Bitcoin payment processor BitPay, Inc. has taken its first outside investment by closing a seed round totaling USD510,000. Investors include Shakil Khan, Barry Silbert, Jimmy Furland, Roger Ver, and other angel investors known for seeking out innovative technology companies. One Investor, Roger Ver, paid his investment contribution using bitcoins.
Over the past year, BitPay has seen transaction volume accelerating with average quarter-to-quarter growth of 50% over the past four quarters. The total dollar value of all orders processed by BitPay in 2012 is over USD3m, and all orders were paid using bitcoin. Bitcoin is the innovative digital currency that is being adopted worldwide.
BitPay plans to use the funds to open their Technology Centre in Atlanta, move their headquarters to Atlanta, and hire additional employees.“Identity theft affects 10 million victims per year, and payment fraud totals over USD100bn per year,” states Anthony Gallippi, the co-founder and CEO of BitPay. “Bitcoin is an enabling technology, it is a global peer-to-peer payment network that will solve these problems and change the world. When businesses look at our service, they see the benefits are very compelling.”
Using BitPay, a business can accept a payment from any country on earth, instantly, with zero risk of fraud. This capability that BitPay offers is not possible with any payment processor today, including PayPal, American Express, Mastercard, or Visa.
In November of 2012, WordPress.com began accepting bitcoin payments using BitPay’s payment gateway API, and since then, the activity at BitPay has spiked. BitPay has increased new merchants by nearly 50% to over 2,000 since the WordPress announcement.
In addition to the payment gateway API, BitPay offers simple “buy now” buttons and payment plugins for the most common eCommerce shopping carts such as Magento, WordPress eCommerce, Woocommerce, OpenCart, and Virtuemart. BitPay invoices now have multiple language support including Danish, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
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