Coinbase’s $100M In Funding Brings Its Valuation To $1.6B

Coinbase has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round, giving the digital currency startup a post-money valuation of $1.6 billion.

TechCrunch reported news that the venture capital funding round, led by IVP — with participation from Spark Capital, Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, Section 32 and Draper Associates — was the first venture capital (VC) raise for Coinbase in more than two years.

With the bitcoin market surging, Coinbase has facilitated almost $15 billion in digital currency exchange in just the first half of 2017, which is five times more than was exchanged in all of 2016. During this same six-month period, the startup has also had a fourfold increase in new customers signing up for the platform.

The startup could see a tenfold increase in transaction volume from full-year 2016 to full-year 2017. The exchange also added support for Ethereum in 2016 and Litecoin in 2017 and has plans to add many more cryptocurrencies in the future.

However, there have been some challenges for the company. The exchange has experienced outages over the last few months, which they attributed to degraded performance related to “unprecedented volume.” And customer service response times have also been a big issue, with Coinbase working on getting response times to below six hours by Q3 2017 and phone support for at least some percentage of the customer base by Q4.

Coinbase has said that some of this new VC funding will support scaling customer support and engineering teams. In addition, it plans on opening a GDAX office in New York City to continue building relationships with institutions and professional traders.

Following its new $1.6 billion valuation, Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, hinted that he sees the company beginning to transition into phase three of its “master plan” — which is described as building a consumer interface for digital currency apps that can potentially reach 100 million people.