Author: Luke Parker || bitcoin || Investment || Venture Capital ||
Publicly-announced Venture Capital investments into Bitcoin and blockchain-related startups so far this year have been a bit slow compared to the first half of 2015, raising only 79% as much as during the same period last year. However, it more than doubled in amount compared to last half of 2015, with approximately US$265.05 million invested to date versus only $111.85 million for the previous half-year.
The number of bitcoin-related business funding deals in 2016 is down by about half compared to the same time period last year too, but with one interesting difference: All but three of the $1m and larger deals in 2016 so far have been for companies outside of the U.S., signalling that Silicon Valley is no longer the home of most bitcoin startups.
Often compared to the momentum of the early internet boom, the investment activity in the Bitcoin industry has been a great indicator of the industry's adoption. BraveNewCoin's new Venture Capital investments resource page tracks investment activity in the space by quarter and year, updated weekly. The companies below are just the bitcoin-related investments that happened so far this year.
The largest investment in 2016 was just announced on Wednesday for bitcoin wallet and peer-to-peer payment service Circle. The Boston-based startup received US$60 million from many investors and announced the formation of Circle China at their new office in Beijing. This was Circle's fourth round of funding, bringing their accumulated total to $136 million, which makes Circle the best-funded startup in the entire Bitcoin space. Investors included Search giant Baidu, IDG Capital Partners, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst Partners, CICC ALPHA, China Everbright Limited, Wanxiang, CreditEase, Sam Palmisano, and Glenn Hutchins.
In February this year, the second largest investment was made to core Bitcoin infrastructure company, Blockstream. The $55 million Series A funding round brought them to accumulated $76 million when including other investments from a year ago. This makes Blockstream the fourth best-funded company in the Bitcoin space, Behind Circle, 21 Inc. and Coinbase. Blockstream's investors include AXA Strategic Ventures, Digital Garage, Horizons Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Blockchain Capital, and Future\Perfect Ventures. The bitcoin technology company is the only Silicon Valley firm on the list.
The third largest investment in 2016 happened at the end of April for US$27 million to Tokyo-based Japanese bitcoin exchange bitFlyer. It was a Series C round, bringing their total funds raised to $33.94 million. Investors include Venture Labo Investment and SBI Investment.
The Caribbean’s Bitt Exchange received $16 million from Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne in March, soon before he stepped down for medical reasons. The Series A investment was welcomed by the Barbadian finance minister at a press conference with massive media coverage. Cumulatively, $17.5 million has been raised for Bitt, which hopes to use it to solve long-standing trade deficiencies in the region.
The Israeli wallet and payments solution Simplex landed a $7 million Series A round investment in February, bringing their total to $8.4 million. The Tel Aviv-based company has made several strong partners in the space and their wallet allows those bitcoin exchanges, broker websites, and wallet applications to sell bitcoin inside their Simplex bitcoin wallets. Investors include Bitmain, Cumberland Mining, and FundersClub.
Japan is apparently making up for the lost time that they weren't interested in Bitcoin after MtGox scared the country away two years ago. The Tokyo-based Tech Bureau Corp is an umbrella company that calls itself a 'Crypto-FinTech Laboratory.' Many Japanese startups and projects were born in the lab including the popular Zaif bitcoin exchange. Their first and only investment so far was in May for US$6.5 million, from Arara, OKWAVE, Nippon Technology Venture Partners, Hiroshima Venture Capital, FISCO, and the Money Partners Group.
Elliptic is a London-based, full-service blockchain forensics company that claims to be able to find and track illicit activity across the blockchain for client companies and law enforcement. Their $5 million Series A round in March brought their total up to $7 million. Investors include Paladin Capital Group, Santander InnoVentures, KRW Schindler, the Digital Currency Group, and Octopus Ventures.
New York-based Chainalysis also offers blockchain forensics, but in more of a self-serve environment, giving clients a control panel to track the illicit or otherwise interesting activity themselves. Although the company has been around for more than a year and made some big partnerships like Barclay's bank, the $1.6 million seed round in February was the first funding Chainalysis has received. Investors include Point Nine Capital, Techstars, the Digital Currency Group, Funders Club, and Converge VP.
For a country that was previously only known for bitcoin mining and trading, China has had a lot of growth in the VC investment space this year with a second sizeable investment, back in April. BitKan received $1.6 million in a Series A funding round, bringing their cumulative amount to $1.75 million. The Shenzhen-based bitcoin app and information website portal gathered a few investors, including China's largest mining technology company, Bitmain.
Non-bitcoin related companies in the blockchain space didn't pull in nearly as many deals, but that is likely because much of that space is dominated by megabanks working with blockchain in-house or in a consortium like R3 CEV.
Interestingly, nearly every one of these 'blockchain not bitcoin' companies that were invested in this year so far is based in the U.S. That includes Blythe Masters' Digital Asset Holdings, which received $60 million from a slew of big banks in January.
Gem's custom blockchain service received $7.1 million, and Chronicled's authentic sneaker registry came in third place this year raising $3.42 million as well.
Does any of this mean that bitcoin has hit its' peak already for VC investments? Only time will tell, but bitcoin investments reached the $1 billion mark in November of last year after bitcoin had only been in existence for six years. Compare that to the internet, which was first turned on in 1969 as the ARPANET. The World Wide Web finally raised its first billion dollars in VC funding by 1994, 25 years later.
BNC tracks Bitcoin & Blockchain industry investments, See our industry resources pages for details.
As always, yet another daily dose of enterprise grade Bravenewcoin content, the “Bloomberg of Crypto Fin-tech”
Regards,
Ricardo Goncalves
BNC Steemit Community Manager
www.bravenewcoin.com
https://steemit.com/@bravenewcoin