BitPay Raises $40 Million to Expand into Asian Markets

BitPay, the world’s biggest global blockchain payment service provider, closed an extended Series B funding round in which it raised another $40 million. Some of the top investors in this round of funding were Menlo Ventures, Capital Nine, Christopher Klaus of Internet Security Systems and Alvin Liu, Tencent’s co-founder.

BitPay is planning to use this amount to fund its expansion plans, especially in the emerging Asian Markets. The focus will be on low-cost payment solutions for cross-border payment options using cryptocurrencies.

In its first round of fund raising in 2014 – the Series A round – BitPay made $30 million. Investors in that round included Founders Fund, RRE Ventures, Index Ventures, Felicis Ventures and even Sir Richard Branson. Thus, so far, the payment platform has generated $70 million through fund raising projects.

Importance of this fundraising

The reason this fundraising is so impressive is because of the technology that BitPay has developed. The company has revolutionized the B2B payment system for cross-border commerce by using Bitcoin as a payment method rather than as a trading asset. Especially in the Asian region.

According to Capital Nine’s director Sam Lin, the cross-border payment option offered by BitPay makes international payment transactions for businesses faster and cheaper.

In fact, the original plan was to raise another $30 million. However, since so many investors wanted in on the venture, BitPay had to increase the funding round to $40 million. According to BitPay’s chief commercial officer, Sonny Singh, the biggest feather in the company’s cap was to rope in Menlo Capital as an investor. He said that this was the first time ever that Menlo had made a crypto-related institutional investment.

BitPay is offering a Great Service

And it’s not just the fact that the company has made cross-border commerce cheaper. Tyler Sosin, one of the partners at Menlo Ventures, says that the company has shown efficient growth as well as stickiness with merchants that a trademark of a great payment service provider.

To help grow the business, BitPay entered into a partnership with Bithumb, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Since the deal was finalized last month, the partnership launched a new cross-border payment platform for South Korean businesses. Currently, a traditional bank wire transfer in South Korea takes an average of 3 to 5 business days and the transaction fees are expensive. With this new service launched by BitPay and Bithumb, users will only be paying 1% of transaction as a fee and the transfer will be completed within one business day.

Another really attractive feature which has got investors betting on BitPay is its level of security. The company, because it is using blockchain tech, ensures that all transactions are recorded and are completely transparent. The BitPay Wallet adoption rate is also growing with the company seeing more than $3 billion per month in transactions.