• MoonPay received about 16 percent of its funding from celebrities.
• Launched in 2019, MoonPay has more than five million users and supports more than 80 digital assets.

MoonPay, a company that allows its clients to purchase digital assets with fiat money, has received about $87 million in investments from celebrities. The list of celebrity investors includes Steve Aoki, Justin Bieber, Post Malone, Drake, Snoop Dogg, Maria Sharapova, Bruce Willis, and many others. The new round of investment was aimed at making MoonPay PayPal for crypto-investments.

PayPal became a leading fintech without big help from Superstars, but PayPal wasn`t built during the period of NFT-BOOM. NFTs appeal to creators and artists because they allow them to generate revenue streams from digital assets. So it seemed natural for Evan Soto-Wright, CEO of MoonPay, to target venture capital firms specializing in the creative economy when it came time to raise money.

“I realized that the creator economy was really going to be an important part of our business, especially with NFT,” Soto-Wright says.

Crypto-pay infrastructure provider MoonPay closed its first $555 million Series A funding round, led by Tiger Global Management and Coatue.

Blossom Capital, Thrive Capital, Paradigm and NEA participated in the round. As a result, the startup, which has been operating for two and a half years, was valued at $3.4 billion.

The MoonPay team used the funding to expand its business globally and increase the number of employees.

According to a statement, the startup’s infrastructure provides a point of entry into the cryptocurrency market, allowing to operate with fiat money and digital assets, “using all major payment methods” in compliance with KYC procedures.

Investors from the first funding round brought many celebrities from their social circles to MoonPay. Initially, the Superstars weren’t particularly interested in Web3 and NFT, Soto-Wright helped them understand, set up cryptocurrency wallets, and connect them to OpenSea.

As one credit to MoonPay, it’s that they helped make it easier for celebrities to dive into the world of Web3, and in particular buying monkeys from BAYC. The first celebrity MoonPay customer was TV host Jimmy Fallon.
On Nov. 12, Fallon tweeted an image of an NFT from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection with the caption “Permission to come a bored?”

The MoonPay platform supports more than 30 fiat currencies and over 90 digital assets. Currently, the company has about 250 partners in 160 countries and a customer base of at least 7 million users.

Since 2019, MoonPay has processed more than $2 billion in transactions, a figure that showed 35-fold growth over the past year, the company stressed.

“We think that the crypto economy today is growing faster than the internet was at a similar stage of its development and that MoonPay is well-positioned to serve crypto-native innovators and those in traditional finance.” – said Tiger Global partner John Curtis.