The tendency to join the world of cryptography, directly or indirectly, became quite popular among the more traditional companies compared to those of recently, but today no one is surprised when there appears here and there some information of this type.
First investment
This time, online payment giant PayPal has made the community talk about it, since it made the decision to make its first investment in a blockchain technology company.
As recently announced, the company joined the expansion of the Series A investment in Cambridge Blockchain. The purpose of this start-up is to provide individuals and financial institutions with the opportunity to manage confidential data with the help of shared accounting books.
It means that users can own their identities online without the participation of intermediaries. It is said that PayPal is also interested in this approach and will consider using the capabilities of the Cambridge Blockchain platform to help its users avoid sharing their personal data when it is really unnecessary.
The amount hasn’t been revealed
Although it can be quite interesting, the amount of the investment has not been revealed. But from the recent filings with the SEC, it is known that the total sum raised by Cambridge Blockchain amounted to $ 3.5 million. This amount was contributed by several investors during the last nine months. In May 2018, the startup closed its Series A with $ 7 million, which means that, in general, it has managed to raise $ 10.5 million.
Several leading investors, including HCM Capital, the venture capital arm of Foxconn and Digital Currency Group, participated in the first round that generated $ 7 million. This amount consisted of $ 3 million of converted bills and $ 4 million of new capital.
The rest of the aforementioned sum of $ 10.5 million was invested by companies such as PayPal, Future / Perfect Ventures, Omidyar Network, the investment firm created by eBay founder Flourish, which is a financial inclusion investment division of Omidyar.
A PayPal spokesperson commented on his role in funding the startup as follows:
“We made an investment in Cambridge Blockchain because it is applying blockchain for digital identity in a way that we believe could benefit financial services companies such as PayPal”. Our investment will allow us to explore possible collaborations to take advantage of blockchain technology”.
Prior to this investment, we have heard about PayPal in the context of blockchain on rare occasions, for example, when it filed a patent in March 2018 to streamline cryptocurrency transaction fees and when it revealed its intentions to implement an internal project aimed at Promote the use of tokens. among its employees.
The Cambridge Blockchain plans
The CEO of Cambridge Blockchain, Matthew Commons, revealed that they first interacted with PayPal in the framework of Fintech Europe 2018. It was an accelerator that was co-sponsored by PayPal and its main objective was to provide support to start-up companies with an increase growing. regulatory requirements related to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy considerations.
Now the start-up plans to allocate the new capital to finance hiring, more research and development. At this time, Cambridge Blockchain is a team of 15 members, 11 of whom work in Boston and face technical problems. A member of the team that has recently joined the company works in Beijing. And three specialists have been hired in Paris, are responsible for launching their technology in Luxembourg (where PayPal has an office), which is said to take place later this year.