A Silicon Valley tech company and a Berlin crowdlending platform each announced they had received rounds of funding on Wednesday.
PeerNova
First up is PeerNova, a company that does many things in the cryptocurrency space, including Bitcoin mining, developing applications for remittances, smart contracts (that technology is set to be released late this year) and loyalty programs.
PeerNova was formed earlier this year by the merger of CloudHashing and HighBitcoin. “This merger marries the best of breed in the bitcoin space and technology veterans from Silicon Valley,” PeerNova’s then-new chairman Atiq Raza said in May. “We will be building a suite of software applications and technology platforms to address this rapidly growing market.”
PeerNova’s pre-Series A investment came from Pierre Lamond, a veteran in the semiconductor industry and a VC who spent 28 years at Sequoia Capital. The amount of the investment was undisclosed.
"I invested in PeerNova because of its stellar leadership team and deep expertise in technology and operations,” Lamond said in a statement. He also added:
“The cryptocurrency space is fairly new, but it has tremendous potential to disrupt a number of industries with blockchain based technology solutions. I am confident that PeerNova's management experience will enable it to successfully deliver on its vision of being the leader in block chain based infrastructure, platform and applications.”
Bitbond
Also announcing a funding round Wednesday, as reported by Gigaom, was the German peer-to-peer lending platform Bitbond, which lets individuals and small businesses take out loans in Bitcoin.
Investors in the 200,000 EUR seed round included Point Nine Capital and CEO of BillPay Nelson Holzner.
"Our investment in Bitbond is a great fit for our strategy to invest in marketplace models and fintech startups," Point Nine co-founder Pawel Chudzinski said in a statement. "We are excited to see Bitcoin being applied to create an international loan marketplace. The founding team has strong expertise in Bitcoin, tech and finance, which played a crucial role in our investment decision.”
- Pawel Chudzinski, Managing Partner at Point Nine Capital
Bitbond works differently from other peer-to-peer lending sites because interest rates are not set by the lender, but rather by an algorithm that calculates the borrower’s credit score.
“It does so based on statistical modeling and, on an individual basis, through documents like payslips and tax assessments, as well as connection with social media accounts — the more information the borrower provides, the lower a risk they’re likely to present,” Gigaom’s David Meyer reported.
CoinDesk reports that Bitbond plans to use the investment to upgrade its user interface as well as roll out new features such as loans linked to exchange rates, messaging tools, analytics for lenders and renovated mobile platform.
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