Kochi, India (CU)_ Sanju, age 29, is a co-founder of Vauld.com, a Singaporean firm that deals with cryptocurrency. It is one of the largest cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency-based banking firms in the world. The firm that was founded in 2019 attracted multimillion investments in just thirty months.
Sanju Sony Kurian was a young boy who was wandering around the village of Kallumala on the outskirts of Mavelikkara until 2014. He is now an elite Singaporean millionaire. He was also featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia List 2022. According to Forbes, he could be one of the 30 Asian entrepreneurs who would soon control the global digital financial services market.
The German-American venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel invested approximately INR 200 crore in the business. Sanju is the elder son of Sony George Kurian belonging to a middle-class family in Kallumala. According to Sanju, he had no special aspirations when he graduated from Government College of Engineering Munnar with an MTech in computer engineering.
Sanju shared his life journey from Kerala to Singapore. He said, “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 was passionate about the field and started Vauld. com jointly in Bengaluru on December 31, 2018”.
Sanju, chief technology officer of the firm, shared about his cryptocurrency business. He said, “In India, dealing in cryptocurrencies is not favored 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”. He added, “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 nationalized banks in India”.
