MoonPay CEO and co-founder Evan Soto-Wright speaks at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Florida.
Eva Marie Ozkategi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
What do Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg and Ashton Kutcher have in common? Aside from being a top list celebrity, they are among over 60 new investors in the fintech startup MoonPay.
Additional popular investors include Chainsmokers, Drake, Eva Longoria, Jason Derulo, Kate Hudson, Paris Hilton, Matthew McConaughey, Mindy Kaling, Questlove and Shawn Mendes, among others. New investors contribute a total of $87 million to A previously announced A $555 million funding round led by Tiger Global and Coatue, valuing MoonPay at $3.4 billion.
Founded in Miami in 2018, the company’s software allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrency using traditional payment methods such as credit cards, bank transfers or mobile wallets, such as apple push and The Google Pay.
MoonPay also sells its technology to other companies including crypto site Bitcoin.com and Non-replaceable code (NFT) Marketplace OpenSea, CEO Evan Soto-Wright called “Crypto-as-a-Service”.
NFTs are digital assets that represent real things – like art, music, and real estate – and cannot be duplicated. In the past few months alone, major brands from every industry, including coca colaAnd McDonald’sAnd nikeand Gucci and the National Football League, they bring the NFTs into their marketing initiatives.
“A lot of companies may open a very small portion of their rounds, but we wanted to make meaningful validations from these people, because we want them to be a part of that story and shape the direction of the product,” Soto-Wright told CNBC.
In particular, when it comes to artists, they don’t want to tour forever, so they are increasingly diversifying, he said.
“A lot of them have venture capital portfolios, a lot of them have their own standalone projects, and we came to them saying ‘we can help you understand the opportunities related to Web3, crypto and metaverse,’” said Soto-Wright. Everyone wanted to be a part of it.”
MoonPay says it has been profitable since it launched its platform in 2019. Its service is now used by more than 10 million customers in 160 countries.
However, investors have struggled to see value in digital art and are confused by big sales, such as the Beeple piece that sold at Christie’s for $69 million.
Looking to the future, the company plans to spend the collected money on new products and expansion. It also has ambitions to attract entrepreneurs to the public.
“We have aspirations to eventually be a public company,” Soto Wright told CNBC in November.
However, cryptocurrencies are known to be volatile, and this has affected even the most well-known players in the field. Bitcoin It fell below $40,000 earlier this week for the first time since mid-March.
—CNBC Ryan Brown Contribute to this report.
