Blockchain — the cryptocurrency startup, known for its Bitcoin wallet and block explorer has announced yet another successful funding round. The company has raised a sum of $40 million in the investment round led by Lakestar venture capital. Other prominent names joining the round includes Google Ventures (GV), and Virgin Group’s Richard Branson, Nokota Management, Digital Currency Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mosaic Venture Partners and Prudence Holdings.
The new round of investment comes at the time when Bitcoin is close to its all-time high of about $3000, which it hit recently. The increasing interest in Bitcoin and the urgency to implement blockchain reforms on Bitcoin network presents lots of opportunities to the company. According to the company, the fresh round of investment will go towards expansion of manpower and research and development. Going by Blockchain CEO Peter Smith’s statement, the company will soon have more offices established across different parts of the world.
Smith described a surge in demand for its products among the cryptocurrency community members as the digital currency’s price rose to record levels in the past few months. The funding will enable the company to meet the rising demand by scaling its infrastructure. Peter Smith was quoted by a leading financial news outlet saying,
“We are really focused on scaling to meet the record demand we are getting in the market… 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.”
Blockchain already has over 15 million wallet signups with users conducting transactions worth billions of dollars per month. The company had earlier raised a funding of about $30.5 million back in 2014.
Ref: CNBC | Image: NewsBTC