BitAngels has completed two years of existence this week. The group created in 2013 during a meeting at the Bitcoin 2013 conference hosted by Bitcoin Foundation is one of the first decentralized angel investors and veteran entrepreneur groups. Since its inception in 2013, BitAngels has been busy accelerating and supporting Bitcoin related start-ups.
The organization founded by Michael Terpin, David Johnston and Sam Yilmaz has grown fast over these past two years to include 500 investors and 6 locations across the world. The second anniversary celebrations of the organization was probably as impromptu as its very first meeting. The founders, expecting a small group of 6-7 people to attend the program had earlier sent out an invite on Reddit. The invite garnered enough attention on the platform to achieve an attendance of 35 people while the rest joined later to create a network of 60 angel investors and entrepreneurs.
BitAngels started as a small group which met at small restaurants which in no time graduated to big budget conferences and online presentations at regular intervals. The big names of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry are now part of the BitAngels network. BitAngels now has representatives in 23 cities along with 6 chapters across the world. This vast network allows them to cater to the Bitcoin start-up communities in those places easily and even set up face-to-face meetings with entrepreneurs.
The organization is also reaching out to more angel investors who are not currently invested in Bitcoin and crypto technology by entering into agreements and strategic partnerships with other angel networks. They entered an agreement recently with San Francisco based Keiretsu Forum which is the world’s largest angel group with over 1500 members.
BitAngels has successfully invested millions of dollars in multiple cryptocurrency and Bitcoin 2.0 companies. It achieved investments of around $7 million within a year of its launch. Led by Terpin, BitAngels has a spin-off called Dapps fund which is more focused on Blockchain technology based start-ups at a local level.
The Bitcoin start-up ecosystem is growing as we speak, so is the competition as many venture funds and accelerators are now looking at cryptocurrency industry with lots of interest.