Bluzelle secures US$19.5mil from ICO

By Digital News Asia January 25, 2018

ICO investors include Kenetic Capital, Hashed, Kryptonite 1 and 8 Decimal Capital
In August 2017, it raised US$1.5 million in a Series A funding round

Bluzelle secures US$19.5mil from ICO

BLUZELLE, a Singapore-based decentralised database provider, has closed its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) having raised US $19.5 million (RM76.56 million) to develop its decentralised database technology and fill the missing piece in the decentralised internet.

Bluzelle was founded in July 2014 and used to focus only on payment systems. However, in February 2016, Bluzelle decided to take advantage of Asia’s growth potential and provide blockchain infrastructure for on-premise deployment to clients that include AIA, Maybank and Temenos.

In August 2017, it raised US$1.5 million (RM5.89 million) in a Series A funding round that was backed by venture capital firms Global Brain, LUN Partners Capital and True Global Ventures.

In October, the company was named in Forrester’s ‘Vendor Landscape: Blockchain Technology Providers in Asia Pacific’ report. Bluzelle is also a recipient of technology pioneer by the World Economic Forum.

The sale was unlike ‘Fomo ICOs’ where buyers are given little time to get their orders in and ‘Fear Of Missing Out’ tactics are used to ensure a mad dash to sell out. Instead, buyers were assembled into groups and given 24 hours to make their purchases.

On day one, 360 buyers took part, which was a 85% turnout for Group 1. On day two, 6,698 buyers took part, which was a 95% turnout for Group 2.

By day three, there were just under two million tokens left of the 165 million made available for sale and both previous groups were able to take part on a first-come-first-served basis. This final round sold out in under five seconds.

In total, 500 million tokens had been generated, so the 165 million that were sold represented 33% of the total.

Investors included Kenetic Capital, Hashed, Kryptonite 1 and 8 Decimal Capital.

Bluzelle CEO Pavel Bains, said: “Selling out the crowdsale is a huge milestone in the growth of our company and our journey to deliver a product that will be a key component of the new, better Internet.

“We have been into this technology for years and the CEOs and CTOs we work with are just as enthusiastic as us about the product, technology and the future. With this funding, we will now be able to bring our decentralised database to everyone.”

Bluzelle’s product fills a missing piece in the decentralised internet because it provides data storage and management that hasn’t been available up to now.

While the need for file storage systems is being served by the likes of Filecoin and Storj, dApp developers also need data storage & management systems that are flexible enough to allow fast and simple data queries if they are to continue building the full range of services that are possible on the decentralised internet.

The company’s advisor list includes Brian Fox, creator of GNU Bash, Alex Leverington, one of the original Core Ethereum developers, Prashant Malik, co-creator of Apache Cassandra and Ryan Fugger, the original creator of Ripple.