Abra, the company changing how people use cash and their smartphones to send and receive money around the world, announced today that it has closed its Series A financing round and has now raised over $14 million in venture financing. Investors in the Series A financing round include Arbor Ventures, RRE Ventures and First Round Capital. The round was highly oversubscribed.
Abra won the Launch Festival in March as Best Overall Company and has since been testing its services for storing digital cash, sending that money to any smartphone and using a new network of human ATM’s, called Abra Tellers, who are individuals or businesses earning money by buying and selling digital cash to and from any consumer via the Abra App.
Abra will soon announce the general availability of the Abra App in its initial launch markets. To date, pre-registrations for consumers and Tellers have come from over 80 countries. Wei Hopeman of Arbor Ventures commented, “Arbor sees huge potential for the Abra business model globally, but especially in China and Southeast Asia, which are traditionally large cash economies but leapfrogging into mobile payments and bypassing traditional banking and card infrastructure at an accelerating rate. Making cash mobile will unlock a lot of opportunities in these markets and across the region.”
An investor in several digital currency companies, RRE Ventures Managing Partner and Abra Co-Founder Jim Robinson is particularly excited about the potential of Abra to disrupt the global money transfer market. “As early proponents of Blockchain technology, we believe that Abra is one of the companies that’s fully leveraging the potential of the technology by reducing friction in financial services. It’s not about Bitcoin for the sake of Bitcoin – it’s about how the technology can solve problems for consumers worldwide, even if they don’t know what the Blockchain is.”
Abra investors include Arbor Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Carthona Capital, Cyanotype, Digital Currency Group, First Round Capital, Future Perfect Ventures, Haystack, Jungle Ventures, The Launch Fund, Lehrer Hippeau Ventures, Liberty City Ventures, NYCA, Pantera Capital, and RRE Ventures.
