Today I’m thrilled to announce River Financial’s $5.7 million seed fundraising round led by Polychain Capital, with Slow Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, DG Lab Fund, Cygni Capital, Pfeffer Capital Ltd, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Steve Lee and a number of other incredible angel investors also participating. We will be putting this money hard to work as we build a financial institution focused on bringing Bitcoin to the world.
In early 2019 River was just an idea. I had spent the last six years in Silicon Valley deeply focused on Bitcoin for the majority of my both my professional work and graduate studies. I was in awe at how fast Bitcoin grew in popularity and was thrilled to see it getting attention from all corners of the globe. However, despite all of this growth, the industry was in a state of arrested development. Everybody was focused on building trading platforms to help people gamble on tokens, instead of building products to bring Bitcoin to the next billion people.
Therefore, I decided to start River, a company focused on bringing Bitcoin to the world. Today, River Financial operates in 19 U.S. states, has 13 full-time employees, and serves thousands of clients who regularly refer their bitcoin-curious friends and family members to our service. Our volume has grown an average of 80% month over month since we launched, and it has been very satisfying to see the positive feedback from our clients, to whom we are incredibly grateful.
While this fundraise is a big milestone for us, we are just getting started on this journey. Last year we were heads down laying the technical and regulatory foundation for the company. This year we are building the skyscraper -– expanding across the United States and launching a number of new products that we believe will help push Bitcoin forward towards its destiny as the most popular store of value and medium exchange in the world.
This fundraise would not have been possible without my incredible co-founder Andrew Benson and the amazing River team. Additionally, I want to extend my deepest thanks to Elizabeth Stark for being such an invaluable advisor since the very beginning. I’d also like to thank all of our other advisors and investors without whom this fundraise would not be possible. We are incredibly excited to help build the future Bitcoin deserves!
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If you’d like to learn more about the fundraising round and our company background, check out the articles below for more information. They are all great reads: