Tel Aviv-based blockchain startup Colu has raised $9.6m, a fundraising that comes amid a shift in its business model that finds it focusing on local currency issuance. The Series A round, backed by Aleph, Spark Capital, Digital Currency Group and former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, follows a $2.5m seed round in early 2015 that came at a time when the startup was focused on building out its underlying technology.
While Colu was formerly focused on developing colored coins technology, a top-level protocol on the bitcoin network that allows bitcoins to be augmented to represent other assets, CEO Amos Meiri said the company has now honed in on a specific use case that was the most in-demand among its users.
Meiri told CoinDesk: "There are a lot of other use cases for colored coins, in music, in the Internet of Things, but what we saw after a while was that more than 60% of the use cases were for local currencies. This is where our market is." In particular, Meiri cited bitcoin startup Bitt’s use of Colu’s technology to launch a version of the Barbadian dollar on the bitcoin blockchain as a turning point in the project.
As a result of the success of this effort, Colu is now launching two similar projects in neighborhoods in Tel Aviv.
There, Colu has created local currencies on its platform that it contends are gaining traction with users and merchants, and Meiri indicated that Colu is building services for these efforts that will make its technology easier to use.
"We have the wallet and we have a control panel where the manager of the local economy can issue a distributed currency, gain access to data about the economy and manage it from one place," he said.
The company said it will look to launch local currencies in other […]
