NFT Unit of SoftBank-Naver JV LINE NEXT Secures $140 Mn from Peter Thiel-backed Crescendo Equity Partners

Investment marks the largest in Asian blockchain and Web3 industry this year

Investment is led by Crescendo Equity Partners, a Peter Thiel-backed private equity firm, citing LINE’s strategies and vision for Web3 popularization

LINE NEXT Corporation., the NFT unit of a joint venture between SoftBank and South Korea-based Naver which is dedicated to developing and expanding the NFT ecosystem, announced that it has secured a USD140 million investment from a consortium led by the private equity firm Crescendo Equity Partners (“Crescendo”).

The investment represents the largest funding round in the Asian blockchain Web3 industry for this year. With the raised funds, LINE NEXT aims to expand its global business and develop new services as part of its plan to popularize the Web3 ecosystem.

First up, LINE NEXT plans to officially launch its global NFT platform DOSI in January 2024, offering a digital marketplace where a wide range of digital products can be traded. Integrating with Japan’s NFT marketplace LINE NFT, 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 give ownership directly to existing digital products and trade them, making it easier to introduce Web3 to their services.

With this investment, LINE NEXT also plans to introduce new services to further accelerate Web3 popularization. These include introducing a social app that allows users to communicate based on the characters they made utilizing AI technology and launching new Web3 games utilizing BROWN & FRIENDS characters that anyone can enjoy.

LINE NEXT plans to build these services based on the public blockchain Finschia, and LINE NEXT and Crescendo will participate in the Finschia Foundation as governance members, contributing to the expansion of its ecosystem.

Crescendo, sponsored by Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, invests with exceptional sector expertise and access to well-established “tech-ecosystem” consisting of both local and global networks. Crescendo focuses on discovering small to mid-cap technology companies and developing them to become global champions.

"LINE’s global competitiveness and its vision to lead Web3 services were the investment thesis," said Kevin Lee, the managing partner of Crescendo. He added that “We hope to build a standard for Web3 apps that general users can easily use and adopt blockchain to all sorts of services and brands of Web2.” 

"It is significant that we were able to secure this funding in the context of a globally contracting investment environment," said Youngsu Ko, CEO of LINE NEXT. "We plan to use this opportunity to further popularize Web3 and develop a new service ecosystem where users own the value of their digital goods."

LINE NEXT has been at the forefront of Web3 popularization through a range of global services based on DOSI. It currently has 5.5 million users worldwide and more than 470,000 cumulative transactions, continuing its rapid growth just one year since beta service began.

Based in Korea, LINE NEXT Corporation is focused on Web3 business strategy and planning. With a subsidiary in the U.S operating the global NFT platform business and an office in Japan, LINE NEXT aims to develop the Web3 ecosystem and popularize it for all. 

CRESCENDO EQUITY PARTNERS LIMITED ( referred as "Crescendo" in this article) is a technology focused private equity firm sponsored by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies. Crescendo mainly invests in companies with high growth potential with exceptional technologies. Target sectors include traditional B2B hardware sectors such as semiconductors and parts and materials, as well as software sectors that are new growth engines such as IT security and factory automation. As of November 2023, assets under management reached about 1.8 trillion won. (Based on the cumulative committed amount)

Affise Raises $8M Series A to Make Partnerships a Measurable and Transparent Marketing Channel

Stanislau Litvinau, CEO at Affise (left) and Dmitrii Zotov, CTO at Affise (right) (Photo: Business Wire)

Affise, the global technology leader in partnerships management and automation, today announced a Series A funding round worth $8 million. This recent funding round, led by Leta Capital and TMT Investments, follows a period of impressive growth for the company. Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2016, Affise has doubled its revenue every year and now employs over 120 professionals in six offices around the world.

“Affise has shown remarkable international growth, which we are happy to intensify even further with the investment round,” said Alexander Chachava, Managing partner at Leta Capital. “We can see that performance marketing becomes essential across many new channels which were difficult to measure until recently. The company empowers its clients with the real tools to boost the business, and we believe that Affise is going to become an industry-standard in performance marketing automation software.”

“The funding round will help the team focus on geographic expansion in regions where advertising, affiliate marketing and economy as a whole are growing, namely the States and Asian countries. With such a great team and product, we believe in success,” - commented Artyom Inyutin, Co-founder & Head of Investments, TMT Investments.

As the partnership marketing industry continues an impressive growth of 10%, every year, its 2021 value is estimated to reach $1.2B. Affise endeavours to utilize the funding to expand its product suite, providing marketers with a single platform to automate and scale partnerships. Following a tremendous success entering the Chinese market in 2019, Affise plans to increase its presence in North America, LatAm, and SEA, as well as cement its leadership in Europe, Israel and India.

“Partnerships management is becoming the vital component of the marketing technology stack, and Affise has established itself as a leader in this fast-growing category,” said Stanislau Litvinau, CEO and Co-Founder, Affise. “Our commitment to representing the marketers’ interests has gained the trust of the leading agencies and networks, and we see significant potential to capture additional opportunity in the market. One strategy we’re aiming to complete with this funding is entering the adjacent market of direct advertisers and brands, empowering them to grow their marketing channel with affiliate programs”.

