Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures Leads $52M Funding Round For European Cryptocurrency Brokerage

Billionaire Peter Thiel-backed Valar Ventures emerged as the lead investor in Vienna-based digital investment platform Bitpanda.

What Happened: The platform secured $52 million in Series A funding led by Valar and other investors including Speedinvest, the cryptocurrency brokerage said in a statement Tuesday.

Bitpanda said it would utilize the fresh investments to enter additional European markets this year and next and introduce new product offerings.

Valar Partner Andrew McCormack is joining Bitpanda’s board as a result of the investment.

“We believe Bitpanda is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the opportunity by scaling across Europe and continuing to attract loyal users, which the team has already proven they can do profitably,” said McCormack.

“Our goal is to become the leading investment and trading platform in Europe, not only for the people who are already familiar with trading but for everyone,” said Eric Demuth, CEO of Bitpanda.

Why It Matters: The investment platform said it is doubling revenue annually and has over 1.3 million users.

Bitpanda supports a wide variety of cryptocurrencies as well as investments in precious metals.

The trading platform says it is looking to expand into stocks early next year.

Thiel, best known for his association with PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL as a co-founder and Facebook Inc. FB as an early investor, has backed major cryptocurrency projects before.

In July 2018, the billionaire led a funding round for EOS cryptocurrency's parent Block.one, Bloomberg reported at the time. In October last year, Thiel backed Texas-backed Bitcoin mining startup Layer1, according to Fortune.

The 52-year old's data analytics company Palantir Technolgies Inc. is set to go public on Wednesday.

Photo courtesy: JD Lasica via Flickr