BitFury is the best-funded mining hardware company in the business, raising $20 million (£12.8 million) in July 2015. It was, CoinDesk notes, its third round in two years, and it has now raised $60 million (38.4 million) in total.
The startup is headed up by Valery Vavilov, originally from Latvia. It does not operate a public pool, but has private mines in Finland, Iceland, and the Republic of Georgia. Despite its prominence in the mining industry, Vavilov insists that "we are not a mining company, I don't like the word mining."
Instead, he told CoinDesk, "we're a technology company, but we're focused on bitcoin now. Our vision in the next three to five years is to move into different areas where computing power is valuable. We plan to expand into other fields of knowledge where humanity needs a lot of computing power."