Bitnet Raises $14.5 Million in Series A Funding to Compete with BitPay and Coinbase
| Updated
by Egor Pavlovich · 3 min read
Bitnet Technologies, designed to enable enterprise-scale merchants to accept bitcoin, announced today it has closed a $14.5 million Series A funding round led by Highland Capital Partners.
Bitnet Technologies which provides a digital commerce platform designed to enable enterprise-scale merchants to accept bitcoin payments, today announced it has closed a $14.5 million Series A funding round led by Highland Capital Partners.
New investors include Rakuten, the largest e-commerce site in Japan and one of the world’s largest by sales. The funding comes as Bitnet launches its platform and builds teams for sales, marketing and customer support.
Bitnet, currently with offices in San Francisco, California and Belfast, Northern Ireland, also plans to expand its physical presence into continental Europe and Asia.
Bitnet founded in January 2014 by John McDonnell (CEO) and Stephen Mc Namara (CTO). Bitnet’s engineering, product, and business development team helped build and manage the world’s largest payment gateway CyberSource, which was sold to the world’s largest payment network, Visa, for $2 billion in 2010.
The promise of bitcoin interested Bitnet’s founders as a universal payment network and currency designed for global e-commerce. In a world with credit card transaction fees hitting merchants’ bottom lines distributed trust systems like Bitcoin have the potential to disrupt established payment systems. Bitnet will provide merchants with guaranteed payment with 1% fee, instant global reach with no cross-border fees, no price volatility, and no fraud, risk or chargebacks.
“John, Stephen, and the team they have assembled are the epitome of what we mean when we talk about partnering with innovative entrepreneurs who have the ambition to build disruptive, market-leading companies,” said Peter Bell. “Bitnet is breaking down the barriers of digital currency transactions and has the potential to transform the way we exchange goods and services around the world.”
“We are listening to the world’s largest merchants,” said John McDonnell, Co-Founder & CEO, Bitnet. “Many of these bigger companies have looked at existing solutions and have remained on the sidelines – until now. With Bitnet, we’re building the integrations, systems and technologies that multi-national retailers and travel companies need in order to accept bitcoin”, he added.
Bitnet’s platform includes developer-focused RESTful hypermedia APIs and SDKs, an easy to implement hosted Checkout product and prebuilt integrations to key third party software systems. Bitnet will also offer advanced analytics with programmatic access to reports designed to help automate merchant reconciliation within their accounting and ERP systems.
About Highland Capital Partners
Founded in 1988, Highland Capital Partners is a global venture capital firm focused on putting the entrepreneur first. With offices in Silicon Valley, Boston and Shanghai, Highland has raised over $3 billion in committed capital and invested in more than 225 companies. Investments include Gigamon, Leap Motion, LevelUp, Lycos, MapQuest, Quattro Wireless, RentJuice, Sybase, VistaPrint, WePay and others.
Egor Pavlovich is CTO of Coinspeaker and a major bitcoin enthusiast. Egor is a specialist in radiophysics and is a keen follower of new and disruptive technologies – from the first moment he discovered bitcoin he knew immediately it was something special. After beginning a bitcoin mining operation he combined forces with Siarhei in 2014 to build professional provider of news for the cryptocurrency/blockchain community. His roles at the site include monitoring analytics, handling the site’s public relations campaigns, overseeing the editorial content in an executive capacity as well as dealing with advertisers and sponsors. You can contact Egor via [email protected]
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