Investments pour in for Bitnet, Gets Whopping $14.5 million in Series A fundingThough Bitcoin’s prices have fallen record this year from the last year’s best $1200, investors have not left their acceptance of the digital currency. Several successful funding attempts by various venture capitalists show that they are hopeful of the future of Bitcoin. The latest to get funds is Bitnet, which provides Bitcoin services for merchants.
The company says that it has secured $14.5 million in Series A funding from a group led by Highland Capital Partners and including the Japanese ecommerce site Rakuten. Though when the amount is compared with the $30 million raised by Blockchain, which holds the current record, not much, the company has shown it is content with it.
Bitnet has been added to the list of the Bitcoin companies that have received investment from venture capitalists. So far venture capitalists have invested $317 million in Bitcoin companies since the creation in 2008. The investment received by Bitnet which is less than a year old, founded in January by John McDonnell and Stephen McNamara is being appreciated.
According to the press note the founders have a background in payments technology, and both worked at CyberSource, the payments-systems company that Visa bought in 2010 for $2 billion. Thus, the company is in experienced hands; it also has Mr. McDonnell, head of business development, and Mr. McNamara, chief software engineer.
With close to 27 staff members and offices in San Francisco and Belfast, the company is willing to expand its reach with the latest investments. Led by Highland Capital Partners, Bitnet’s Series A round also included Rakuten, Japan’s largest e-commerce site. According to the agreement Rakuten is not only providing funding, it will use Bitnet’s Bitcoin payments software.
Small Organizations Have Ease Accepting Bitcoin
Talking to media professionals John McDonnell, CEO of Bitnet, and the company has an enterprise-level platform for large retailers to begin accepting Bitcoin expects offering to compete against established market players such as BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin. All these companies have expanded their operations in the last couple of months.
McDonnell admitted that he saw Bitcoin as an opportunity to reduce direct costs of processing and eliminate a lot of the ancillary costs of handling credit cards. According to him what he saw was an opportunity to bring that payments domain expertise from running the world’s biggest e-commerce payment gateway to Bitcoin.
According to the Bitnet CEO it is fairly simple for small merchants to begin accepting Bitcoin; however, he suspects that big organizations could experience problems integrating cryptocurrency payments given their often complex internal financial systems.
To contact the reporter of this story: Deepak Tiwari at deepak@forexminute.com
The company says that it has secured […]