Viennese crypto company Bitpanda receives funding of $ 52 million

The Viennese cryptocurrency company Bitpanda , founded in 2014, is getting fresh money. The start-up has closed Europe's largest Series A financing round of 2020 with $ 52 million (EUR 45 million), as it announced on Tuesday. Among the investors are the Valar Ventures of the German-American tech billionaire Peter Thiel and the Viennese venture capitalist Speedinvest.

Bitpanda wants to use the money to expand in other European countries and take on 70 new employees at the Vienna location by the end of the year. Around 130 people currently work for the fintech, which operates a trading platform for bitcoins, among other things.

Bitpanda is supposed to become a "unicorn"

Valar Ventures co-founder Andrew McCormack wants to turn Bitpanda into Europe's next fintech unicorn, i.e. a start-up with a valuation of more than one billion dollars.

The native German and Donald Trump supporter Thiel is among other things a co-founder of the controversial US data collection company Palantir, which also works with governments and goes public on Wednesday. In addition, at the end of the 1990s, Thiel founded the online payment service PayPal together with Max Levchin and Elon Musk (Tesla boss) and he was one of Facebook's first external investors.