Simplex, an Israeli company working to enable bitcoin purchases with credit cards, has secured $7m from a group of investors. With previously raised money, the total amount of attracted funds equals $8.4 million.
Apart from non-disclosed angel investors, the principal contributors list includes bitcoin mining firms Bitmain and Cumberland Mining, and a crowdfunding platform FundersClub.
Founded in 2014, Simplex enables bitcoin exchanges, broker websites and wallet applications to make cryptocurrency purchases on a secured online platform via credit card transactions. The company claims to provide an alternative and handier method for buying bitcoins. While the common way of bitcoin purchases – wire transfers to exchanges – is time-consuming (up to three days) and too formalised (entails KYC requirements by banks), Simplex offers faster bitcoin purchases via credit cards.
Simplex's CEO Nimrod Lehavi explains: “Banks often place additional restrictions on which countries bitcoin exchange customers can send wire transfers to. … This clearly creates very high friction and makes mainstream adoption of bitcoin far from easy. With Simplex, transactions are convenient, carry fewer restrictions, and occur almost instantaneously.”
The company puts a special emphasis on the protection of businesses from fraud, promising to bear all costs in the case of chargeback or fraud. According to Lehavi, the beta platform was launched by Simplex about a year ago and since then about $4 million in purchases has been processed without any fraud. Simplex’s website provides the names of the company’s clients, the cloud mining provider Genesis Mining and bitcoin exchanges SpectroCoin and Bits of Gold among them.
Israel is known for its fast-growing and coherent bitcoin community. Simplex is not the first Israeli bitcoin/blockchain startup to attract funding from investors. In January 2015 another Israeli-based company, Colu, raised $2.5 million in a seed round. Among other successful Israeli cryptocurrency ventures Bits of Gold, GetGems and Polycoin can be mentioned.
Anna Lavinskaya
