New Zealand's Easy Crypto raises $11.75M, eyes stock market float
Summary
According to an Oct.6 announcement from Easy Crypto, the NZD 17 million figure “seemed to have set a new record in New Zealand” for the largest Series A funding from a local firm. Co-founder and CEO Janine Grainger ha expressed how difficult it had been to garner investment in the early stages the company due to working in the “fringe” crypto sector. The funds will be used to accelerate growth via product and tech development, investment in talent, and expanding to new markets in Indonesia and the Philippines to service the unbanked. Easy Crypto was founded by siblings Janine and Alan Grainger in 2017, and has generated $760 million (NZD 1.1 billion) worth of sales to date, from a customer base of more than 150,000 across NZ, Australia, South Africa and Brazil. Cointelegraph reported in July that a former Cryptopia employee pled guilty to the theft of around $172,000 in crypto he obtained by making a copy of users’ private keys while working at the firm.