Vogogo isn’t a new company. The payments processor has been around for about 13 years and is currently processing $75 million in payments in the last 10 months from their Calgary headquarters. Now they’ve raised $8.5 million to help bring their expertise in payments and cryptocurrency to the U.S.

Cormark Securities Inc. led the round which included Salman Partners Inc., Clarus Securities Inc., Beacon Securities Limited and Canaccord Genuity Corp.

Founded by Geoff Gordon and Rodney Thompson, the company has long been Canada’s go-to payments provider. However, as they expanded into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, they found their skills worked well for Canadian customers. They are now seeing $6 to $10 million in crypto payments a month.

“We had been watching Bitcoin and crypto currencies closely. As a payments company we were very intrigued by the potential of Bitcoin,” said Gordon. “We watched several crypto groups enter the Canadian market, have a lot of success only to then be shut down by their bankers due to payment related fraud and/or no compliance structure. We put the Vogogo platform in front of a few crypto groups to resounding success in Canada. We are now adjusting our platform to scale these services and we will be replicating the service in the US, EU and other target markets.”

The team hopes that the investment will help legitimize bitcoin in the payments space.

“Bitcoin has a huge amount of potential but it needs interoperability with the banks and the banking system to realize that potential,” said Gordon.

The U.S. expansion is expected to go live in a few months and they will further expand into the EU. What does a Vogogo-powered payment systems look like? It’s basically custom-made for each customer and, thanks to their cross-border skills, they can make it easier for large web-based business to accept BTC along with credit cards and other currencies.

While the company isn’t quite a household name in the States, these moves could add one more payment player to the bitcoin pantheon.