Toronto’s Bitstrips Growing Insanely Fast, Raises $3 Million to Support Extreme Growth

Just yesterday, Toronto’s Bitstrips was ranked by startup analytical tool Mattermark as the fastest growing mobile app it’s tracking—and was listed as a company with no funding.

Today, the Canadian startup revealed it has in fact raised its first round of funding.

Bitstrips has raised a $3 million round from Hong Kong’s Horizons Ventures, which will help the company build and support its systems “to ensure a more seamless experience” for users—something that has plagued Bitstrips recently, as its app has grown faster than the team has been able to keep up with.

“Bitstrips has been around in various forms for over five years, but we just launched our mobile app this fall, and it exploded,” explains the chief executive officer of Bitstrips, Jacob Blackstock, who goes by “Ba.”

According to him, the app became number one in over 40 countries, and the number one app in the entertainment category in over 90 countries; in less than two months, more than 30 million avatars were created on the platform, and the users behind them were making millions of Bitstrips a day.

“The app was growing many times faster than our best projections—our servers were melting, the app was breaking, our users were getting frustrated,” says Ba, which made a funding round necessary.

Ba added vaguely that his company is working on tons of “pretty mind-blowing” new stuff.