LINE NEXT Corporation., LINE’s venture dedicated to developing and expanding the NFT ecosystem, announced today that it has secured a USD140 million investment from a consortium led by the private equity firm Crescendo Equity Partners.
This investment represents the largest funding round in the Asian blockchain Web3 industry for this year. With the raised funds, LINE NEXT aims to expand its global business and develop new services as part of its plan to popularize the Web3 ecosystem.
First, LINE NEXT plans to officially launch its global NFT platform DOSI in January 2024, offering a digital marketplace where a wide range of digital products can be traded. Integrating with Japan’s NFT marketplace LINE NFT, DOSI will be offered as a mobile app to users around the world. In addition, LINE NEXT will provide new solutions to help services and brands give ownership directly to existing digital products and trade them, making it easier to introduce Web3 to their services.
With this investment, LINE NEXT also plans to introduce new services to further accelerate Web3 popularization. These include introducing a social app that allows users to communicate based on the characters they made utilizing AI technology and launching new Web3 games utilizing BROWN & FRIENDS characters that anyone can enjoy.
LINE NEXT plans to build these services based on the public blockchain Finschia, and LINE NEXT and Crescendo will participate in the Finschia Foundation as governance members, contributing to the expansion of its ecosystem.
Crescendo, sponsored by Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, invests with exceptional sector expertise and access to well-established “tech-ecosystem” consisting of both local and global networks. Crescendo focuses on discovering small to mid-cap technology companies and developing them to become global champions.
“LINE’s global competitiveness and its vision to lead Web3 services were the investment thesis,” said Kevin Lee, the managing partner of Crescendo. He added that “We hope to build a standard for Web3 apps that general users can easily use and adopt blockchain to all sorts of services and brands of Web2.”
“It is significant that we were able to secure this funding in the context of a globally contracting investment environment,” said Youngsu Ko, CEO of LINE NEXT. “We plan to use this opportunity to further popularize Web3 and develop a new service ecosystem where users own the value of their digital goods.”
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