Blockchain payments startup Bitpay raises $40M Series B with participation from Menlo Ventures and Aquiline Capital Partners
Theodore Schleifer / Recode :
Context & Ripple Effects
Bitpay's $40M Series B lands at the peak of the 2017-2018 merchant-crypto buildout: the company processes bitcoin payments for merchants, and Menlo Ventures plus insurance-focused Aquiline Capital Partners are buying in at the Series B stage rather than seed. The bet pays off commercially within a year — bitcoin wallet provider Blockchain announces a partnership integrating BitPay's payment architecture into its wallet service, turning Bitpay from a processor into embedded infrastructure.
The longer arc sits with the investors. Menlo Ventures, here writing a mid-size check into crypto payments, later raised $3B dedicated to AI funds and reportedly holds an Anthropic stake worth nearly $14B — making this round an early data point in how generalist capital deployed into crypto rails before rotating hard into AI.
First-order effects
- Bitpay gains $40M to scale merchant payment processing, and the follow-on Blockchain wallet integration converts that funding into distribution across an established consumer wallet base.
- Menlo Ventures and Aquiline Capital Partners acquire Series B exposure to crypto payment volume, with Aquiline bringing an insurance-sector lens unusual for this category.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent founders read the round as validation and attack neighboring layers of the same stack: Paystand raises $20M for blockchain-based B2B payments aimed at making business transactions as simple as Venmo, while Talos later raises $40M led by a16z to let financial institutions offer digital asset trading — pushing the market from consumer checkout toward institutional rails.
- The ecosystem thickens around the payments core, drawing security specialists like Halborn, whose $90M Series A came on the back of clients including Coinbase and Solana.
Third-order effects
- If the capital-rotation pattern holds, generalist firms that seeded crypto payment infrastructure treat the category as a portfolio waypoint rather than a destination — Menlo's later $3B AI fundraise and its reported ~$14B Anthropic position show where the same firm's attention migrated.
- Crypto payments consolidates around embedded architecture deals like the BitPay-Blockchain integration, with value accruing to whoever owns the processing layer inside other companies' wallets and platforms.
The trend: Venture capital that built crypto payment rails in the late 2010s has since concentrated into AI, leaving crypto payments to specialist infrastructure providers and embedded integrations.