The Boston-based payments company Circle has raised money yet again, continuing to grow at an extremely fast pace.
The company announced in a blog post yesterday that it had raised $110 million in series E funding led by a new partnership with Bitmain, a bitcoin mining company. The announcement, according to Coin Desk, also means the company now values itself at $3 billion and is now officially a unicorn.
Circle also said that tokenized US dollar coins were now available on its platform, made possible by developments in the CENTRE open source framework and by a new partnership with Bitmain.
“Circle USDC (USD Coin) is a solution that enables customers to purchase and use USDC fiat tokens for payments and trading in the crypto ecosystem,” Circle Founders Dean Neville and Jeremy Allaire said in the post. “USDC provides a full reserve U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, and is based on the open source fiat stablecoin framework developed and governed by CENTRE, which will provide independent oversight of Circle’s offering.”
Circle USDC joins other products the Goldman Sachs-backed company offers including Circle Invest, Circle Trade, Circle Pay and Poloniex.
In addition to Bitmain, existing investors IDG Capital, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Digital Currency Group and Pantera, along with new investors Blockchain Capital and Tusk Ventures, are participating in the funding round.
The round is just the latest development in a series of big moves the company has made in 2018.
In late February, the company acquired the U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex, one of the world’s leading token marketplaces available in over one hundred countries. It was the first exchange to reach $1 billion in daily volume and customers have traded crypto assets equating to billions of dollars through its platform.
About a month later, Circle hired Naeem Ishaq, who formerly held high ranking roles at Boxed and Square, as the company’s new CFO, treasurer and executive vice president of risk. In the same announcement, Circle said it would grow the company from around 150 in March to around 400 employees by the end of 2018.