Affise works with over 1,000 customers, including leading brands and agencies such as Wargaming, Xapads, Hypercentage, Kismia, Mobavenue, Zorka.Mobi, Mobligent. The company boasts connections to a conglomerate of over 300,000 partners, which accelerates business growth. The winner of 14 awards in the last year alone, Affise has been crowned the leader in three categories by G2: Partner Management, Marketing Analytics, and Digital Analytics.

“The market evolution from traditional affiliates to new performance channels (influencers, brand-to-brand and other), along with the skyrocketing growth in e-Commerce in 2020, will encourage more small and medium advertisers to launch their affiliate programs'' - Dmitrii Zotov, CTO and Co-Founder, Affise. “This trend will generate demand for technological solutions to start and manage affiliate programs from scratch and achieve incremental growth. Thus, this funding round will enable us to follow Affise’s mission of empowering marketers with the tools needed to catapult their success and make accurate strategic decisions. This will drive innovations and transparency across the industry”.

About Affise

Affise is a partnership marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to automate and scale their partner relations via all possible performance marketing channels: traditional affiliates, influencers, networks and agencies. The synergy of technology and the long standing experience allows Affise’s clients to make partnerships manageable and revenue predictable marketing channel. To learn more, visit www.affise.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005005/en/

AI-powered Customer Data Platform Blueshift Raises $30 Mn in Funding Led By Fort Ross Ventures

SAN FRANCISCO (February 24, 2021) -- Blueshift, the leading AI-Powered Customer Data Platform, today announced a $30 million Series C financing round, bringing the total amount raised to $65 million. This latest funding round was led by Fort Ross Ventures, along with Avatar Growth Capital. Existing investors including Softbank Ventures Asia, Storm Ventures, Conductive Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round. Ratan Singh of Fort Ross Ventures will join Blueshift's Board of Directors.

"Our mission is to back category-leading companies that are poised to dominate a market. Blueshift clearly stood out to us as the leader in the enterprise CDP space," said Ratan Singh of Fort Ross Ventures, Blueshift's newest board member. "We are thrilled to partner with the Blueshift team as they accelerate the adoption of their SmartHub CDP platform."

Marketing and Customer Experience (CX) are increasingly intertwined in today's connected world, and marketers are being tasked with understanding customers through the lens of CX data to craft personalized experiences. However, traditional marketing platforms focus only on marketing response data (like clicks), and are unable to leverage CX data from across the customer journey. The first generation of CDPs attempted to solve this challenge by focusing only on data integration, but lacked any intelligent decisioning, and were not built for marketers or CX professionals.

Blueshift's SmartHub CDP platform combines the data fidelity of a CDP with the intelligence needed for marketers to make real-time decisions. This enables marketers to not only unify 360-degree CX data ("CDP"), but also to make AI-Powered decisions from large volumes of data ("Smart"), and distribute the decisioning to every touchpoint in the customer journey (the "Hub").

Blueshift's SmartHub CDP platform has been adopted by leading global brands including LendingTree, Discovery Inc., Udacity and BBC among others, and has been shown to deliver 781% ROI in a recent study conducted by Forrester Research. Blueshift was recently named among the fastest-growing companies on Deloitte's Fast 500 Technology Awards, which lists the fastest growing technology companies in North America. Blueshift will use the proceeds from this latest funding round to further accelerate its global growth, cementing its leadership position in the CDP space.

"With the increased urgency towards digital transformation, we have seen an increased demand for a SmartHub CDP, that can not only unify silo-ed data, but also unify silo-ed experiences", said Vijay Chittoor, co-founder and CEO of Blueshift. "I am very pleased to welcome both Fort Ross Ventures and Avatar Growth Capital to the Blueshift family as they have tremendous experience with enterprise-focused scale-ups at our stage of rapidly accelerating growth."

"One of the biggest challenges in 1:1 marketing is the need to activate large volumes of data when you scale to millions of customers across multiple touch points. Unlike other platforms that struggle with handling increasing amounts of data, Blueshift becomes more powerful the more data you have in it.", said Chris Kachel, Senior Director of Customer Experience at LendingTree. "This has allowed us to scale our personalization efforts and customer journeys across multiple apps on different channels, and the results have been tremendous"

About Blueshift

San Francisco based Blueshift helps brands deliver relevant, connected experiences across every customer interaction. The Blueshift SmartHub CDP platform uses patented AI technology to unify, inform, and activate the fullness of customer data across all channels and applications. Through unified data, omnichannel orchestration, intelligent decisioning, and unmatched scale, Blueshift gives brands all the tools they need to seamlessly deliver 1:1 experiences in real-time across the entire customer journey.

The company is backed by leading venture capital investors, including Fort Ross Ventures, Avatar Growth Capital, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Storm Venture Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners.
For more information visit: blueshift.com.