LINE NEXT Corporation., LINE’s venture dedicated to the development and expansion of the NFT ecosystem, announced today that it has secured a USD 140 million investment from a consortium led by private equity firm Crescendo Equity Partners.
This investment represents the largest funding round in the Asian Web3 blockchain industry for this year. With the raised funds, LINE NEXT aims to expand its global operations and develop new services as part of its plan to spread the Web3 ecosystem.
First, LINE NEXT plans to officially launch the global NFT DOSI platform in January 2024, offering a digital marketplace where a wide range of digital products can be traded. Integrating Japan’s NFT LINE NFT market, 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 directly own and market existing digital products, facilitating the introduction of Web3 into their services.
With this investment, LINE NEXT also plans to introduce new services to further accelerate the spread of Web3. These include the introduction of a social app that allows users to communicate based on the characters they made using AI technology and the release of new Web3 games using BROWN & FRIENDS characters that everyone can enjoy.
LINE NEXT plans to build these services based on the Finschia public blockchain, and LINE NEXT and Crescendo will join the Finschia Foundation as governance members, helping to expand its ecosystem.
Sponsored by Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, Crescendo invests with exceptional domain expertise and access to an established “technology ecosystem” consisting of both local and global networks. Crescendo focuses on discovering small to mid-cap technology companies and growing them to become global champions.
“LINE’s global competitiveness and its vision to lead Web3 services was the investment thesis,” said Kevin Lee, Crescendo’s managing partner. He added that “We hope to create a standard for Web3 applications that mainstream users can easily use and adopt blockchain across all kinds of Web2 services and brands.”
“It is significant that we were able to secure this funding in the context of a global investment environment,” said Youngsu Ko, CEO of LINE NEXT. “We plan to use this opportunity to further popularize Web3 and develop a new ecosystem of services where users own the value of their digital products.”