CoinDesk reported that BitPay completed a $30 million financing round, this is the largest ever financing round for a bitcoin related company.
The round was led by Index Ventures, and included Yahoo founder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Felicis Ventures, PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Horizons Ventures, RRE Ventures, Virgin Galactic’s Sir Richard Branson and TTV Capital.
As part of the deal, Index Ventures’ Jan Hammer and noted bitcoin ecosystem investor Jimmy Furland will join BitPay’s Board of Directors.
In an interview with CoinDesk, BitPay CEO Tony Gallippi framed the funding as both a validation of the explosive growth his company has seen over the past year and a way for BitPay to continue its success into 2015 and beyond.
For example, the company will aggressively expand its team, tripling its work force by adding 70 jobs across its global offices.
“We have to continue to make our product more scalable,” said Gallippi. “What works for 1,000 merchants does not work for 100,000 merchants. We’ve got to continue to add new features to the platform, we’ve got to continue to build things that our merchants are asking for.”
BitPay’s $30m round comes amid an increasingly active year for bitcoin startups. Fellow merchant processor and consumer bitcoin wallet provider Coinbase raised $25m in December, while wallet and secure storage platform Xapo secured $20m in March.
BitPay previously raised $2m in funding as part of a seed round led by Founders Fund in May 2013.
As of January, BitPay reported that it is now adding more than 1,000 merchants to its network each week. Furthermore, the company processed more than $100m in bitcoin payments in 2013.
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