VCs back Singapore's Bluzelle in $19.5m ICO

Other participants included US-based Kryptonite1 and US-based 8 Decimal Capital. The ICO, which entails the sale of Bluzelle business exposure rights in the form of digitized tokens, was fully subscribed over a staged three-day exercise.

Bluzelle was founded in Canada in 2014 and relocated to Singapore in 2016 to take advantage of Asia's growth potential and provide blockchain infrastructure for deployment to clients including Hong Kong life insurance company AIA Group and Malaysia's Maybank. Its core offering is a database service for decentralized application (dApp) developers.

DApps are programs that run on a blockchain network which are not controlled by any single user. Transactions performed via these programs are considered more secure, efficient and reliable due to the disintermediated nature of blockchain-based systems. Bluzelle aims to provide dApp developers with decentralized data storage and systems management capacity.

"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," Pavel Bains, CEO of Bluzelle, said in a statement. "With this funding, we will now be able to bring our decentralized database to everyone."

Blockchain initially proliferated in the virtual currency sector as a means of securing digital financial distributions but the technology is being increasingly integrated into other business models. At the same time, companies exploiting the technology are increasingly raising capital through ICOs. These token sales – also known as crowdsales and token generating events – have recently surpassed traditional equity funding by VC firms as the leading source of capital in seed-stage rounds.

Legal enforcement around ICOs is an area of ongoing development globally. In Asia, fraud concerns have prompted regulatory restrictions including ICO bans in Greater China and Korea. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has recently published guidelines that permit ICOs but stipulate the tokens being sold could be regulated as traditional securities in some circumstances.

Singapore is considered to have one of the more progressive regulatory frameworks for financial technology in the region. Recent venture-backed ICOs in the country include a $26 million capital raise for online cryptocurrency casino Funfair and a $105 million investment in cryptocurrency trading platform Quoine.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
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