Crypto firm MoonPay raises $87M from Gwyneth Paltrow, Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher, and others

MoonPay, a cryptocurrency payments startup, has raised $87 million from over 60 high-profile investors, including pop star Justin Bieber, tennis player Maria Sharapova, actors Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashton Kutcher, and rap icon Snoop Dogg.

The funding was a part of the crypto firm’s Series A financing round, disclosed in November 2021, which valued the firm at $3.4 billion. The new investors contributed a collective $87 million to the Series A funding round led by Coatue and Tiger Global.

Founded in 2018, the Miami-based MoonPay provides payments infrastructure for NFT and cryptocurrency transactions. Chief executive officer Ivan Soto-Wright said that the firm expects content creators to increasingly use NFTs to market their work and increase fan engagement.

MoonPay also sells its proprietary technology to other businesses, including NFT marketplace OpenSea and crypto website Bitcoin.com, a model described as “crypto-as-a-service” by the CEO Soto-Wright.

Non-fungible token or NFT is a type of crypto asset that utilizes blockchain technology to record who owns a digital file, such as a video, an image, or a text.

According to the managing director at 3iQ Digital Assets, Alex McDougall, over 600 crypto startups have seen over $12.5 billion in venture capital investment in 2022.