On the last day of July 2025, Sumit Gupta had a problem that no founder wants. His exchange had just lost about $44 million in a hack. Newspapers were reporting that Coinbase was in talks to buy it, at under a billion dollars. Gupta had to tell the world, publicly, that this was not true.
The personal record behind this man is thin. We know that he and Neeraj Khandelwal both studied at IIT Bombay, and that they started CoinDCX in 2018, when owning Bitcoin in India felt like an act of faith. We do not know where either grew up, what their families made of crypto, or how the first months felt. That is the honest limit of what we could verify.
We do not know where either grew up, what their families made of crypto, or how the first months felt.
What the record does show is a pattern of surviving moments when a company could have ended. India's central bank had once banned banks from serving crypto firms. The country later imposed a 30 percent tax and a 1 percent deduction at source on trades, which cut trading volumes sharply. CoinDCX kept going. In August 2021 it raised $90 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, becoming India's first crypto unicorn. Soon after, another round of $135 million reportedly doubled its value.
Coinbase, the American exchange, was already an investor, having first put money in during 2020. In July 2024 CoinDCX bought BitOasis in Dubai.
Then the hack. About $44 million, or Rs 378 crore, left the exchange. The company said customer funds were untouched. In the following days Khandelwal told users that traffic had pushed its servers and asked them to ignore rumours. A buyer did not appear. Instead, in October 2025, Coinbase invested again, at a post-money valuation of $2.45 billion.
The numbers show a company that is large, not rich: FY25 operating revenue of Rs 559.6 crore, up 43 percent, and a profit of Rs 1.7 crore. It claims over 2 crore users and trading volumes above Rs 2.4 lakh crore a quarter.
The lesson is almost administrative. In a regulated-adjacent business, a founder's job is often to hold the line in public while the story is still unclear: deny the false thing, admit the true thing, and keep customers. Investors, it seems, noticed.