Coinbase Valued at $1 Billion After $100 Million Raised in Funding

It’s no secret that digital currency exchanges are all the rage this year, and Coinbase is the latest start-up to announce a mammoth of series funding.
On Thursday (August 10), Coinbase announced that it had raised $100 million in Series D funding, whose mission is to create a global open financial system, the blog post states.
The latest funding instalment–which was led by US venture capital firm IVP–makes the crypto start-up the first one of its kind to be worth more than $1 billion. Additional funding participants included Spark Capital, Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, Section 32 and Draper Associates.

“Coinbase experienced unprecedented growth over the last year, and we have now exchanged over $25 billion USD of digital currency for our customers,” the post reads.
Founded in 2012, Coinbase had previously raised $117 million from a wide range of investors; the latest segment bumps that total up to $217 million. According to Reuters, Pitchbook data indicates that Coinbase had raised more than $75 million in 2015, followed by $10.5 million in July 2016.
The funding will be used to expand the company’s engineering and customer support teams, open a GDAX office in New York City, and invest in Toshi, an ethereum-based browser, to help advance digital currency into a global payment network.
“We’re fortunate to be working with IVP, one of the premier later-stage venture capital and growth equity firms in the United States,” the company states.
Coin Desk also reported on Thursday that, to date, cryptocurrency start-ups and the like have raised $1.9 billion combined, meaning that Coinbase now holds 10 percent of all venture capital investments in blockchain start-ups.
Reuters noted that the company’s founder Brian Armstrong said that Coinbase is transitioning into its third phase of the expansion and is looking to build digital currency applications for consumers.
“The key feature of this application will be that it dramatically lowers the hurdle for new digital currency applications to be developed and used by ordinary people,” he said.
Since the company’s inception, it has become a world leader in digital currencies that supports bitcoin, ethereum, and litcoin in over 30 countries.
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Securities Disclosure: I, Jocelyn Aspa, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article