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With $100 Million in Fresh Funding, Coinbase Joins Unicorn Club

With $100 Million in Fresh Funding, Coinbase Joins Unicorn Club

Digital currency wallet Coinbase has taken the leap to become a unicorn today. The San Francisco-based company announced it has received $100 million in Series D funding led by IVP. Other investors include Spark Capital, Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, Section 32, and Draper Associates.

Today’s investment brings the company’s total funding to $217 million; Pitchbook estimates Coinbase is now valued at $1.6 billion. This makes the company one of only a handful of unicorns (startups with more than $1 billion valuations) in fintech and crowns Coinbase as the first bitcoin unicorn.

Since it was founded in 2012, Coinbase has now exchanged more than $25 billion worth of digital currency for its clients. Almost $15 billion of this occurred in the first half of 2017 alone. The company plans to put the new funds to work in three ways. First, Coinbase plans to expand its engineering and customer support teams. Second, it will open a GDAX office in New York City to better position itself to serve professional traders. Third, it will invest in the digital currency Toshi to build it into a global payments network.

Coinbase, which supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin in 32 countries, offers three main products:

  • Coinbase: an exchange platform for digital currency
  • GDAX: exchange platform for professional U.S. traders and institutions
  • Toshi: a browser for the Ethereum network

The company notes that with this funding, it is preparing to transition into phase three of its “secret master plan,” that is, it plans to build a consumer interface for decentralized digital currency apps. Coinbase, which demoed Instant Exchange at FinovateSpring 2014, has made headlines twice today– the first instance highlighting its View Balance feature in partnership with Fidelity Labs.