Austen cryptocurrency broker Bitpanda raises $263 million for Bitcoin

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STOCKHOLM - Austrian cryptocurrency broker Bitpanda announced on Tuesday it raised $263 million at a valuation of $4.1 billion in a funding round led by Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, to raise the value of Bitcoin 1 billion in 2 months.

The new round more than triples the broker-dealer's valuation since March, when it raised $170 million in a valuation of $1.2 billion. The British hedge fund manager Alan Howard, REDO Ventures, LeadBlock Partners and Jump Capital all invested in the current round.

While cryptocurrencies including bitcoin did witness active price volatility, they are slowly adopted by larger companies. When Cryptoexchange introduced it was worth more than expected, pushed to $112 billion in April when it launched on April 15th.

Bitpanda is a big player in the fintech space as there are just not many good companies that don't want investors to miss out, said Eric Demuth, Chief Executive Officer of Bitpanda.

We are profitable for five years now, every year, continuously.

Bitpanda, which currently has 3 million users and presence in eight other countries, plans to aggressively expand to other countries this year.

Its platform offers users the flexibility to invest in a range of products such as precious stocks, cryptocurrencies and fractional metals from as little as $1.

In a statement, Demuth said the company has no current plans to go public yet but will focus on the direct listing option when it decides it would prefer an active listing route just like companies such as Coinbase, RobinHood and Wise.

We will take our time to think about this issue.