Mergermarket: TOP Network to close up to USD 15m raise by April, CEO says
This story was initially published on Mergermarket for subscribers.
By Sirui Shao in New York
TOP Network, a Silicon Valley-based, venture capital-backed provider of decentralized cloud communication services via blockchain technology, plans to close a USD 10m to USD 15m capital raise by April, said CEO Steve Wei.
The company has raised USD 11m to date, with a USD 2m seed round in April 2018 and an additional USD 6m raised via a Series A round that September, according to news reports.
The proceeds from the new round will boost TOP’s marketing and technology, he said, adding the company plans to have several meet-up road shows around the globe this spring. Ideal investors would help build local blockchain networks.
A longer-term goal for the company is to list on one of the blockchain exchanges, he said, as the markets are a bit cold right now in terms of valuation.
TOP’s investors include Danhua Capital (DHVC), NEO Global Capital, LD Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Ontology Global Capital (OGC). Wei noted its individual investors include Hongjia Gong, the co-founder of Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology [SHE: 002415] and Yongming Wu, a co-founder of Alibaba [NYSE:BABA]. Wei said the management team owns 15% of the company and the rest is owned by investors, advisors and non-profit foundations.
Prior to forming TOP, Wei helped develop the texting and picture-sharing mobile app Dingtone, a secure texting and phone call app called CoverMe and SkyVPN, a high- speed virtual private network app. These apps all use TOP’s services.
The company is unique for its low costs and encryption data, Wei said.
TOP currently has about 130 employees in Hangzhou, 20 employees in Nanjing and its management team is based in Silicon Valley.
You can find TOP Network on:
Email Contact: [email protected]
Official Website: http://www.topnetwork.org
Telegram: https://t.me/topnetwork_top
Twitter: https://twitter.com/topnetwork_top
Medium: https://medium.com/@topnetwork
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@topnetwork-top
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/topnetwork_top
About TOP Network
TOP Network is a decentralized open communication network that provides cloud communication services on the blockchain. TOP offers secure, low-cost services such as messaging, calling, video, VPN, CDN, IoT data sharing and more.
TOP Network is also a high-performance public blockchain platform designed to handle real-world business of any size or volume. Powered by innovations including three-layer network, two-layer sharding, two-layer lattice DAG and PBFT-DPoS*, TOP can process several hundred thousand transactions per second on the blockchain.
The long-term mission of TOP Network is to build a public blockchain infrastructure for all Dapps. Our world-class team of over 100 developers is striving for this goal.
TOP Network originated from the common underlying network layer of Dingtone, CoverMe and SkyVPN, three communication apps built by the TOP team before the blockchain project. These apps, having attracted over 50 million users in total, will be ported to TOP Network upon the launch of TOP and generate huge volumes of transactions in the TOP ecosystem.
TOP Network was founded by serial entrepreneur Steve Wei and his colleagues in late 2017. Steve was one of the earliest employees of WebEx in the 1990s. After WebEx, he founded a successful video conferencing software company which was acquired by Huawei in 2010. In 2012, Steve co-founded Dingtone, a public listed company operating popular communication apps such as Dingtone, CoverMe and SkyVPN.
TOP Network has closed $11 million early investments from prestigious institutional investors and individual billionaire investors, including DHVC, Fenbushi Capital, NEO Global Capital (NGC), Ontology Global Capital (OGC), LD Capital and more.