Overstock.com, Inc. has invested $5 million into San Jose based Bitcoin technology specialist PeerNova Inc., as part of the second tranche of Series A funding.

The company, at least on paper was founded in early 2014, but was the result of a merger of two separate pre-existing companies: cloud mining contractor CloudHashing and ASIC designer HighBitcoin.

PeerNova describes itself as an “innovator and thought leader” in distributed trustless systems based on Bitcoin blockchain technologies, and claims to be “pioneering the disruption of the digital assets and financial transactions sectors.”

In particular, the company is aiming to bring blockchain-based applications to the enterprise at scale; the technology can serve as a platform to reduce friction, costs, and improve security in e-commerce financial and other transactions.

The company also offers advanced bitcoin mining hardware and cloud services.

“PeerNova’s team and depth of knowledge in this space impressed the Overstock team,” CEO of Overstock.comPatrick M. Byrne said in a statement. “With our knowledge of PeerNova’s projects and Overstock’s suspicion of society’s reliance on centralized systems, we believe that this collaboration forms a win-win. I believe such crypto technologies will solve many social problems that flow from our society’s reliance on centralized systems.”

Including the new funding PeerNova has raised $13.6 million to-date, although with debt financing included, the figure comes to $19 million. Previous investors include
Crypto Currency Partners, Atiq Raza, Ashar Aziz, Steve Case and Mosaik Partners.

PeerNova said it intended to use the funds to accelerate the development of two core enterprise products focused on data security and financial applications and to build a world-class product and business development teams.

photo credit: Bitcoin via photopin (license)