Bitcoin (BTC) mining behemoth Bitmain is now valued at $15 billion after closing a pre-Initial Public Offering (IPO) funding round with backing from high-profile investors, QQ News reported August 4.
The fresh financing deal, which is said to have closed on Saturday, notably includes investments from Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent and Japan’s Softbank, another tech giant whose 15 percent stake in Uber makes it the drive-hailing app’s largest shareholder.
Tencent, meanwhile, is the developer of China’s dominant social media platform WeChat, which has over 1 billion global users and outstripped Facebook’s market cap by $72 billion in March of this year.
According to QQ, Bitmain is planning to launch its IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this September at an estimated valuation of $30 billion. As Cointelegraph previously reported, Bitmain’s CEO Jihan Wu hinted at plans for the IPO in early June.
In February 2018, Bitmain reportedly held 70-80 percent of the global market for Bitcoin mining hardware, and posted between $3 and $4 billion in operating profits in 2017 — higher than American graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturer Nvidia.
At the end of July, Fortune reported that Bitmain earned around $1 billion in net profit for the first quarter of 2018, the same month it closed a $300-400 million Series B funding round which inched its valuation upward to $12 billion.
Meanwhile, another Chinese crypto mining giant, Canaan Creative, is planning to launch its own IPO — also on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Just yesterday, Bitmain revealed it will construct a $500 million blockchain data center and mining facility in Texas as part of its expansion into the U.S. market, hoping to initiate the center’s operations by early 2019.
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