Bitso, a Mexico based crypto platform, has received a $62 million investment from Kaszek Ventures and QED Investors. The series B funding represents the first foray into cryptocurrency for both QED Investors and Kaszek Ventures.
The digital asset platform says this is the first major investment into crypto in the Latam region as it enters the Brazilian market. Bitso has already expanded into Argentina and claims 75% of the reported market share. Bitso reports over 200 employees from 25 different countries
Nigel Morris, co-founder and Managing Partner at QED and Nicolas Szekasy, co-founder and Managing Partner at Kaszek Ventures, have joined the board of Bitso. Existing shareholders Coinbase Ventures and Pantera Capital also participated in the funding round.
Bitso claims to be the dominant platform in the region with more than one million users and over 95 percent reported market share in Mexico. The new funding will enables Bitso’s growth into new markets and help power its world class engineering team as it builds the top crypto products for Latin America.
Daniel Vogel, CEO and co-founder of Bitso, said their mission is to provide access to cryptocurrency and make it useful for the daily lives of their users:
“Working with the brilliant, experienced teams at QED and Kaszek Ventures will help us further this mission,” said Vogel. “Today’s investment will fund our global strategy to offer the Bitso platform to consumers in other countries in Latin America with a particular focus on Brazil.”
Szekasy said that Bitso has built the leading crypto platform in Latam:
“The team is by far the strongest in the region and combines deep technical knowledge with a great understanding of the market. Since they launched, they have developed a proprietary platform that includes exchange functionalities, cross border capabilities, and banking features that allow users to operate in the crypto world in a seamless and intuitive way.”
Morris explained that QED has long kept a pulse on the crypto market:
“It has been a joy to watch the company grow and expand throughout LatAm and we are thrilled to include Bitso as QED’s first crypto investment within our portfolio. The power crypto has to disrupt and innovate traditional financial services is inexorable and we look forward to using our operating knowledge and expertise to help Bitso achieve exactly that.”
Bitso offers two main products: the Bitso App for new or experienced cryptocurrency users to buy, sell, send, or receive crypto in a simple and intuitive way; and Bitso Alpha, a professional-grade crypto trading platform.
Bitso raised a previous round of investment in 2019, after becoming one of few crypto exchanges, and the only one in Latin America, to obtain a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) license from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC).
