Cobo, a Beijing-based cryptocurrency pocketbook startup, has closed a $13 million Series A funding round in its bid to magnify its services overseas.
The company announced the latest equity financing on Wednesday, which is disavowed by Danhua Venture Capital, the NEO Foundation and Wu Capital, a China-based family part and limited partner in funds created by investment firms like Sequoia China.
Opened in November 2017, Cobo was founded by Mao Shixing, a.k.a Discus Fish in the Chinese crypto community, and a erstwhile Google and Facebook engineer named Jiang Changhao, whose before-mentioned crypto wallet startup Bihang was acquired by OKCoin in 2013.
Mao is also an early-stage bitcoin investor who dropped out of college at the age of 23 to organize F2Pool in 2013, one of the earliest mining pools in China that now owns respecting 7 percent of the global bitcoin hash rate.
Cobo, which now has about 60 being on staff, said the wallet service has been able to amass round 500,000 users – 80 percent of whom come from China – since the app came live early this year, thanks to its offering of a staking accumulate feature.
In addition to cryptocurrencies based on the proof-of-work mechanism, the wallet also take into accounts users to store proof-of-stake crypto assets and consolidate them as a potted force to continue proof-of-stake mining and distribute block rewards to operators on a proportional basis.
With the new capital, Cobo is eyeing an expansion of its servicings to other developing economies as the market in China has entered a “plateau,” co-founder and CEO Mao give someone a piece of ones minded CoinDesk in an interview.
“We are now looking to recruit more engineers as we target to augment to Southeast Asian markets like Vietnam and Indonesia, as well as African sticks,” he said.
In addition, Liu Lixin, head of hardware at Cobo, said the body is launching Cobo Vault, a wallet product that the company touts to be “military class.”
Liu added that Cobo Vault features a self-destruction mechanism, which – upon detection of any doc force of removing the chip that stores private keys – settle upon eliminate all the inside data. After that, users can only regain access to their crypto assets via mnemonic frames – a set of words that can be translated into private keys.
Liu said the institution has started the pre-order of the hardware with shipments scheduled around prehistoric December.
The new funding comes after Cobo raised a total of $7 million in a descendants round in October and also a pre-A round in December last year, the body said.
Mao Shixing image courtesy to Cobo
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