After expanding to the United Kingdom earlier this year, Boston's PayPal-for-Bitcoin startup Circle Internet Financial is one step closer to letting people across the world send seamless mobile payments to each other, free of charge.
On Wednesday, Circle announced that it has raised a new $60 million round of strategic financing led by Beijing venture capital giant and existing investor IDG Capital Partners. The other investors are Breyer Capital, former IBM CEO and Chairman Sam Palmisano, Silver Lake co-founder Glenn Hutchins. General Catalyst Partners and a number of strategic partners in China, including Baidu, CICC Alpha, EverBright Investments, WangXiang and CreditEase. This brings total funding to $136 million.
But the funding announcement might be burying the lede: the mobile payments startup also announced that it has launched a new and independent company in China, conveniently called Circle China, and it was formed with what co-founders Jeremy Allaire and Sean Nelville said is a multi-million dollar seed investment from many investors in Circle's latest round.
In a blog post that was expected to be published Thursday, Allaire and Nelville said they've taken a lot of inspiration from China in thinking about the future of banking and consumer finance:
Social payments as a category started in China, and has enormous scale, unlike in the West. The first private banks in China are run by Alibaba and Tencent. Messaging and payments, p2p lending and novel forms of saving and investment, powered by the internet and software, are accelerating at an incredible pace in China, outpacing the West. We all have a lot to learn from innovators in China.
Circle China doesn't have a commercial product and service available in the country yet, Allaire and Nelville said they are committed to the development of a China-native company and ensuring that they comply with federal regulations.
What's more, Circle is also expanding its European coverage with the launch of Circle Euro in Spain as part of a broader rollout in the continent over the coming month.
"Between the US, Europe and China, there are 2+ billion consumers who will share value, and we want to enable that experience in the same way that these consumers share messages and content today," they wrote. "We're on track to exceed a billion dollars in transaction volume on an annual basis, and Circle's global customer base has grown by 300 [percent] over the past 12 months -- but we're just getting started."
As Yahoo Finance reported back in May, while Circle first became known as a Bitcoin startup, it has expanded more broadly into letting users exchange state-sponsored currency like U.S. dollars and British pounds.
"No one ever sees bitcoin, it’s just underneath," Allaire told Yahoo Finance. "If you want to, you can. But we think the number of people who want a non-state-sponsored digital currency as their primary currency is really small."
