Tête-à-Tête with Akash Aggarwal – Founder & CEO, Alluma

With over 10 years of extensive experience as an entrepreneur, Akash founded Alluma in Singapore in June 2017. Since then, he has built an experienced international team that is passionate about the crypto and blockchain opportunity in India and South East Asia.

He is also a private investor, cryptocurrency trader and leading industry speaker in the blockchain space. Akash is a Member of Bitcoin Foundation, Digital Currency Council, UK Digital Currency Association as well as a founding member of IRTA, the International Regulations Tech Association.

1. What motivated you to start Alluma?

The stimulus for Alluma came from a set of problems that I personally experienced whilst trying to trade crypto in India. At that time I was a trader and I just couldn’t find a good exchange that could satisfy my basic needs and I thought if that’s the case for me, it must be true for others. I just wanted a reliable platform, a quick, simple onboarding as it was mainly paper based and took 8 days, lots of coins, advanced trading features I was used to from other exchanges and competitive currency prices (as a result of with lots of buy and sell orders). So I came up with a business model and proposition that fixed all of these issues, and more, which is of course Alluma.

2. What are the initial challenges you faced while launching the company, and how did you overcome those?

There were two main hurdles. Building an advantaged exchange and building a winning team.

Building a superior exchange was complex, but we have pulled it off. The platform is extremely robust, scalable and secure. We also wanted a ‘bank-grade’ compliance framework and that’s what we have created - it will be a market first for the emerging markets we are targeting. We also have some great liquidity partnerships which give us day one liquidity on many coin pairs.

As importantly, was building a leadership team of highly skilled people. This wasn’t a typical story of 5 or 6 friends coming together to start a business. Yes, the 6 or 7 people in the exec team have built the business with me but it has taken a while to find them. I needed to get the right people that I thought would work well together. We also needed a heavyweight team with a lot of e-commerce experience. If you look at the team’s resumes, you will see they have worked for top MNCs, other exchanges and digital companies, and have an impressive collection of leading university-business school names behind them. Above all, every single one of them has huge energy and fits very well into the start-up environment. They are also a very international bunch which gives us collectively some great perspectives on our target markets and our customers.

3. What’s the one-line mantra you follow irrespective of the situation?

Challenges are the stuff of life and the more challenges you overcome in your life, the stronger you become.

4. Who or what most influenced you as an entrepreneur?

It has never been a person or a book that inspired me to become who I am today. I think it was innate. I was very ambitious from the earliest I can remember and I wanted to be an individual with good purpose, that could stand as a role model to others.

What continues to drive me as an entrepreneur is an aspiration to make a mark, do something constructive with my life that could make a difference to other people’s lives.

If we talk about people I admire, that would be Paytm’s founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Founder & CEO of One Championship, Chatri Sityodtong. Paytm’s journey has been amazing I hope to see them successfully expand beyond India.

5. Since you started your career pretty early in life, any advice for someone who would want to start a venture of their own?

Yes, I started my career at the age of 14, and it gave me the opportunity to have clarity on what to choose as a career path in life. I also remember having an early awareness about my strengths - that probably helped a lot.

The only piece of advice I would have for budding entrepreneurs is that, it’s not an easy path but once you decide that’s what you want, go for it, and keep working on it, don’t ever give up.

6. With the little spare time you have, what do you like to do with it?

The reality is that I don’t get much down time. Building a business like this is 7 days a week. When I have time, I love listening to music but the genre depends upon my mood. I also like to research and understand more about what’s trending inside and outside of this industry. It’s a fascinating space and it moves so quickly.

Travelling is a passion and I enjoy travelling as much as possible, exploring by car if possible. Maybe I will have more time to do this in 2019!

Connect with Akash on LinkedIn & Twitter.