The start-up is planning to direct the funds to further expansion and development of the team.
Blockchain, a bitcoin wallet and distributed ledger, has raised $40 million. GV, Nokota Management, Digital Currency Group and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mosaic Venture Partners, Prudence Holdings, Virgin and Sir Richard Branson participated in the funding round.
Blockchain offers a bitcoin wallet that allows storing the digital currency and carrying out transactions with other users. The company has nearly 15 million sign-ups with billions of dollars worth of monthly consumer wallet activity. The team expects gross revenue to exceed 1,000 percent year-over-year in June.
The current investment will be directed to expansion of the team and further research and development. Blockchain is planning to launch new offices in other countries to expand.
“We are really focused on scaling to meet the record demand we are getting in the market,” says Peter Smith, Blockchain CEO. “We started raising this round before the run up in the cryptomarket. It was good timing in the end because while we were closing the round, we were massively up on every level. Our traffic has been growing 15 percent week over week in last two weeks.”
Smith points to the recent rally in bitcoin saying that it has caused high demand for Blockchain’s wallet product, and now the funding will help to meet that. Indeed, the bitcoin price has recently reached its all-time high of $3,000 while altcoins are gaining momentum as well. Experts admit that bitcoin is growing at a very nice pace, but non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies are growing even faster.
Blockchain was founded in 2011. Last time when it launched a funding round was in 2014 when the company raised $30.5 million. Blockchain has users in 140 countries.
There are many popular bitcoin services that manage your wallet for you and operate an exchange. This means that they allow creating an account and purchasing bitcoins on the same platform.
Blockchain differs from these services as it doesn’t control your balance or your transactions. You can back up your wallet to Blockchain’s servers, but you keep the keys to your wallet. Due to partnership of Blockchain with multiple exchanges, customers can buy bitcoins on the platform directly or buy bitcoins on favorite exchange and then send them to the Blockchain wallet address.
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