Chinese Crypto Mining Giant Bitmain Valued at $12B in New Funding Round

Bitmain, a producer of cryptocurrency mining equipment from China, has been valued at $12 billion following a Series B funding round, local news outlet Caixin reported on Friday, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

The giant has reportedly raised $300-400 million from Sequoia Capital subsidiary Sequoia China, US hedge fund Coatue and Singapore-based governmental investment fund EDB.

This round of funding was materially larger than $50 million raised in Series A funding round in September, where the biggest investors were Sequoia China and IDG Capital.

Pre-IPO funding round in sight

Last month, Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu in an interview with Bloomberg said that he is “open” to plans of conducting an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in Hong Kong. According to Caixin’s recent publication, the company is also considering a pre-IPO funding roud. However, he did not unveil any specific details.

If the company goes forward with its IPO plans, Bitmain will fall into the ranks of competing mining firms Ebang Communication and Canaan Creative, that have both applied to list their shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Bitmain – a privately held company, set up in 2013. The company is engaged in developing Bitcoin mining hardware and ASIC chips. According to analysists’ opinion, the company should have made approximately $4 billion in operating profit last year. Estimates also indicate that Bitmain occupied 70-80 percent of the mining equipment market share in February 2018.

Moreover, the company owns AntPool and BTC.com, that combined possess about 35% of the flagship cryptocurrency network’s hashrate.

As Cryptovest reported last week, public documents have revealed that Bitmain is going to buy $50 million in shares from Opera – the owner of a popular web browser that has the same name.