February 3rd, 2015 – Stockholm/London: KnCMiner, the professional bitcoin mining company, announced a Series B investment of $15M led by Accel Partners with participation from existing investors Creandum, GP Bullhound and private investor Martin Wattin. Michiel Kotting, Partner at Accel Partners will join the company’s board, whilst Fred Destin of Accel will join as observer. Kotting said: “We are excited to back the KnCMiner team, as they have proven to be world class operators in a very dynamic marketplace. We strongly believe in the long-term potential of Bitcoin technology and see large scale miners like KnCMiner playing a crucial role.”
Accel, which was founded way back in 1983, has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful companies, many of which have defined their categories, including Alfresco, Angry Birds (Rovio), Atlassian, Circle Internet Financial, Cloudera, ComScore, Dropbox, Facebook, Gameforge, Groupon, Imperva, Kayak, Nimble Storage, Playfish, QlikTech, Spotify, Supercell and Varonis.
Staffan Helgesson, General Partner at Creandum: “We are happy that Accel Partners are joining us in supporting KnCMiner’s rapid growth. Since we invested in KnCMiner in 2014, they have built a world-class payment processing platform and grown to be one of the leading bitcoin companies globally. We believe KnCMiner will be one of the key infrastructure companies in the bitcoin ecosystem long term.”
KnCMiner plans to use the new capital, in addition to cash generated through operations, to increase its bitcoin mining capacity and continue to build the bitcoin-processing infrastructure of the future. KnCMiner has generated over $100M in revenue since launch and re-invested most of its profits in the mining operation.
Sam Cole, co-founder and CEO of KnCMiner, said: “We have invested more than $70M over the last 12 months into building a world-class bitcoin mining operation and plan to invest a further $150M over the next 18 months as we become one of the key transaction processors within Bitcoin. We are delighted to be partnering with Accel in this next chapter, as we continue building our brand and relationships within the Bitcoin and broader financial communities.”
KnCMiner started by designing and selling bitcoin mining hardware to 3rd party miners and was founded in Stockholm in 2013 by datacentre and Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) experts. Previously dominated by small scale manufacturers, often individuals pooling in computing resources, KnC feels that as the bitcoin and other blockchain based market matures, there is a need for mass production and hence it has been mining bitcoins directly on an industrial scale since February 2014.
KnC has also released a 16nm tape- out with Alchip at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) and expects to be first to market with this next generation chip technology. This will be one of the most efficient chips in the market, enabling KnCMiner to dramatically increase its mining capacity and to become a trusted, low-cost scale provider of bitcoin mining capacity on a global basis. KnCMiner has partnered with several bitcoin companies directly, including Circle Internet Financial and BitPay, to improve liquidity and thus the end user experience.
With an increasing number of merchants now accepting bitcoin payments, the cryptocurrency market is increasing rapidly despite the speculation surrounding it in the public sector. Top tier investors have reportedly invested over $400M into bitcoin companies to date.
(image credit: Krystal Jennings)
