MoonPay CEO and co-founder Ivan Soto-Wright speaking at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Florida.
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What do Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg and Ashton Kutcher have in common? In addition to being A-list celebrities, they are among more than 60 new investors in fintech startup MoonPay.
Additional celebrity investors include Chainsmokers, Drake, Eva Longoria, Jason Derulo, Kate Hudson, Paris Hilton, Matthew McConaughey, Mindy Kaling, Questlove, and Shawn Mendes, among others. The new investors are contributing a collective $87 million to a previously announced $555 million funding round led by Tiger Global and Coatue, valuing MoonPay at $3.4 billion.
Founded in 2018, the Miami-based company's software allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies using conventional payment methods such as credit cards, bank transfers or mobile wallets, such as Apple pay and Google To pay.
MoonPay also sells its technology to other companies, including cryptocurrency website Bitcoin.com and non-fungible token (NFT) OpenSea, a model CEO Ivan Soto-Wright calls "crypto-as-a-service."
NFTs are digital assets that represent real-world objects, such as art, music, and real estate, and cannot be replicated. In the last few months alone, big brands from every industry, including Coca Cola, mcdonald's, NikeGucci and the National Football League have included NFTs in their marketing initiatives.
"A lot of companies may open a very small portion of their rounds, but we wanted to get meaningful checks from these folks, because we want them to be a part of this story and shape the direction of the product," Soto-Wright told CNBC.
Particularly when it comes to artists, they don't want to be on tour forever, so they're branching out more and more, he said.
"A lot of them have venture capital portfolios, a lot of them have their own independent companies, and we went to them to say 'we can help you understand the opportunities around Web3, crypto and the metaverse,'" Soto-Wright said. . "We had practically no rejections. Everybody wanted to be a part of this."
MoonPay says that it has been profitable since it launched its platform in 2019. Its service is now used by more than 10 million customers in 160 countries.
Still, investors have struggled to see the value of digital art and are puzzled by big sales, like the Beeple piece, which sold at Christie's for $69 million.
Looking ahead, the company plans to spend the money raised on new products and expansion. He also has the ambition to take the business public.
"We have aspirations to eventually be a public company," Soto-Wright told CNBC in November.
However, cryptocurrencies are notoriously volatile and that has affected even the most well-known players in the space. Bitcoin it dipped below $40,000 earlier this week for the first time since mid-March.
โCNBC Ryan Browne contributed to this report.
