Seed investment and accelerator fund 500 Startups today announced that it has recruited two new venture partners, including early SiliconANGLE contributor and serial entrepreneur Sean Percival. Currently the vice president of marketing at Topix, a fast growing local news and forum site, he has made a reputation for himself as an expert on all things BitCoin.

Percival joined Topix in August 2013 after a stint as the chief executive of Wittlebee, a 500 Startups graduate he co-founded in December 2011 with Gabe Harriman. The children’s clothing subscription company achieved $225,000 in monthly bookings at its peak, and raised an impressive $2.5 million from Google Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Rincon Venture Partners and a number of other prominent vendors.

When he’s not spearheading strategy at Topix, Percival advises BitCoin wallet operator BlockChain. He’s also the founder of BubbleCoin, a cross-platform news service that focuses exclusively on the crypto-currency.

“I worked with Sean Percival briefly at Mashable, as well as here at SiliconANGLE in the early days of building our contributor network. Sean is a thought leader and deep thinker in emergent tech, and as an early adopter in bitcoin, will serve well at 500 startups in identifying investment targets in that arena,” commented SiliconANGLE Founding Editor Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins.

The other new addition to the 500 Startups team is Marvin Liao, a Silicon Valley veteran who served in various sales, business development, operations and marketing roles at Yahoo! for more than a decade. Before that, he led online marketing at Monsoon Commerce, a Portland-based firm that develops e-commerce solutions for small to mid-sized retailers. It also operates Alibris.com, an online store that sells new and used books and other media through a network of independent partners.