US-based blockchain deployment platform developer Near Protocol has secured $350m from investors including cryptocurrency exchange FTX’s corporate venturing arm, FTX Ventures, Coindesk reported yesterday.
Investment firm Tiger Global Management led the round, which included Republic Capital, Hashed and Dragonfly Capital. The deal valued the company at $10bn according to data from digital assets tracker CoinGecko seen by Bloomberg.
Near Protocol has built a crypto protocol dubbed MainNet that helps developers design and optimise decentralised applications across areas such as business contracts and gaming merchandise.
The company had raised $150m through a January 2022 token sale led by Three Arrows Capital, which participated alongside investors including Jump Crypto, a vehicle for trading firm Jump Trading, as well as quantitative trading firm Alameda Research, Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Zee Prime and Amber Group.
Dragonfly had made a ‘significant investment’ of undisclosed size in Near in January 2021, following a $21.6m round eight months earlier led by a16z’s crypto fund and backed by Blockchange, Distributed Global, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital and Libertus Capital.
Digital currency exchange Coinbase, cryptocurrency remittance service Ripple and design studio Ideo had all taken part in Near’s $12.1m series A round, in 2019, through Coinbase Ventures, Ideo Colab Ventures and Xpring respectively.
The 2019 round was co-led by Metastable and Accomplice and also featured Amplify Partners, Multicoin Capital, ACapital, Pantera Capital and Scalar Capital in addition to multiple angel investors.
Image courtesy of Near Inc.
