Waves Platform secures $120M to launch universal blockchain solution ‘Vostok’

Blockchain startup Waves has announced that it has raised $120 million to launch its private blockchain platform and system integrator, Vostok.

Founded in 2016, Waves is a public blockchain platform that offers easy-to-use, highly functional tools to create decentralised applications. This year, it developed Vostok – a universal blockchain solution for scalable digital infrastructure comprised of two constituent elements:

• A fundamental technological innovation – the Vostok private blockchain platform
• A facilitator of its maintenance, development and optimisation – the Vostok system integrator

The project aims to form the basis of the digital infrastructure for certification, registration and data tracking, and to make new technologies easy-to-use in business and public administration. In September, Russian manufacturing conglomerate Rostec signed an agreement with Vostok to co-develop a data management system based on blockchain technology.

Founder and CEO of the Waves Platform and the Vostok project, Sasha Ivanov said that the Vostok project lies at the intersection of several disruptive technologies, including Blockchain, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and the Industrial Internet of Things.

“By implementing [various disruptive technologies] in the IT infrastructures of corporations and government agencies, we lay the foundation for the digital economy. This is a logical continuation of the work we have been doing over the past few years.” Ivanov said.

According to the official release, the first projects are expected to launch in Europe and Asia at the beginning of 2019.

For Vostok’s first funding round, Waves said that it approached those investors in these key target markets who did not only contribute financing, but also had “the expertise and motivation to use their business resources to further the project.” It also reached out to a portfolio of projects for which Vostok technologies would be beneficial.

Waves said that the funding round drew support from private and institutional investors. Dolfin, a London-based financial services group, coordinated both the structuring and execution of the deal.