Venture Capital Funding for Bitcoin Startups Triples in 2014

It’s been a bumper 12 months for bitcoin companies raising funding. In fact, the amount of venture capital flowing into bitcoin startups this year is more than three times the total raised in 2013, according to CoinDesk data.
In total, bitcoin firms raised $314.7m in 2014. This represents a 3.3-fold increase over the previous year, in which $93.8m was invested.
Additionally, this year’s total accounts for more than three-quarters of all venture capital raised for bitcoin startups since the start of CoinDesk data in 2012. A total of $410.7m has been invested in the space over that time.
The chart of cumulative all-time VC funding (below) shows two jumps in funds raised this year in March and October.
Twin peaks
In March, a number of big deals were completed that caused the first of those spikes.
Chief among those was Xapo’s $20m round raised from Fortress, Benchmark and Ribbit Capital. This was followed by Circle Internet Financial, which raised just $3m less from a group of investors that included Accel Partners, Pantera Capital and General Catalyst.
That month also saw smaller but significant amounts raised by bitcoin exchanges Kraken ($5m from Hummingbird Ventures) and OKCoin ($10m from Mandra Capital, Ceyuan and others).
Six months later, the next round of big deals took place. Wallet and data provider Blockchain led October fund-raising with $30.5m from Lightspeed Ventures, Mosaic Ventures and others. Notably, the Blockchain round was the largest ever single investment made in a bitcoin company.
Bitcoin mining firm BitFury took second place with $20m raised from noted investor Bill Tai and others. Payment processor BitNet closed $14.5m in funding from Japanese e-commerce platform Rakuten and Highland Capital Partners.
Smaller rounds were peppered throughout October, including $2.5m raised by Korean universal Coinplug, $5m for mining hardware maker Spondoolies-Tech and $3m for exchange SolidX.

This post was published at Coin Desk on December 31, 2014.