Bitcoins abound: KnC Miner raises a whopping $14 million Series A

    More hardware funding and bitcoin news – this time from Sweden. KnC Miner, a creator of state-of-the-art chips for bitcoin mining machines, has just raised a huge $14 million (€10.81 million) Series A from Stockholm-based investor, Creandum and GP Bullhound. This adds them to the list of other name-brand bitcoin companies that have raised eight figures lately, including BitPay, Coinbase, and Xapo.

    KnC got its start providing bitcoin and litecoin mining hardware and recently developed the world’s first 20 nanometer bitcoin chip. The company has also branched out into Cloud Mining, where they’ve set up a server farm in an old aircraft hanger in Swedish Lapland and allow buyers to rent out mining machines, or shares of mining machines. Pricing seems straightforward and renting a machine pumping out 3 TH/s (three trillion calculations a second for 6 months, will currently set you back $5,495, with the return on that investment fluctuating as widely as the value of bitcoin. As part of their cloud management services, it should be noted the the company has released a mobile Bitcoin wallet, called KnCWallet.

    KnC was founded in 2013 by Andreas Kennemar and Sam Cole and has already sold $70 million worth of mining equipment, and has moved $40 million worth of revenue through their mining operations. The company is also moving forward in developing new pool software, as well as other new financial products related to cryptocurrency mining, transacting and asset management, giving them a valuable mix of both hardware and bitcoin services.

    Investor Creandum has been tracking bitcoin companies more closely than most VCs in the region, building a crowdsourced database of bitcoin investments around the world. If the size of this round or the number of bitcoin-related press releases coming out way is any indication, the Nordics surely won’t be left out of this bitcoin madness.