ALAPPUZHA: Till 2014, Sanju Sony Kurian was a young boy who roamed Kallumala village on the outskirts of Mavelikkara. Now, he is a Singapore-based millionaire. He has figured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia List 2022. Forbes considers him to be one of the 30 entrepreneurs in Asia who would dominate the digital finical services in the world in the near future.
The 29-year-old Sanju is the co-founder of Vauld.com, a Singapore-based company dealing with cryptocurrencies. It is one of the biggest startups dealing with cryptocurrencies and banking in cryptocurrencies in the world. The company which was started in 2019 gained multicrore investment in 30 months.
Peter Thiel, a German-American venture capitalist and cofounder of PayPal, invested around Rs 200 crore in the company. Sanju is the eldest son of Sony George Kurian of Kurian Cottage, a middle class family at Kallumala. According to Sanju, he had no particular dream when he completed his MTech computer engineering from Government College of Engineering Munnar. “I worked in various IT firms in Kochi, but a passion to make something different grew in me gradually.
I was fascinated with finance. By 2018, I moved to Bengaluru to explore the potential in computer engineering. Later, I started thinking about cryptocurrency. In my pursuit of my dream, I met Darshan Bathijia, a native of Coimbatore. We discussed the possibility of marketing cryptocurrencies. He were passionate about the field and started Vauld. com jointly in Bengaluru on December 31, 2018,” Sanju told TNIE over the phone from Singapore.
“In India, dealing in cryptocurrencies is not favoured much. Many frauds have been reported in the field. The laws in India are weak to manage such firms. Hence, the startup was registered in Singapore and we operated it from Bengaluru. In Singapore, crypto deals are regulated by government laws. So, we shifted to Singapore by mid-2019,” said Sanju, chief technology officer of the startup.
“In the initial stage, customers used Vauld.com for purchasing and selling cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum. We now plan to convert Vauld into a neo-bank like any of the nationalised banks in India,” Sanju said.