Bitnet, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a digital commerce platform designed to enable enterprise-scale merchants to accept bitcoin payments, closed a $14.5 million Series A funding.
The round was led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from Rakuten, Webb Investment Network, Bitcoin Opportunity Corp., Stephens Investment Management, Commerce Ventures, Bill McKiernan, Bitnet chairman and founder of CyberSource, Carl Pascarella, former CEO of Visa, and Jack McDonnell, founder of TNS. As part of the funding round, Peter Bell, Partner at Highland Capital Partners, will join Bitnet’s board of directors.
The company intends to use the funds to build its teams for sales, marketing and customer support to expand its physical presence into continental Europe and Asia.
Founded in January 2014 by John McDonnell (CEO) and Stephen Mc Namara (CTO), Bitnet provides a digital commerce platform enabling enterprise-scale merchants to accept bitcoin payments. The solution includes developer-focused RESTful hypermedia APIs and SDKs, a hosted Checkout product and prebuilt integrations to key third party software systems. The company will also offer advanced analytics with programmatic access to reports designed to help automate merchant reconciliation within their accounting and ERP systems. In addition to large retailers, Bitnet is working with financial institutions, payment service providers, international trade organizations and airlines to provide Bitnet’s reliable, high-volume bitcoin payment acceptance solution.
The company’s engineering, product, and business development team, which is based in San Francisco, California and Belfast, Northern Ireland, helped build and manage CyberSource (NASDAQ: CYBS), a payment gateway which was sold to Visa (NYSE: V), for $2 billion in 2010.
FinSMEs
20/10/2014