Bitcoin payment startup PEY has raised €300,000 ($339,780) in seed funding for a new payroll service.
The Hanover-based firm, which makes bitcoin point-of-sale (POS) terminals alongside a consumer app, attracted investment from a series of entrepreneurs, including the former managing director of multinational e-commerce company Zalando, Frank Biedka.
Ricardo Ferrer Rivero, founder and managing director at PEY, told CoinDesk:
"The new funding will be used to hire developers, pay lawyers for everything necessary to make in-depth checks on what we are offering to customers and to ensure that we find legal workarounds that help expand bitcoin adoption."
PEY will be launching the payroll solution this autumn, enabling companies in Germany – where the cryptocurrency is considered to be a financial instrument – to pay a portion of their employees' salaries in the digital currency.
"Currently we are using the fact that in Germany bitcoin is not considered a currency. Our lawyers and advisors helped us get legal and tax approval to do this correctly. We will be offering that for now only in Germany but we want to find similar workarounds in every country we enter," Rivero said.
According to its founder, the startup – which gave away some of its POS terminals to merchants in Germany for free earlier this year – is also hoping for its devices to expand internationally.
"We have had a great reception to the terminals ... We also had a lot of people from around the world asking us how they could order them. We have put them all on a waiting list and will notify them as soon as we roll out internationally."
Despite PEY's recent venture, the startup does not yet have a revenue model. This decision, the founder claims, is attributed to the company's focus on offering value to both merchants and users.
"If we have enough happy people and companies on both sides, we are sure that we will find a way to earn money. When the time comes, we will start thinking of what is the best way of achieving this," he concluded.
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