Bitmain’s valuation reaches $15 billion following latest funding

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Bitmain, the China-based cryptocurrency mining company, reportedly wrapped up its latest funding round this past Saturday. According to the media outlet QQ News, it attracted several important backers and is said to now be worth about $15 billion. The funding round was launched in anticipation of a possible initial public offering (IPO) that could come as early as next month.

China’s Tencent, which is behind the country’s social media platform WeChat, is one of the new backers of the company. Tencent now has more than one billion users around the world and was recently valued at $72 billion more than Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. It apparently isn’t done moving up in the ranks yet either, and recently reported that it expects 56% growth in the fourth quarter of this year.

The other new investor is Japanese bank Softbank. It has a 15% stake in Uber, making it the taxi alternative’s largest shareholder.

Bitmain has said that it anticipates launching its IPO next month on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange or another “US investor-friendly” exchange. The company believes that, by the time it’s ready to go public, it will have achieved a valuation of around $30 billion.

Bitmain has continued to control crypto mining and holds around 70%-80% of the global market. It was founded in 2013 and last year reported operating profits of as much as $4 billion, higher than what was seen by competitors AMD and NVidia. The company offers several application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners through its Ant product line.

Due to its success, and for political motives, the company opened a 20,000-square-foot facility in Silicon Valley last month to be close to the largest tech hub in the world. It recently announced that it is going to build a data center in Rockdale, Texas where it will employ up to 400 individuals. Ground has already been broken on the data center and Bitmain expects construction to be complete early next year.

The company is also expanding to other parts of the US, and is reportedly expected to launch some type of operation in Arizona and Washington State, but the complete details of those activities have not yet been provided.