Oobit Technologies UAB, a mobile crypto payments app, said today that it has raised $25 million in an early-stage funding round to support its development and expansion into more markets.

The Series A round was led by stablecoin issuer Tether Ltd. and joined by other cryptocurrency venture capital contributors such as CMCC Global’s Titan Fund, 468 Capital and Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. Oobit previously raised $8 million in a seed round in Dec 2020, placing the total raised by the company at $28 million, according to Crunchbase.

Oobit provides a mobile payment app that allows crypto token holders to purchase goods and services at more than 100 million retailers worldwide, which accept credit cards such as Visa or Mastercard, using their cryptocurrency as easily as cash. The underlying technology pays the merchants in cash in exchange for cryptocurrency holders’ tokens, thus allowing merchants to adopt crypto payment systems and other digital assets into their transactions.

Using Oobit’s technology, the app allows customers and merchants to transact using cryptocurrencies similarly to the way they would use credit or debit cards.

“With the backing of industry leaders, this funding round marks a pivotal moment for Oobit, propelling us forward in our mission to allow a simple way to pay with digital assets anywhere,” Amram Adar, Oobit’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement to CoinDesk.

To pay in stores customers use a “tap-to-pay” feature available on Android devices that works with payment terminals that support credit card systems with tap receivers. Any store that has a “Contactless” symbol (it looks like a series of curved lines) at the pay terminal may be able to use this feature with the user’s mobile device to make a payment.

The company’s app is available in the Apple App Store and Google Play and users can connect it to digital assets using Oobit’s native digital wallet to allow payments using bitcoin, Tether or other tokens.

As a digital asset, Tether USDT is a “stablecoin,” which means that it maintains a one-to-one market value parity with the U.S. dollar. That makes it usable for buying things such as food, coffee or gas. It’s the largest stablecoin by market cap at $83 billion and unlike bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap at $846 billion, so users don’t need to worry about its value fluctuating hour by hour.

Mobile cryptocurrency wallets and payment systems are not new and there are currently several apps and services that allow users to store and pay merchants using crypto tokens. Several prominent solutions include BitPay Inc., which allows merchants to accept cryptocurrency and will allow them to settle into dollars. There is also the even better-known PayPal app, which also allows users to pay for goods and services with crypto tokens and merchants can immediately receive dollars or whatever currency they like.

Image: Oobit