Blockchain payments technology platform BitPay announced it has secured $40 million through its extended Series B funding round, which included participation from Menlo Ventures, Capital Nine, G Squared, Nimble Ventures (an affiliate of Passport Capital) and Delta-v Capital as well as individual investments from Christopher Klaus Family Office, Founder of Internet Security Systems (ISS), and Alvin Liu, Co-founder of Tencent. This news comes just a few months after the company announced it raised $30 million during its Series B funding round led by Aquiline Technology Growth.
As previously reported, BitPay stated its platform gives businesses and individuals powerful tools for secure blockchain payment acceptance, savings, and spending. During the past year, BitPay has notably achieved a record year for merchant payment processing on the bitcoin blockchain, now approaching $2 billion in annualized payment volumes. Stephen Pair, CEO of BitPay, reportedly stated:
“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.”
Tyler Sosin, a partner at Menlo Ventures, also commented:
“We gravitated towards BitPay because we felt the company had identified a killer use for crypto in facilitating low-cost payment solutions for cross-border commerce and B2B payments, which is a massive market poorly served by the existing payment rails,” said “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.”
Klaus then added:
“Security is extremely important to the blockchain network and BitPay. I have been watching the cryptocurrency space and believe BitPay is able to disrupt the financial services worldwide through payment processing and cross-border payments in large part because of the security built into blockchain.”