South East Asia and Africa-focused Bitcoin startup BitX has raised $4 million Series A in a round led by South Africa’s Naspers Group through their payments subsidiary PayU, that also included existing investor Digital Currency Group.

Founded in 2013, BitX provides a variety of Bitcoin related services including Bitcoin wallets, a Bitcoin exchange, and Bitcoin business integration.

The company has as its aim to make “money frictionless and universally accessible by building an open, intelligent global platform that leverages the most optimal technologies available, including Bitcoin and the Blockchain.”

Based in Singapore with offices in Cape Town, South Africa, and Jakarta, Indonesia, the company currently offers a mixture of services in various countries. On top of the global provision of both wallets and their API, in addition they offer additional services in Indonesia (instant buy and sell), Kenya, Malaysia and South Africa (buy and sell and exchange) and Nigeria (exchange.)

Those countries cover a footprint of over half a billion people, which BitX claims delivers them the largest emerging markets coverage of any company in the cryptocurrency space, and although the company doesn’t provide exact usage figures, they claim to be seeing ” incredible growth and engagement” across the markets they operate in.

“Given our unique and competitive cost structure this funding round represents a significant capital injection to help expand our business,” BitX Chief Executive Officer and Founder  Marcus Swanepoel said in a statement. “This, combined with our access to world class engineering and business talent across our operational centers, our deep local knowledge and relationships in the markets we operate in, and our mobile first approach, gives us a strong competitive advantage as we continue to build out our global platform.”

Emerging markets

If you follow much of our Bitcoin and Blockchain related coverage here at SiliconANGLE you may have noticed an underlying trend: while there’s plenty of money around for Western Bitcoin and Blockchain startups, emerging market plays in the space are becoming more and more common; you could even go as far as saying that Bitcoin related startups targeting emerging markets are hot right now.

And there is a very simple explanation for it, which we touched on in our coverage of Coins.ph’s new teller service: emerging markets are prime real estate for Bitcoin as there’s a gaping hole in many of them when it comes to money transfer and banking services.

Millions, if not billions of people don’t currently have access to traditional financial services, and yet many of them have access to smartphones; Bitcoin services like those provided by BitX and others have the potential to fill the hole in markets where there are currently no alternatives.

Including the new round, BitX has raised $4.8 million to-date. The only previous investor who didn’t participate in the new round was Carol L. Realini.

The company said it would use the new funds to expand into other markets and launch a number of “exciting new products.”

Image via BitX