MachineFi Lab, the core developer of IoTeX, has completed a $10 million seed round that was led by Samsung Next, Draper Dragon Fund, and Jump Crypto.
The fundraising round will help bring hundreds of millions of smart machine and device users into the Web3 machine-share economy, and this seed round gives MachineFi Lab a $100 million valuation.
IoTeX has said other investment rounds will follow, and this one featured various other companies and angel investors, including Escape Velocity, Goodwater Capital, Xoogler Ventures, Alpha Grep, DHVC, IOSG, Wemade, Hanwha Vista Lab, Ribbit Angel Fund, and NewBuild VC.
This seed round sets the IoTeX network as the decentralized machine onboarding and financialization layer for all the blockchains.
MachineFi Lab have developed a “full suite of infrastructure that includes an EVM blockchain, multi-chain wallet, bridge, W3bstream computing oracle, and MachineFi onboarding platform and SDKs (Software Development Kits).”
Continuing, they said in their statement: “These provide developers worldwide with Web3 tools to build game-changing decentralized applications and bootstrap machine networks in months rather than years.”
Commenting on this milestone achievement, Dr. Rallen Chai, CEO and founder of both IoTeX and MachineFi Lab, said that by building on the IoTeX infrastructure, MachineFi Lab will help jump-start the large-scale decentralised machine networks.
“It incentivizes the deployment of machines and the financialization of smart devices and machines' utility and data. And it enables their self-evolving governance," the former Google and Uber employee added.
He emphasised that all of the companies that took part in this first seed round share the MachineFi vision and are passionate about the real-world adoption and people's financialisation of their smart devices and generated data.
Samsung Next, which was one of the lead investors of this fundraising round, has invested in various other Web3 projects, including Axie Infinity, FTX, and Dapper.
Draper Dragon, another key investor that has backed MachineFi, has previously invested in the likes of Tesla, Skype, PayPal and Coinbase.
Andy Tang, partner at Draper, said his venture capital fund is very bullish on MachineFi.
"The MachineFi platform is ideal to empower community-owned machine networks, therefore, perfect for a shared autonomous vehicle network that rewards users and owners with a self-governance model," Tang said.
Escape Velocity Co-Founder Salvador Gala, for his part, emphasised MachineFi’s importance in driving the transition to the new era of the machine economy.
"MachineFi will—for the very first time—enable developers to seamlessly connect IoT devices to permissionless blockchains,” he said.
“This unlocks a massive design space for crypto applications that provide real-world value for consumers, businesses, and governments at scale.”
What is IoTeX?
IoTeX is the leading decentralized network which is powering the future of Web3 and the machine economy (MachineFi) via decentralised apps, or dApps, to reward and benefit people for countless real-world and everyday activities.
The project was founded in 2017 with an impressive team of alumni from Google, Facebook, Uber, Bosch, and Intel, and it has since launched a high-performance open-source blockchain with off-chain computing for devices and machines, cross-chain bridges, a wallet, and the MachineFi marketplace.
It has experienced impressive growth and now has circa $1 billion in assets on-chain, around 300,000 on-chain users, and in excess of 10,000 devices connected across over 130 Dapps.
IOTX, the network’s native token, is one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world by market capitalisation according to Crypto Intelligence, and it is available to trade on several bluechip cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance.
