Game developer Nexon has paid $80m for a 65.2% stake in Korbit, a South Korea-based cryptocurrency exchange backed by telecommunications group SoftBank, Tech in Asia reported on Wednesday, citing local news publication Hankyung.
The valuation of Korbit was initially pegged as more than $150m, but Nexon’s South Korean holding company NXC told TechCrunch yesterday the deal valued the company at approximately $120m.
Korbit operates an online platform that enables users to trade in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. It stores the majority of deposits in digital wallets that are not connected to the internet in order to prevent cyberattacks.
The company had previously raised a total of $3.6m in funding according to its website. It secured $3m of that in an August 2014 series A round co-led by SoftBank’s local corporate venturing unit, SoftBank Ventures Korea, and Pantera Capital.
The series A round included Bam Ventures, Bitcoin Opportunity Corp, Strong Ventures and angel investors Tim Draper and Pietro Dova, and followed $400,000 in seed funding from assorted angel investors in January the same year.
SK Planet, an e-commerce subsidiary of telecom firm SK Telecom, and Banks Foundation for Young Entrepreneurs, supplied an undisclosed sum for Korbit in 2013, and it also lists Tekton Ventures and D.Camp as investors. None of Korbit’s backers have revealed whether they exited through the Nexon deal.