Blockchain, the world’s most popular web based bitcoin wallet provider, announced that it has secured a record $30.5m Series A funding deal, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Wicklow Capital. The figure is one of the largest ever single investments in a bitcoin company, after BitPayannounced a new record with its $30m Series A round in May and Xapo achieved the gold standard for total funding with $40m over two rounds in Marchand July, according to coindesk.com.
„We searched long and hard for the right investors to bring onto the team to help us scale, to advise us, and work with us to bring bitcoin to the next 20 million people.”, says the company.
In January, Blockchain passed a million users. Since then, growth has only accelerated and the company have recently celebrated 2.3 million consumer wallets and a total $26bn in transaction volume. More than half of the wallet account which are from sign-ups made this year. At the beginning of 2013, it had just 110,000 accounts and by the end of October that year it had 500,000.
Blockchain president Peter Smith said:
“The company has grown exponentially in every way over the last 18 months. We are honoured to add investors and partners to the team with deep expertise in financial services and consumer technology.”
Founder and CEO Nicolas Cary told CoinDesk he was looking forward to the opportunities such an investment would bring. He said: “This is the first outside capital in Blockchain. We’ve accomplished a lot with a little. So now we’re even more excited about what we can do. We have a very compelling product roadmap and we’re eager to share it with our users over the coming months.”
Blockchain’s growth reflects the rise of bitcoin’s own popularity and awareness levels.
Blockchain was founded in August 2011 by Ben Reeves, a developer from the United Kingdom. The site began as a Blockchain explorer intended to make it easier for Bitcoin users to study transactions and analyze the bitcoin economy. Shortly after, Blockchain Wallet was launched, the first client side JavaScript bitcoin wallet providing a secure and convenient way to store and use bitcoins. The company, which was a one-man operation from its August 2011 beginning until the spring of 2013, and operated with only a handful of employees as recently as seven months ago, now has a total 21 employees in various locations around the world.
Blockchain produces software tools for merchants to accept bitcoin, and acquired bitcoin price and data provider ZeroBlock last December. It also manages the premium domain namebitcoin.com, which it uses to introduce bitcoin to total newcomers.
Blockchain’s team: Peter Smith – president, Ben Reeves – Chief Technology Officer, Nicolas Cary – Chief Executive Officer
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
