In April, Bitcoin Magazine reported that global payment provider Align Commerce launched a public beta of its payments platform, the first in the industry to use the Bitcoin blockchain transparently to enable faster and cheaper global payments. Transactions appear as traditional payments at both the sending and the receiving end, but Align Commerce pipes the transfer through the blockchain instead of using several intermediate banking relays, halving both time and cost of traditional international wire transfers. Now Align Commerce announced that it has raised a $12.5 million Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), The Wall Street Journal reports . This is the first investment of the renowned venture capital firm in a blockchain-based fintech company. Align estimates that small businesses currently pay $50 billion in wire and exchange fees. Forbes notes that, while wire transfers typically incur fees from the initiating bank, intermediaries and the recipient’s bank, plus the foreign exchange fee, Align charges only a low 1.9 percent foreign-exchange rate. “We were looking for applications of the blockchain for the last couple of years in ways that could build real businesses and add real value that weren’t at the mercy of the currency valuation which will move up and down and all over the place,” said KPCB general partner Randy Komisar, who will join Align’s board, in a statement reported by Forbes . “And of those blockchain companies, we invested in Align, because we believe it’s a market that’s underserved, with a CEO who understood it well and early traction from customers who reinforced that value.” The Align Commerce platform is targeted at mainstream business-to-business (B2B) payments. The users on both ends don’t have to know that such things as Bitcoin or the blockchain exist; the only thing they have to know is […]
