Singapore based Eximchain started life in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s media lab, where CEO Hope Liu was completing an MBA. Crunchbase confirmed today that the supply chain company closed a $20m round of funding from FBG Capital, Kinetic Capital, and INBlockchain. The financiers are all based in China and Hong Kong.
The company had initially planned an ICO which has now been shelved and instead is proposing a free ‘airdrop’ of tokens to potential partners. This continues a recent trend of companies abandoning public ICOs in favor of professional investors.
Development of the blockchain started in 2015, and the focus is on Supply Chain Finance (SCF). While at MIT the venture signed up nine businesses to participate in a proof of concept.
Competition
The startup is not the first SCF blockchain company. Last week Centrifuge raised $3.8m from UK-based Mosaic Ventures and BlueYard Capital. While Centrifuge is at an earlier stage of development, its team have deep experience in the space. In 2009 they founded Taulia a non-blockchain SCF company. The venture raised $156m in capital to date, and is possibly a ‘unicorn’.
It’s conceivable that Centrifuge could focus on the European market and Eximchain the Asian market. The Singapore company has already formed a partnership with Trademanager which provides big data services to over 50,000 SMEs in China.
Eximchain is a permissioned blockchain that uses Quorum, the JP Morgan variant of Ethereum.
