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The Bitcoin security platform BitGo announced on Monday that it had raised $12 million, the latest example of how investors see opportunity in a growing industry aimed at making virtual currency easier and safer to use.

BitGo, which sells a security platform to protect Bitcoin against theft and loss, said it had raised the money from investors including the Silicon Valley investment capital firm Redpoint Ventures; Bitcoin Opportunity Corporation, a Bitcoin investment vehicle run by the entrepreneur Barry Silbert; and Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments.

Bitcoin, the computer-driven online currency, has no central regulator and is not secured by a national bank, meaning that investors have little recourse if their Bitcoin is lost or stolen. This lack of security has spurred the growth of a cottage industry aimed at providing protection to Bitcoin, thereby bringing it further into the mainstream.

In some ways, those efforts have succeeded, as more and more merchants have begun accepting Bitcoin as payment. But online money still faces regulatory and technological hurdles. It is still not widely used, and law enforcement agencies are wary of its potential for abuse.

Investors are also concerned about security, especially in the wake of the collapse of Mt. Gox, once the dominant online exchange for buying and selling Bitcoin. The company went dark nearly overnight last February and announced that more than 700,000 Bitcoins had been lost, leaving users with few options to recover their money.

Jeff Brody, a founding partner at Redpoint, said that wary Bitcoin investors needed the same assurances that VeriSign brought to e-commerce at the dawn of the Internet age, when users were first introduced to entering their banking data online.

“Until VeriSign came along and offered the certificate authority and infrastructure, that was a pretty difficult and dangerous thing to do,” Mr. Brody said on Monday. “We think that Bitcoin needs the same thing.”

BitGo, based in Silicon Valley, says that it can protect users’ Bitcoin through a proprietary “multisignature” system — the equivalent of issuing multiple user “keys” that are required to unlock a Bitcoin account, much like a safe deposit box at a bank.

BitGo doesn’t want to just appeal to individual virtual currency speculators, however. The company says it wants to appeal to hedge funds, large corporations and other firms that may want to invest in Bitcoin, but need sophisticated security assurances to do so.

“If users can’t trust that their holdings are secure, or that they can’t transact securely, then Bitcoin will never take off,” said Will O’Brien, BitGo’s chief executive. “Our focus is on making Bitcoin secure for commercial transactions.”