Bitcoin services platform BitX has secured $4 million in a Series A round led by the Payments subsidiary of South Africa’s Naspers Group, PayU.
Other investors include Ariadne Capital, Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin Opportunity Corp and FinTech investor Carol Realini.
BitX, not to be confused with Bit-X Financial, offers a bitcoin wallet, exchange and merchant integration service. It is focusing on servicing the African and East Asian markets, with offerings in Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria and South Africa. These regions contain sizeable pockets of unbanked populations, making bitcoin a potential candidate of choice for transmitting money.
Naspers Group is a large group of e-commerce and media platforms. It has become one of South Africa’s most successful media enterprises. Its shares, publicly traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, have gained more than 50% during the past year and 550% during the past 5 years. The shares are currently trading at R 192,950 ($15,629) apiece, and its market cap has grown to R 807.59 billion ($65.4 billion).
The investment is BitX’s second in just under a year, its seed round bringing in SGD $1 million ($824,000).
Like its US-based competitors, the startup also provides developer tools such as an API and libraries. Fittingly, it also offers a tipping platform, Doffr, allowing online users to tip appreciated content with bitcoin.
