Gem Gets Another $1.3 Million, to Accelerate Feature Development

Bitcoin wallet and API provider GEM has secured another $1.3 million in funding. Combined with an earlier round in September, which coincided with the hiring of a former PayPal exec as COO, the Startup has now secured a total of $3.3 million.

The round was led by KEC Ventures, with other investors including First Round Capital, RRE Ventures (also a participant in the first round) and early Facebook investor Robert Wolfson.

According to its website, Gem provides Bitcoin application developers with pre-built, full-stack Bitcoin API, multisig wallet and security functionality. With this out of their way, developers can focus on the application’s unique components and potentially complete it with just a few lines of code.

It also says to have built out a "redundant infrastructure", allowing developers to offer 100% uptime. Recently, the startup released an API for its multisignature wallet, which was also recently enhanced by the addition of Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) from payment security provider Thales e-Security.

The latest investment will go towards accelerating feature development and scaling its offering for developers.

There has been a recent surge in the creation of tools for Bitcoin application developers, with a number of startups racing to get their offerings to the market, some receiving substantial sums of capital in the process.