has also financed domestic crypto exchanges such as CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber, both of which entered the country’s startup unicorn club this year.
Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange platform, gets maximum revenue from transactions by its users. It also earns revenue from its “Subscription and Services” revenue category that helped it to earn $20.7 million in Q4 of 2020.
All these activities helped Coinbase to become one of the fastest-growing, profitable unicorns. The company looks ready for direct offering. As per Bloomberg data, 85% of the total 130 firms that went public last year, are unprofitable. Investors may get a good return on their investments due to the immense popularity of cryptocurrencies.
Coinbase has a huge user base of 43 million verified users. Transaction fee contributes 96% to the total revenue of the company. It helped the company to earn total revenue of $3.4 billion until 2020.
