Bitpanda Closes $52M Series A Led By Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures
- Led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, the Series A funding round will help Bitpanda expand to new European markets.
- The firm expects to hire around 70 new employees and release several new products by the end of 2020.
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Cryptocurrency asset platform Bitpanda has just closed a $52 million Series A funding round, bringing its goal to expand internationally closer to fruition, the firm announced in a blog post on 29 September.
According to the announcement, the funding round was led by Valar Ventures, a VC firm backed by Peter Thiel, and saw the participation of Vienna-based VC Speedinvest and other unnamed investors. With this investment, in addition to the 2016 seed round and the 2019 IEO, the firm has raised roughly $100 million to date. Bitpanda’s co-founder and CEO, Eric Demuth, said in a statement:
“This funding round will help us to bring the Bitpanda platform and all our services to a new level. We are going to launch new, industry-leading products, including a completely new and innovative way of stock trading early next year.”
Claiming to have around 1.3 million users, and facilitating roughly $2 million in daily volume, Bitpanda is not the typical cryptocurrency exchange. In addition to the usual cryptocurrency trading, the exchange also offers its clients the option of trading precious metals, which was responsible for “over a $1 billion in volume in 2019”.
The newly acquired funds will be used to strengthen Bitpanda’s team, as well as to expand the firm’s international reach. While the company currently has around 240 employees, it wishes to scale to around 300 employees by the end of Q4 2020, while expanding to additional European markets. The announcement further states that France, Spain and Turkey, to which the company expanded in 2020, were among the fastest-growing crypto markets out of the 34 countries the platform was available in.
As part of the investment, James Fitzgerald and Andrew McCormack from Valar Ventures will also join Bitpanda’s board. McCormack said in a statement:
“Together, we’re going to ensure everyone in Europe has the power to access the financial markets and invest in their financial futures as we build Europe’s next fintech unicorn.”
- German digital bank N26 will use Bitpanda’s White Label solution to allow select clients to buy and sell close to 200 crypto assets.
- The service will initially be available only to Austrian customers, but N26 plans to expand its reach to other key markets over the next six months.
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- Trustology, which will be rebranded to Bitpanda Custody, is Bitpanda’s maiden acquisition worth tens of millions of dollars.
- Bitpanda plans to begin its newly announced crypto custody services by taking custody of all its assets across its retail and institutional businesses.
- In order to enable trading of digital assets, Lydia has fully integrated Bitpanda’s “white Label Solution” into its platform.
- The 5.5 million users of the payments app will soon have access to over 170 digital assets, including crypto, fractional stocks, ETFs, and precious metals.