Tumkur to Bengaluru: Unocoin raises $1.5 million
- Earlier the bitcoin start-up had raised $250,000 in funding from SecondMarket founder Barry Silbert's Bitcoin Opportunity Corp
- The company was started in Tumkur and is now head-quartered in Bengaluru
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Unocoin, a Bengaluru-based Bitcoin startup, has raised $1.5 million in funding from Blume Ventures, Mumbai  Angels and ah! Ventures.Â
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International investors like Digital Currency Group, Boost VC, Bank to the Future and FundersClub also participated in the pre series-A round.
"We started from my small hometown called Tumkur and our goal from the beginning was to make it easy to get bitcoin in India. A few years later, we are now headquartered in Bangalore with 30-plus employees, serving more than 100,000 customers across the country and growing exponentially," Unocoin co-founder and CEO Sathvik Vishwanath said.Â
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He added that given that India has huge inward remittance and technical prowess, it is a perfect home for Bitcoin and blockchain technology.Â
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Bitcoin is a digital currency and payment network that uses open-source and peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks.Â
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The management of the transactions and bitcoins issuance are carried out collectively by the network.Â
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The Reserve Bank of India has issued a warning against dealing in Bitcoin and other virtual currencies due to various risks, including those related to money-laundering and cyber security, as such digital currencies are not backed by any assets or monetary authorities.Â
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However, RBI also appreciated the strengths of the underlying blockchain technology.Â
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Previously, Unocoin had raised USD 250,000 (Rs 1.52 crore) in funding from SecondMarket founder Barry Silbert's Bitcoin Opportunity Corp.Â
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"In Sathvik and team, we discovered not only the leading Bitcoin company in India, but a determination to educate all stakeholders, simplify Bitcoin's usage, and bring another frictionless layer to payments and commerce," Karthik Reddy from Blume Ventures said.Â
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Unocoin has launched a merchant point-of-sale (POS) app, a mobile trading app and an auto-selling feature for remittance users among other features over the past year.
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