Circle Internet Financial had launched a USD9 million Series A investment round. Investors in the funding round would be Accel Partners, Jim Breyer and General catalyst Partners. All three were existing investors of Circle founder Jeremy Allaire's initial endeavor called Brightcove. Brightcove later on went public last year.

Proceeds from the investment round would go towards Circle's development of a payment platform that would be adopting digitial currencies. Consumers and merchants would be conducting transactions primarily using Bitcoins, for example.

Publicity from the the illegal trading in online black market Silk Road had pushed digital currencies, Bitcoin in particular, to the spotlight. In turn, investors showed an increasing interest to use digital currencies due to lower costs, privacy of the transaction and security.

Circle's Series A funding was dubbed by tech website Techcrunch as the largest funding amount secured by a digital currency startup so far. Startups like Coinbase and BitPay secured USD5 million and USD2.5 million in initial funding from investors.