Blockchain technology platform and merchant bitcoin payments processor BitPay Inc. announced today it is raising $30 million in new funding.

BitPay was an early industry leader in bitcoin merchant payments launched in 2011, allowing brick-and-mortar and online merchants to accept bitcoins as payment. This year, the company approached $2 billion in payments processed for merchants and its open-source wallet software, Copay, recently reached a milestone of $3 billion in user payments.

“BitPay plays an important role in the cryptocurrency ecosystem by helping consumers, businesses and other financial institutions seamlessly accept and transfer Bitcoin for goods and services in the real world,” said Max Chee, head of Aquiline Technology Growth, the fund managed by Aquiline Capital Partners LLC that led the Series B round. Chee also said BitPay saw an eightfold rise in revenue from the second quarter of 2016 to the third quarter of this year.

BitPay Chief Executive Officer Stephen Pair said the money would be put toward “improving our customers’ experience with BitPay.” More specifically, the company will continue development of projects to help with the processing of cross-border supply chain payments and other markets underserved by credit cards and banks. The money will also be used for key engineering hires, regulatory licensing, acquisitions and expansion into markets in Asia.

Cross-border payments have been of particular interest to blockchain solutions companies over the past year. IBM Corp., JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Mastercard Inc. all announced blockchain-based cross-border payment projects this year in an effort to start building settlement networks to tackle the slower, traditional payment systems. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, an international payments settlement network that facilitated an average of 28.4 million transactions in 2017, has also been working on a blockchain-based solution that it can build on.

For consumers, BitPay introduced a prepaid Visa debit card in 2016 that allows users to load its balance with bitcoins from any wallet. The result of this card — and others like it in the industry, such as Coinbase Inc.’s Shift card — was to make paying for everyday expenses with bitcoin a lot easier. Previously, merchants had to already be signed up for a bitcoin payment processing service, but with these cards, customers can bring it with them.

BitPay also contributes to the bitcoin app development ecosystem with Bitcore, an open-source application user interface for Node.js. Using Bitcore, developers can rapidly build web and mobile apps that can connect to the bitcoin blockchain, transfer coins and perform other operations.

The new funding round matches the company’s $30 million Series A funding round in 2014. Including this round, BitPay will have raised a total of $62.5 million in venture funding since launch.

Image: BitPay