Dallas fintech unicorn is WeWork’s first member to pay for office space with Bitcoin

WeWork announced in April that its coworking members could use cryptocurrency to pay for office space but no corporate client took the bait — until now.

British fintech firm Revolut, which operates an all-in-one financial app, is using Bitcoin to pay WeWork for its space for 300 employees in Dallas. Revolut, which has more than 2,300 employees worldwide, transfers the digital currency to WeWork, which then converts it into U.S. dollars.

“Some look at crypto as an investment,” said Revolut U.S. CEO Ronald Oliveira. “We look at it as another currency.”

By paying with Bitcoin, six-year-old Revolut is sending a sign to its customers that it trusts crypto and they can, too, he said.

The office on Dallas Parkway will house its call center employees who are helping to sign up small business clients for the Revolut app, which has 16 million global users. Oliveira said the office will be focused more on conference rooms and collaboration than in pre-pandemic times.

Revolut announced in July that it raised $80 million in new funding, led by SoftBank and Tiger Global, that valued it at $33 billion. That’s a steep climb from its $5.5 billion valuation in February 2020. Robinhood, the U.S. fintech firm that went public in July, is valued at about $35 billion.

Revolut, which reported an annual loss of $231.9 million in 2020, has benefited from the fintech investment frenzy. In 2020, investors dumped $17.8 billion into private U.S. fintech companies, up 20% from 2019, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The company is using some of its new funding to expand in the U.S., where it launched in March 2020 with Dallas as its hub. It has a New York office and its San Francisco office will reopen in the next month.

Revolut is planning a branding campaign later this year with the goal of becoming a household name in the U.S.

“Our U.S. presence here is small but our ambitions are large,” Oliveira said. “So far, we’ve kept a low profile here because we came at the start of the pandemic. But that’s about to change.”