[Correction: The article has been updated to state that Aquiline Technology Growth is the lead investor in the series B round and to mention other investors]

Leading bitcoin payment processor BitPay has raised $40 million in series B round led by Aquiline Technology Growth (ATG).

In December 2017, BitPay announced that it was raising $30 million in a strategic Series B funding. Recode has now reported that Menlo Ventures is the latest to join the funding round, marking the venture firm’s first investment in the blockchain space.

Tyler Sosin, the person leading Menlo’s work in crypto, said his firm had been looking into blockchain startups for the last 18 months but had yet to find something that they loved. He said that the VC firm believes that blockchain technology will be integral to the future of payments, adding that the industry is still evolving and Menlo intends to dive more into this space.

“We gravitated towards BitPay because we felt the company had identified a killer use for crypto in facilitating low cost payment solutions for cross-border commerce and B2B payments, which is a massive market poorly served by the existing payment rails,” said Sosin. “We are impressed with the company’s execution—it has demonstrated extremely efficient growth and a stickiness with merchants and consumers that is the hallmark of many great payment service providers. As the market leading crypto-processor, BitPay is well positioned to both benefit from and serve the fast moving crypto-ecosystem.”

In addition to Menlo, other participants include Capital Nine, G Squared, Nimble Ventures (an affiliate of Passport Capital) and Delta-v Capital as well as individual investments from Christopher Klauss Family Office, Founder of Internet Security Systems (ISS), and Alvin Liu, Co-founder of Tencent, according to the official release.

Bitpay CEO Stephen Pair said that the company had to expand the round from a planned $30 million to the final $40 million due to high demand. The latest round follows a Series A round in which BitPay raised $30 million in 2014.

The company is now planning to use the amount raised towards its international expansion, particularly into Asia. Pair said that BitPay could open its office in either Hong Kong or Singapore this year.

“BitPay had a record 2017 as we processed over $1 Billion in bitcoin payments. We brought on these new investors who can help BitPay scale globally to meet customer demand,” said Stephen Pair, BitPay CEO. “Our goals include key hires in engineering and regulatory licensing, as well as expansion into emerging markets in Asia-one of BitPay's fastest-growing regions for transactions and wallet adoption.”