{"id":28063,"date":"2014-10-07T19:49:49","date_gmt":"2014-10-07T19:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci027cfe6ed0162697"},"modified":"2014-10-07T19:49:49","modified_gmt":"2014-10-07T19:49:49","slug":"blockchain-raises-30m-first-financing-1412711389","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/business\/blockchain-raises-30m-first-financing-1412711389","title":{"rendered":"Blockchain Raises Over $30M in its First Financing"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>
<\/figure>\n

London, 7 October 2014<\/strong> \u2013 Blockchain, the world\u2019s leading bitcoin wallet, today announced that it has raised over $30 million of capital in a Series A financing co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Wicklow Capital. Blockchain has been bootstrapped since it was founded by Ben Reeves in 2011; this constitutes its first outside financing round.<\/p>\n

The UK-based company is the largest Bitcoin wallet in the world, with 2.3M consumer wallets, more than the rest of the industry combined. It is adding new wallets faster than any other Bitcoin wallet and since the beginning of the year has doubled its user base and surpassed US$ 26 billion in transaction volume.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe company has grown exponentially in every way over the last eighteen months,\u201d said Peter Smith, President of Blockchain. \u201cWe are honoured to add investors and partners to the team with deep expertise in financial services and consumer technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blockchain plans to use the funds to scale its product & engineering teams, in order to develop innovative new features for its users. It will also invest to further its international expansion and increase bitcoin wallet functionality and usability for the next 20 million Bitcoin users.<\/p>\n

As part of the financing, Blockchain also welcomes Jeremy Liew, of Lightspeed Venture Partners, to its board of directors. \u201cBitcoin is a long game and the wallet is the crucial strategic high ground in the Bitcoin ecosystem,\u201d said Liew, \u201cWe wanted to back the biggest player in the most important segment of the Bitcoin value chain, and that is Blockchain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe potential for a global transformation in payments powered by Bitcoin is very exciting\u201d said Sir Richard Branson, who also participated in the round. \u201cConsumers are being offered much greater control and freedom with their money and more of them have chosen Blockchain\u2019s safe and easy to use wallet to hold their Bitcoins than any other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other investors in the round include Mosaic Ventures, Prudence Holdings, Future Perfect Ventures, and a number of angels including Rafael Corrales of CRV, Amit Jhawar of Braintree and Nat Brown among others.<\/p>\n

About Blockchain<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

At Blockchain, our mission is to reimagine how the world transacts. We build innovative software that makes using Bitcoin safe, easy, and secure for consumers and businesses anywhere in the world.<\/p>\n

Blockchain provides the world\u2019s most popular Bitcoin wallet, the world\u2019s most widely used Bitcoin APIs, the world\u2019s most popular block explorer and the world\u2019s most popular Bitcoin search engine. With over 2.3M people using Blockchain\u2019s software to successfully transact over $26 Billion in value to date, it has what is widely recognized as the strongest, most trusted brand in Bitcoin.<\/p>\n

Find out more at www.blockchain.com<\/a><\/p>\n

About Lightspeed Venture Partners<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Lightspeed Venture Partners (http:\/\/lsvp.com<\/a>) is a leading venture capital firm with over $3 billion of committed capital under management and investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, India, Israel and China with Lightspeed China Partners. Over the past two decades, Lightspeed partners have backed more than 200 consumer and enterprise companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including AppDynamics, Blue Nile, Brocade, Ciena, DoubleClick, Fusion-io, GrubHub, Informatica, Nest, Nicira, Nimble Storage, Nutanix, SnapChat and Riverbed Technology.<\/p>\n

About Wicklow Capital<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Wicklow Capital is a Chicago based fund created by Daniel Tierney and Stephen Schuler, co-founders of GETCO and current board members of KCG, a leading market maker in both the securities and commodities markets. Wicklow is an active FinTech investor and has previously invested in Motif Investing, Lending Club and CircleBack Lending.<\/p>\n

About Mosaic Ventures<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Mosaic Ventures (www.mosaicventures.com<\/a>) is a Silicon Valley-style venture capital firm based in London, focused on Series A investments. Mosaic is investing a $140 million fund in founding teams that are fundamentally reshaping big markets. The Mosaic team has invested across 10 countries in over 70 companies that together have created about $200 billion of value.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

About Prudence Holdings<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Prudence Holdings, Inc. is a NY-based private investment firm that makes growth equity investments in market leading businesses as well as provides specialty credit for companies seeking financing solutions.<\/p>\n

Founded in 2009, Prudence has completed 13 investments including HzO, Urban Compass, Thuzio and Wananchi Group Holdings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

London, 7 October 2014 \u2013 Blockchain, the world\u2019s leading bitcoin wallet, today announced that it has raised over $30 million of capital in a Series A financing co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Wicklow Capital. Blockchain has been bootstrapped since it was founded by Ben Reeves in 2011; this constitutes its first outside financing round. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3566,"featured_media":28062,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[556,954,1565],"class_list":["post-28063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-blockchain","tag-holdings","tag-venture"],"author_data":{"id":3566,"name":"Ruben Alexander","nicename":"ruben-alexander","avatar_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/ruben-alexander-promo-image-96x96.jpg"},"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/blockchain-raises-over-30m-in-its-first-financing.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}