One of Latin America’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges, the Brazilian-based Mercado Bitcoin, has succeeded in raising $200m in its recent Series B funding round.
This latest investment in Mercado Bitcoin makes 2TM (Mercado’s parent company) the 8th most valuable Unicorn company in South America.
Pivotal to success in this latest fundraising effort has been investment from SoftBank, which is under the leadership of CEO Marcelo Claure, in Latin American technology companies as part of a BRIC strategy that aims to invigorate technological innovation on the continent.
This strategy has seen the launch of SoftBank’s Latin America Innovation Fund – with $2B to invest across Central and South America – in order to provide much needed capital and foreign direct investment (FDI) to the continent’s most promising entrepreneurs.
The $200m contribution represents SoftBank’s largest investment on the continent and makes true on their promise to “become a major investor in transformative Latin American companies that are poised to redefine their industries and create new economic opportunities for millions of people”.
Mercado Bitcoin will use the funds to increase the scale of its exchange operations in order to expand its offerings, alongside investing in infrastructure to meet the surge in demand for crypto in the region.
The company has seen significant growth over the past year, with its client base reaching 2.8 million in 2021 – more than 70% of the entire individual investors base on Brazil’s stock exchange.
Mercado Bitcoin – Brazil’s Unicorn
Mercado Bitcoin was founded by two brothers in 2013, when Mauricio and Gustavo Chamati envisioned Mercado Bitcoin as the first crypto exchange in Brazil.
This Series B financing round comes only five months after Mercado Bitcoin’s Series A round in January 2021, led by G2D/GP Investments and Parallax Ventures with advisory participation from J.P.Morgan.
As a company Mercado Bitcoin has been profitable since 2018, and until a successful Series A funding round in January 2021 had been self-scaling, reinvesting its cash generation into exchange growth and cryptocurrency portfolio expansion, according to Parent Company CEO and 2TM Group Executive Chairman Roberto Dagnoni.
Mercado Bitcoin’s parent company 2TM became the first to tokenise public debt assets in 2019 and launched its own digital asset alongside Fifa last year.
Mercado Bitcoin has a pattern of partnering with other blockchain innovators in Latin America too, in 2018 funding partner SoftBank launched its own blockchain aimed at facilitating global mobile payments.
Then in 2019, Mercado partnered with BitPay to bring cryptocurrency transactions to Mercardo Livre (Brazil’s biggest e-Commerce network).
As the crypto industry fight for dominance across De-Central America partnerships like these could prove critical to the long-term success of adoption and as “Millions of people around the world are realising that digital assets and cryptocurrencies are both innovative technologies and efficient stores of value – Brazil is no exception to that trend” according to Roberto Dagnoni.
Some analysts predict that Brazil’s FinTech economy will be worth $24B in the next decade, and cryptocurrency is becoming an attractive means of banking Brazil’s bankless.
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