Paxos, the firm powering payment giant Paypal’s cryptocurrency services, has announced that it has raised around $142 million in its Series C funding round, media reports said. The funding round was led by Declaration Partners, which is backed by the family office of Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein. Other investors that also participated in the funding round for Paxos include Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital, newly formed Alua Capital and PayPal Ventures.
Paxos chief executive officer and co-founder Charles Cascarilla told the media, “Our pipeline has expanded very significantly from having been in the millions of customers maybe a year ago to, now, billions of customers through partnerships. That is partly why we need to raise this capital, to really take advantage of the growth opportunities.”
“We think that opportunity is now, our investors think it is, too. We want to really be able to put the pedal to the metal to make sure that we take advantage of that.”
Paxos will use the funds raised in its Series C funding round to further develop new products that help institutional clients with tokenisation.
“We always want to be able to think of other ways that we can grow our business, including, potentially, acquisitions and new hires,” Charles Cascarilla added.
Earlier this year, the Palo Alto-based payments firm launched a cryptocurrency trading service in partnership with Paxos, letting customers buy and spend bitcoin.
Recently, bitcoin breached the $20,000 mark for the first time ever.