A year ago, the idea of a Bitcoin startup raising nearly eight figures in funding would have been all but unfathomable. Then again, so would the idea of a well-known tech exec jumping into the Bitcoin space.
On Thursday, a new startup called Circle announced raising a $9 million Series A round from big-name investors including Jim Breyer, Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners. Much of that funding can be chalked up to the pedigree of its founder, Jeremy Allaire, a serial entrepreneur who founded and currently serves as the chairman of Brightcove, an online video platform.
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Circle is still very much under wraps, but the plan is to create online services that make it easier for consumers to purchase and use digital currency — particularly Bitcoin — without having to worry about long character strings and public key cryptography, and to make it easier for merchants to integrate digital currencies into their businesses.
For Allaire, the goal of his new venture is effectively to help take Bitcoin mainstream. "We really want to improve [digital currency] a great deal to make it as easy as having a Gmail account or making a free phone call with Skype," Allaire told Mashable in an interview. He is aware, however, that just as with e-mail adoption, Bitcoin won't become mass-market overnight. "It's going to take awhile for this to really get to a large scale."

The key to expanding the use of Bitcoins and digital currency in general, as Allaire sees it, is to expand its presence in merchants, which is why Circle aims to tackle both consumer and merchant services. "Right now, when consumers adopt something like Bitcoin, it's a speculative investment," he says. "In order for it to be part of trade and commerce, it needs to have merchant acceptance."
Part of the reason Allaire has decided to enter the Bitcoin space is precisely because of the many obstacles it faces. "This is not like your typical Internet startup where you ship a product and hope people will adopt it. The barriers here are a lot higher," he says, pointing to regulatory issues and the need to be well capitalized, among others. As he sees it, the Bitcoin industry lacks a certain amount of "sophisticated" entrepreneurs and capital, which leaves an opening for a well-funded, experienced startup to take hold.
Allaire will continue to serve as chairman of Brightcove while building Circle and notes that his new company is "about a block and a half" from Brightcove's office in Boston, Mass.
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Image: Circle