BitPanda Is Moving Beyond Cryptocurrency

According to Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch, one of the bigger European startups operating a trading platform for cryptocurrency has closed a big round of funding on the heels of very rapid growth and plans to open its platform to a wider stream of assets.

Bitpanda, a "neobroker" that wants to make it easier for ordinary people to invest not just in bitcoin and other digital assets, but also gold, and any established stock that takes their interest, has picked up US$ 170 million, a Series B that catapults the company's valuation to US$ 1.2 billion.

Bitpanda is based in Vienna, Austria and says that this equity round makes it the country's first "unicorn" -- the first startup to pass the US$ 1 billion valuation mark.

"We are shifting to become a pan-investment platform, not just a crypto broker," said Eric Demuth, the CEO of Bitpanda who co-founded it with Paul Klanschek and Christain Trummer. Bitpanda's focus up to now has been primarily on building a platform to target investors in Europe, a largely untapped market, as it happens. "In the EU, we probably have less than 10 percent of the population owning stocks. Our growth goes hand in hand with that."

In addition to Austria, Bitpanda is live in France, Spain, Turkey, Italy and Poland with plans to expand to more markets this year, building hubs in Madrid, Barcelona, London, Paris and Berlin. New investment options to back ETFs and "fractional" trades, which will let people invest small amounts of money in whichever stocks they would like to back, are due to be added in April, the company says.

That said, the vast majority of activity on the platform right now is related to cryptocurrency, and within that Bitcoin trading far outweighs any other digital currency.

The round is being led by Valar Ventures - the fund backed by Peter Thiel - with participation also from unnamed partners from DST Global (Yuri Milner's fund). Both have been building name for themselves as significant backers of crypto startups. Valar is also an investor in Robinhood - which, like Bitpanda, has positioned itself as a platform to help a wider funnel of people engage and profit from trading - and most recently, earlier this month the pair co-invested in a US$ 350 million round for BlockFi, which provides financial services like loans to crypto traders.