Ledger, the world’s foremost cryptocurrency hardware company, is reportedly attracting some very high-profile interest ahead of its new funding round.
Launched in 2014 after its founders were inspired to offer more secure solutions for crypto holders following the Mt. Gox hack, the company is seemingly going from strength to strength.
Selling over a million hardware wallets in 2017 – after selling only 30,000 the previous year – the firm completed its Series B round funding in January, raising an impressive $75 million.
Reportedly valued at up to $1 billion, the firm is looking for investment from “industrial partners who will also sign commercial contracts with the crypto startup,” and, according to Forbes, have attracted interest from tech behemoths Samsung, Siemens and Google’s venture arm GV.
The ambitious company is also looking beyond hardware.
On Monday, they announced the launch of Ledger Live – a desktop software application to manage crypto assets designed to streamline secure crypto management and make it easier for new adopters.
Big Tech and Blockchain
Of the three companies reportedly interested in the company, Samsung have so far made the biggest strides into the space.
In January, the South-Korean giant entered into a partnership to develop ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) chipsets for cryptocurrency mining, and in April the company said it was looking at distributed ledger technology to improve efficiency for its massive global electronics shipment network.
While Siemens have also actively involved themselves in the industry – investing in blockchain smart grid company L03 Energy earlier in the year – Google have so far participated less formally.
In March the company was reportedly experimenting with distributed ledgers to support their cloud businesses, although nothing concrete has been announced by the company to date.
With Sergey Brin revealing this week that he has been privately mining ETH, it remains to be seen whether Google will add its name to the growing list of companies throwing their weight behind blockchain.
