MoonPay

History

2022: Attracting $87 million of investments, including from Maria Sharapova

On April 13, 2022, it became known that the cryptocurrency payment startup MoonPay raised $87 million from more than 60 investors, including singer Justin Bieber, rapper Snoop Dogg, tennis player Maria Sharapova and actor Bruce Willis, amid how the role of non-replaceable tokens (NFT) in creating content and attracting fans is becoming more significant.

This round of funding MoonPay the amount of $555 million is additional. The round was announced back in November 2021, which was headed by Tiger Global Management and Coatue, as a result of which the company was valued at $3.4 billion.

Maria Sharapova invested in an infrastructure developer for cryptocurrency operations MoonPay

Other investors in the company include rapper Aubrey Drake Graham and Adela Fücher Nura's company Dreamcrew, Kinship Ventures under the leadership of Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashton Katcher, a venture capital firm Sound Ventures, supported by Guy Oseasari, singer Abel Tesekfaifer, and his manager Maekfaife, the more

MoonPay provides payment infrastructure for transactions with cryptocurrencies and NFT. According to Chief Executive Officer Ivan Soto-Wright, the company expects content creators to increasingly use NFT to promote their work and interact with fans.

At the end of 2021, the company launched a concierge service to help wealthy people and celebrities acquire NFT tokens and cryptocurrencies. This step could introduce celebrities to the platform, which led to their investment.

We wanted to make significant commitments to these people, because we want them to be part of this story and form the direction of the product - said MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto- Wright in an interview. Many of them have venture capital portfolios, and many of them also have their own independent enterprises, and we came to them with the words: We can help you understand the capabilities of Web3, cryptocurrencies and the metaverse.

Around cryptocurrencies, the number of transactions continues to increase. The payment company Wyre was acquired by Bolt in early April 2022 for $1.5 billion. Wyre claims that it processed more than $10 billion in payments and provided the opportunity to switch to cryptocurrency to more than 15 million consumers. For comparison, at the time of the Series A financing round in November 2022, the company MoonPay processed transactions worth $2 billion from 7 million users, at the time of the end of the additional round they number almost 10 million people.

Another competitor, the Hong Kong crypto exchange XanPool, raised $27 million in Series A under the leadership of Valar Ventures Peter Thiel. It has 500 thousand users and 400 business partners.^[1]

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