Imgur Receives $20M From Ex-Ripple CTO’s Payments Startup

Major image hosting platform and meme site Imgur received $20 million from micropayments startup Coil, according to a press release published on June 26

Per the release, as part of the partnership between the two companies, the founder and CEO of Coil and former CTO of Ripple Stefan Thomas will join Imgur’s board of directors. Imgur CEO Alan Schaaf commented:

“Coil's technology will open up new opportunities for users to give to one another and support the community in new ways.”

The press release explains that Coil’s platform lets users subscribe to other users’ content and use the company’s application programming interface to send micropayments to the content creator.

As part of the partnership, some of Imgur’s 300 million users who decide to subscribe to a premium membership and Coil subscription will be able to pay each other for original content.

The release also claims that the partnership creates new opportunities for Imgur to profit and improve user experience while also scaling up its advertisement business. 

Imgur, which was founded in 2009, is a popular image-sharing site that is also used by the Reddit community to share visual content. As of press time data from Amazon’s web statistics platform Alexa states that Imgur is the 16th most-visited website in the United States and the 56th most-visited worldwide.

In 2014, Imgur raised $40 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Reddit. 

As Cointelegraph reported in October last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with Ripple Labs Inc. and Coil to implement the Interledger Protocol.