(Bloomberg) -- Former Meta Platforms Inc. executive David Marcus, who spearheaded the social giant’s digital currency efforts before departing last year, is launching a new company focused on building technology to promote Bitcoin.
The company, called Lightspark, will “explore, build and extend the capabilities and utility of Bitcoin,” Marcus wrote in a statement. The startup is creating infrastructure to support the Lightning Network, a crypto payments system designed to make Bitcoin transactions faster and cheaper.
Marcus raised roughly $175 million in venture capital funding for the new company, according to a source familiar with the deal, and venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm are co-leading the round.
Marcus left Meta after an eventful seven years in late 2021 with plans to start a new business. He joined Meta, then Facebook, in 2014 to lead the company’s Messenger team and spent four years running the service. But Marcus will be best known for his role in co-creating Libra, later renamed Diem, the company’s proposed digital currency that ran into intense regulatory pushback and never launched. The group was eventually spun out of Facebook but kept the social media company as its primary backer. The operation sold its intellectual property and other assets to Silvergate Capital Corp. earlier this year.
Lightspark will be headquartered in Los Angeles. Other investors include Thrive Capital, Coatue, Felix Capital, Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners and Zeev Ventures.
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
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