Wirex has announced its first crowdfunding drive, aiming to raise £1 million.

The Crowdcube campaign plans to use new funding to scale up the company. Plans are underway to launch several product and service updates, including additional currencies, free international ATM withdrawals and an upgraded rewards program.

Striving for global expansion, Wirex is also actively seeking licences in new territories with a launch in both the US and Japan in the coming months.

Since its inception in 2014, the UK-based payments platform has given users the ability to buy, exchange, hold and spend multiple traditional and cryptocurrencies using a centralised app and card.

The business experienced a 100 per cent increase in the volume of cryptocurrency transactions on the platform in March compared to February, as well as the highest volume of transactions in a single day in the Asia Pacific region.

In July, Mastercard named Wirex as its first crypto-native principal member. Prior to this, Wirex was the first company to launch a contactless debit card letting customers spend cryptocurrency in-store, as well as the first cryptocurrency rewards scheme, Cryptoback.

It is also one of the few crypto-friendly companies that is a UK regulated e-money institution. With a company valuation of £125 million, Wirex announced that it turned profitable in 2019, recently reaching 3.1 million customers across 130 countries, with the aim of 10 million customers by the end of 2021.

Chief executive and co-founder Pavel Matveev stated: "We have a lot of exciting projects and announcements already underway at Wirex as we endeavour to provide a cheaper, faster and safer platform, and crowdfunding will only fast-track our ambitious plans.

"We're proudly a hedgehog FinTech - our journey to becoming a tech unicorn is built on managing and monetising growth sensibly," he continued, adding: "Millions of 'Wirexers' have supported our growth - this funding round is deliberately aimed at giving them an opportunity to own a share of the brand as we go to the next phase of our growth and scale-up."

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