Uphold Eyes Expansion With Mobile Payments Startup Acquisition

Digital money platform Uphold has bought a mobile commerce startup, the company announced Thursday, coming soon after it inked a multi-million dollar investment.

Uphold has bought Cortex MCP, a deal that will see the company – formerly known as Bitreserve – acquire Cortex's intellectual property holdings and add its founder Shaunt Sarkissian to the Uphold payments unit.

The goal, Uphold said, is to apply Cortex's mobile wallet tech to its online services, including the use of those resources to develop tools for paying in both cryptocurrency and government-issued currency.

The deal also factors into Uphold's expansion plans. Through the Cortex acquisition, Uphold said it will support "a new closed-loop payment platform expansion," with a focus on Central America and South America.

"Cortex's mobile centric, closed loop payment and secure tokenization solutions provide industry leading technologies and security to our platform. It additionally brings new commercial offerings and opportunities to our enterprise division, Uphold Solutions," William Dennings, Uphold's COO, said in a statement.

The move comes roughly a month after Uphold announced a $57.5 million investment from former Ripple executive Greg Kidd.

Part of those funds would go to assisting Uphold’s loss assurance program, which is designed to protect investors from losses due to cryptocurrency volatility or other asset issues, as CoinDesk previously reported.

Coin stacks and miniatures image via Shutterstock