OKCupid Founders’ Keybase Accepts Investment from Stellar

OKCupid’s co-founders’ new initiative, Keybase, has accepted an undisclosed investment from the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation.

Keybase, a platform built on improving end-to-end encryption, previously secured $10.8 million in a venture funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The terms of the investment from Stellar are not known, but Keybase will reportedly not need to pursue a Series B round at all after closing the deal.

Keybase co-founder Chris Coyne explained: “It’s a very friendly and mutually beneficial arrangement. It’s significantly less formal than a traditional venture round.”

Coyne added that he felt dating and cryptocurrencies will continue to interlink in the future. He and his partners made OKCupid one of the first tech companies to accept bitcoin payments.

Keybase has indicated that it will soon enable customers to hold Stellar’s cryptocurrency, lumens.

Coyne said: “It feels like we’ve almost given up on this story of people sending cryptocurrency to each other. What excites me about Stellar is that it’s insanely fast, transaction fees are close to zero and the low energy consumption is exciting to a lot of people on our team.”

Keybase’s technology means that data can be encrypted to users’ devices without having to handle cumbersome PGP keys.

Keybase already allows its users to send files and encrypted chats, all end-to-end encrypted across multiple devices for each user.

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