- Pillow is a crypto services provider established by three Indian-origin men.
Pillow claims to be an all-in-one platform that will help all sorts of users, including beginners or new users, to spend, invest and save in cryptocurrencies.
Pillow is a newly launched startup based in Singapore, and the company recently completed the Series A funding round of $ 18 million. The funding was headed by four major companies, Accel and Quona Capital, with other participants like Elevation Capital and Jump Capital.
The application is currently used in approximately 60 countries with a user base of around 75,000. The application has added limited cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, polygon, and Axie Infinity, with some Stablecoins being USD-backed, like USDC and USDT. However, the platform plans to add twenty more digital assets in the upcoming months.
Pillow was established in 2021, focusing on emerging markets like Southeast Asia and Africa. Three Indian-origin people, Arindam Roy, Rajath KM, and Kartik Mishra, co-founded pillow.
Pillow co-founders noted that the user base of their application grew by 300x, and the total amount of assets under management also hiked by 5x in this financial year.
According to reliable media sources, Pillow has recently expanded in more than three countries, Vietnam, Nigeria, and Ghana, with several other important markets.
Before the funding round, Arindam Roy and Rajath KM worked with identity verification and AML software provider ‘HyperVerge.’
In an interview with a media outlet, the co-founders of Pillow underlined, “We saw a pattern of problems repeating.” They added, “People do not know how to pay gas fees, do not know how to bridge across various blockchains, people do not know what transaction they are approving and end up losing funds.”
During this time, both the co-founders met Kartik Mishra, who was already running a business of Indian delivery startup, Dunzo. And after several meetings, they discussed how to overcome this problem which is troubling users on a large scale.
Roy and KM said, “Eventually, we realised that the challenge is that crypto transactions today do not fit the mental model of how retail users perceive transactions. You would need a strong technical background to transact seamlessly in crypto.”
After this long discussion, these three worked hard for months and created “Pillow,” a platform that makes users aware and understands the usage of cryptocurrencies.
The first major issue faced by the Pillow team is the ideology of users that trading crypto is not just buying and selling digital assets; moreover, it has many other use cases.
The second major issue is the messy process of using crypto. A user needs to know all basic things like transaction fees, blockchain technology, charts, price analysis, etc.; an average is believed to not want to get into all this messy process.
Using Pillow is quite easy; in the first step, users must log in using their respective mail IDs. In the second process, the users must provide basic KYC information like a live selfie p icture and nation representing identity card.
In the pillow application, the third step directly takes the users to a short lesson on the possible risk that usually occurs in the investment of digital assets. And before investing, the application redirects users to another lesson about possible risks in digital assets investment.
