Blockchain announced today that it has secured a record $30.5m Series A funding deal, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Wicklow Capital.

The figure is one of the largest ever single investments in a bitcoin company, after BitPayannounced a new record with its $30m Series A round in May and Xapo achieved the gold standard for total funding with $40m over two rounds in Marchand July.

Blockchain is the world's most popular bitcoin wallet provider, search and technical information source with 2.3 million wallet accounts and a total $26bn in transaction volume.

Today's news marks its first funding round from external investors. It was previously bootstrapped by founders including Roger Ver, who remains with the company.

Blockchain president Peter Smith said:

Future Plans

According to a report in the New York Times, Lightspeed partner Jeremy Liew will take a seat on Blockchain's board.

Blockchain will use the extra funding to grow its product and engineering teams, and expand and invest in developing markets. Wallet services would be the "central nexus of value creation" in the digital currency industry, said Liew.

Founder and CEO Nicolas Cary told CoinDesk he was looking forward to the opportunities such an investment would bring. He said:

"This is the first outside capital in Blockchain. We've accomplished a lot with a little. So now we're even more excited about what we can do. We have a very compelling product roadmap and we're eager to share it with our users over the coming months."

Blockchain produces software tools for merchants to accept bitcoin, and acquired bitcoin price and data provider ZeroBlock last December. It also manages the premium domain namebitcoin.com, which it uses to introduce bitcoin to total newcomers.

source: http://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-grow-further-closing-30-5-million-funding-round/