Technology startup Brave Software has announced that it has raised a $4.5 million seed round investment from leading venture capital firms and angel investors which includes the likes of Founders Fund's FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.

The funds will be used for development of the platform and growth. The latest funding round follows a $2.5 million seed round completed last November, bringing the total amount of funding to date to $7 million.

Brave is a new open source browser for desktop and mobile that blocks invasive ads and online trackers to provide a faster and safer web experience. It has a built-in ad-blocker (no extensions needed) which reduces page loading time, improves performance, and guards from ads infected with malware. It substantially increases speed both on the desktop and on mobile devices. Brave also protects users with leading privacy and security features such as HTTPS Everywhere (encrypted data traffic), fingerprinting shields, phishing protection, malware filtering, and script blocking.

"The Brave solution fends off intrusive ads and stops the collection of personal details by third parties, enhancing not just browsing speed, but security and privacy. With Brave, users can now fight back and keep their data private and defensible on their devices, while still supporting the content they wish to view via micropayments”, said Brendan Eich, President and CEO of Brave Software.

The startup also announced that it is partnering with BitGo and Coinbase to provide wallets and purchasing tools for the Brave Ledger, a new Bitcoin-based micropayments system that automatically and anonymously pays users' favorite websites. Brave also will allow users and publishers to opt into a better, privacy-preserving ad model that shares revenue with users as well as publishers.

Speaking with CoinDesk, Eich said that currently there are no plans to add support for Ethereum or its Ethereum Classic.

"We’re just sticking with bitcoin because we need something frictionless under the hood," he said. "We’re still excited about using bitcoin."

Brave is currently available in developer version, and intends to launch its 1.0 release in September 2016. Brave is available for download for mobile devices (iOS and Android), as well as the following desktop platforms: MacOS, Windows (32 bit and 64 bit), and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE).