By
Mayowa Adebajo
April 15th, 2024
Crypto mining company BitFury has closed a $80 million private funding round led by European venture capital firm Korelya Capital and billionaire Mike Novogratz.
BitFury, one of the largest crypto mining companies, announced it had closed an $80 million round of private financing with global investment firms. Among the investors were such companies as Macquarie Capital, Asian financier Dentsu, European companies Armat Group and Jabre & Lian Group, and the merchant bank founded by billionaire and ex-Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner Mike Novogratz.
Bitfury has closed an $80 million private placement – led by @korelyacapital and joined by many others including Armat Group, Macquarie Capital, Lian Group, Jabre, Dentsu Inc., Foyer, MACSF, Argenthal Capital Partners, @novogratz @co_garnier and more. https://t.co/SnX0u0Pbp5
— The Bitfury Group (@BitfuryGroup) November 6, 2018
According to Bitfury, the round was led by a Paris-based venture capital firm Korelya Capital. After the funding round is finished, the company is valued $1 billion. It is notable that BitFury is among the top five manufacturers in the crypto mining hardware market, along with AMD, Bitmain, Canaan, and Baikal Miner. This sector, which is continuously increasing, could grow by 44.6% between 2018 and 2022.
BitFury executive vice president George Kikvadze said:
“This private placement will take our corporate governance to the next level, expand our strategic financial options and ideally position us for our next phase of growth as the market matures.”
Valery Vavilov, CEO and co-founder of Bitfury, commented:
“2018 has been a year of incredible expansion for Bitfury. This private placement reflects our achievements, and it recognizes our ability to address adjacent market segments in high-performance computing, including in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). The institutionalization of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, partnered with the opportunity of these emerging technologies, is a natural expansion opportunity that Bitfury will build on — in 2019 and beyond.”
As Vavilov states, the demand for the blockchain from companies and institutions had increased significantly over the past 11 months.
“We see a lot of demand from companies and public institutions to put their services or products in the blockchain — especially in emerging markets, where administrative systems can be very inefficient.”
BitFury to Facilitate Crypto Mining
BitFury is the largest full-service blockchain technology company in the world which develops and delivers cutting-edge software and hardware solutions necessary for businesses, governments, organizations and individuals to securely move assets across the blockchain. BitFury derives sustainable advantage through its custom-made application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), optimized to achieve the lowest power consumption coupled with the highest processing metrics – the parameters that drive mining margins.
The firm has 700 employees in 15 countries and five data centers active in mining in Iceland, Canada, Georgia, and Norway.
In September of this year, BitFury upgraded the cooling system at its 40-megawatt mining plant located in Tbilisi, Georgia. With Bitfury’s immersion cooling technology, cooling costs can be reduced by 95%. BitFury also disrupted the market with a new highly efficient ASIC mining chip. Fully customized for SHA256 Bitcoin mining, the chip boasts of 55 millijoules per gigahash (mJ/GH) power efficiency rate and up to 120 gigahashes per second (GH/s) hashrate.
Is BitFury Preparing for an IPO?
There are rumors that BitFury would already be preparing its Initial Public Offering (IPO) and is considering doing so in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, or London. If the rumours are true and the company’s plans are executed in the next two years, it will seek a valuation of up to $5 billion.