Valhalla Ventures Invests $21M in MoonPay’s $555M Series A Round

It warms our hearts to share that Valhalla Ventures has invested $21M in MoonPay’s $555M Series A financing at a $3.4B valuation! The round was led by Tiger Global and Coatue with participation from NEA, Thrive Capital, Paradigm, and Blossom Capital.

The Valhalla team is overjoyed for our dear friend Ivan Soto-Wright, co-founder and CEO of MoonPay, for his success in leading his team to this landmark financing which is the largest and highest valued Series A financing for any bootstrapped crypto startup globally.

Further, the Valhalla team would like to congratulate the entire MoonPay team for this accomplishment which is only possible thanks to their tireless efforts to build the world’s leading fiat-to-crypto payments technology stack, with MoonPay now integrated into over 250 platforms from Bitcoin.com to OpenSea and serving over 7M customers in 160 countries globally with over $2B in transactions processed to date.

This moment is bittersweet for Valhalla as our Series A participation in MoonPay is our firm’s largest investment to date, yet the initial seed financing for the company represents our worst investment miss. Ivan approached Valhalla in June of 2019 to see if there was interest in participating in a $1M seed financing at a $10M valuation shortly after the company won Bitcoin.com as a client. MoonPay was already processing millions of dollars in transaction volumes, netting hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per month and consistent net profits from inception.

However, as we pitched the investment to our limited partners we found that after the ICO boom of 2017 had turned to bust in 2018 and many investors watched historic profits turn to as much as 99% peak-to-trough losses, there was no love on the street for MoonPay’s seed round.

Investors had written crypto off as a scam, thinking Bitcoin was a fad and the digital assets space writ large was unlikely to produce anything of value. Valhalla pitched over 100 of our limited partners on the opportunity, as did Ivan separately to his network, and neither were able to convince investors to back the company.

The Valhalla team then watched over the next months as Ivan secured a line of credit to bootstrap the business coming into 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly hit and multitudes of Gen Z and Millennials overnight became quasi-professional crypto day traders, MoonPay experienced an explosion in transaction volumes resulting in over 30x revenue growth from Q1 of 2020 to Q2 of 2021.

To all of our investors who missed out on MoonPay’s seed financing, from day one we believed Ivan was special and that his company would succeed and we tried our best to share our enthusiasm. We share in the pain of our 340x MOIC miss.

While we can’t turn back time, we are happy to now offer qualified purchasers the opportunity to participate in our debut $100M fund which is tracking to be fully subscribed by Q1 of 2022. With this fund we intend to find and nurture the next MoonPay with concentrated bets on infrastructure providers at the intersection of digital assets, gaming, and the metaverse.

The future is incredibly bright for MoonPay, which continues to out-innovate its competitors and achieve torrid growth by providing a PayPal-like experience for participants in the digital assets ecosystem. We are excited to partner with MoonPay in realizing their goal of democratizing access to the crypto economy in order to help billions of people access trillions of dollars of digital value over the next decade and beyond.

Our heartfelt congratulations go out to Ivan and the entire MoonPay team, we are thrilled to be on this journey with you!