Ripple Labs is about to close its new $30 million Series A funding round.
Ripple Labs, the developer of Ripple payment network, is closing its new $30 million Series A funding round.
Ripple Labs spokesperson told WSJ that the company is working on a new Series B funding round. According to the website, the deal will place the San-Francisco-based stratup at a valuation of $100 million.
The investors in a Series A funding round will include Andreessen Horowitz, IDG Capital Partners, Google Ventures and others. Ripple has previously received over $3.5 million from a number of companies, among others Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Venture51, Camp One Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, FF Angel and Vast Ventures.
Instead of building strong customer base, Ripple Labs has always been targeted at financial institutions and banks, while promoting its services. By integrating Ripple, banks are able to realize instant cross-border remittance, corporate payment, and institutional payment services.
The Ripple protocol has already been adopted by such banks as Cross River Bank and CBW Bank in the U.S. as well as Fidor Bankin in Germany.
Ripple is a payment system and remittance network based on an open source Internet protocol. It allows making international transactions of any size using either cryptocurrency or any fiat currency. The company aims at minimizing costs on making international transfers in different currencies, while accelerating the speed of transfers. Besides, the network enables smaller banks to eliminate participation of large intermediate banks that usually take high fees on remittances.
The distributed ledger system, used by Ripple, presents high potential to be used as a basis for different types of applications, not only currency.
At the same time, a lot of businesses were kept from investing due to the high price volatility of bitcoin, while others decided to take the risk.
Gene Sperling was recently appointed as a member of Ripple Labs’s Board of Directors. Sperling is known for serving as National Economic Advisor and National Economic Council Director for two presidents. The company believes his experience will come in useful , taking into account the bitcoin regulation is steadily increasing.
Ripple Labs was founded in 2012 by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb.
Polina is an undergraduate student at Belarusian State Economic University (BSEU) where she is studying at the faculty of International Business Communication for a degree specializing in Intercultural Communication. In her spare time she enjoys drawing, music and travelling.
