BitPay, the world’s largest global blockchain payments provider, recently closed its extended Series B funding round with an investment total of $40 million. This brings the total capital raised for BitPay to $70 million since they were founded in 2011. New investors in the Series B round led by Aquiline Capital Partners include Menlo Ventures, Capital Nine, G Squared and Nimble Ventures.
Speaking on these new investors and what this means for the company, BitPay CEO Stephen Pair said:
“BitPay had a record 2017 as we processed over $1 Billion in bitcoin payments. We brought on these new investors who can help BitPay scale globally to meet customer demand. Our goals include key hires in engineering and regulatory licensing, as well as expansion into emerging markets in Asia–one of BitPay’s fastest-growing regions for transactions and wallet adoption.”
With Asia playing an important role in Bitpay’s future growth, investment from the region makes sense. Capital Nine is an Asian fintech company with millions of customers and other Asian investors in the round include Alvin Liu (co-founder of Tencent) and Yong An Financial Holdings Co.
While some of the investors in BitPay are fairly active in the crypto industry, one, in particular, is making BitPay their first foray into the cryptocurrency space. Menlo Ventures, which was founded back in 1976, has spent significant time researching the crypto space and felt comfortable making BitPay their first institutional investment there. Tyler Sosin, a partner at Menlo Ventures, had this to say about their investment:
“We are impressed with the company’s execution—it has demonstrated extremely efficient growth and a stickiness with merchants and consumers that is the hallmark of many great payment service providers. As the market leading crypto-processor, BitPay is well positioned to both benefit from and serve the fast moving crypto-ecosystem.”
This Series B round comes four years after BitPay’s Series A round of funding, in which $30 million was raised by the likes of Index Ventures, RRE Ventures, and Sir Richard Branson. Hundreds of thousands of businesses from all over the world have already signed up with BitPay to accept bitcoin payments. This recent investment will only help BitPay continue to grow their reach and expand their operations.