Today Florida-based MoonPay announced it raised a $550 million Series A at a post-money valuation of $3.4 billion. The funding for the bootstrapped startup was led by Tiger Global Management and Coatue with participation from Blossom Capital, Thrive Capital, Paradigm, and NEA.
The company enables users to convert fiat money into cryptocurrency and at the same time provides anti-money laundering and know your customer compliance. More recently, it has moved into enabling NFT purchases. To date, the company has processed more than $2 billion in transactions with seven million end users. It supports 30 fiat currencies, is integrated with 250 wallets, and supports most payment methods, including bank and card payments and Apple and Google Pay.
“We spoke to many of the company’s customers during diligence who highlighted MoonPay’s compelling user experience and expressed conviction in the company’s market leadership,” said John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global.
Looking at competitors, Simplex was acquired by Nuvei for $250 million in May. It was projecting $2 billion in volumes for 2021 at that stage.
In September, XanPool, a Hong Kong-based onramp raised a $27 million Series A led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures. It has 500,000 users and 400 business partners.
Another related startup is UK regulated competitor Ramp which in June raised a $10.1 million seed round led by NFX and Galaxy. When contacted, CEO Szymon Sypniewicz told us he wasn’t in a position to discuss details of its latest funding round. Ramp has 200 partners and was the early onramp provider for Sorare, the fantasy soccer game, which raised $680 million in September.
