21 Inc., an otherwise yet unknown Bitcoin industry company, just emerged from stealth to announce $116 million in venture capital funding. Although it has stopped being so secretive and it has a lot of funding, it’s still hard to tell what 21 does exactly. Even its CEO and co-founder, Matthew Pauker, has been cryptic about the company’s operations.

Amid investment trends into Bitcoin companies $116 is the largest to date. In January, Coinbase led the charts with a $75 million series C investment round, bringing its total up to $106.7 million.

While now known as 21, the company appears to have started out as 21e6, a reference to Bitcoin’s 21 million coin limit, according to Digital Currency Magnates. 21’s website makes a direct reference to this with “21 million Bitcoin, infinite possibilities.” It also provides an e-mail signup for interested users.

The lead investors in 21 Inc. make up a considerable number of extremely well-connected companies including Andreessen Horowitz, RRE Ventures, Chinese private-equity firm Yuan Capital and Qualcomm’s venture-capital unit. Others run a gamut of successful startups with a strong vision for Internet technology and money such as PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll, Zynga co-founder Mark Pincusl, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.

As to 21’s plans, according to the Wall Street Journal, Pauker would only say there will be “several interesting developments over the next weeks and months” and that 21 would be attempting “to drive mainstream adoption of bitcoin” with hardware and software products.

“Bitcoin is going to change the way that people and businesses and even machines interact with each other,” explains Pauker. “But for bitcoin to realize that vision we need mass adoption. It can’t just be for Silicon Valley.”

While Bitcoin is the apparent focus of the company, it’s not the currency itself that 21 and its investors think will win the day: it’s the technology.

In fact, several of the investors have spoken to a trending opinion that bitcoin’s mainstream adoption is being hampered by the focus on Bitcoin as currency. Pauker and these investors believe that the underlying technological engine that drives Bitcoin, the blockchain, will be the defining aspect that finally makes Bitcoin an industry and household name.

The Bitcoin blockchain is a distributed ledger held by all participants in Bitcoin’s network that allows for recording and tracking of transactions. By using a distributed accounting system, and a method for validating and verifying each transaction before it is added to that ledger, the blockchain provides a powerful tool that makes bitcoins potentially impossible to forge and prevents double-spending. Due to these qualities, the blockchain is considered the main innovation of Bitcoin.

Pauker also mentioned that Qualcomm’s involvement would be key.

Qualcomm’s capability for mass production would make it possible to generate a multitude of devices that could take advantage of the blockchain for applications leveraging the Internet of Things. That is, the use of smart, decentralized applications that would allow devices to communicate between themselves interactively to improve performance as well as to share and negotiate information.

Already other companies, such as IBM and Samsung, have begun to look to blockchain technology to distribute information and control systems for Internet of Things projects.

Image credit: Photo of Matt Pauker from G+; and photo credit: Bitcoin IMG_1924 via photopin (license)