Morning Report: The $258M Filecoin ICO In Context

Morning Report: The Filecoin ICO, also backed by traditional venture capital firms, closes with just under $258 million in funds raised. How much money is that?

The Filecoin ICO is in the books. The results of the raise amounted to $52 million from venture capitalists and $205.8 million from normal channels according to CoinDesk. The total makes Filecoin the largest ICO to date.

As Crunchbase News noted before, questions abound with Filecoin, including when the distributed storage network will, in fact, launch. The coin’s website, as of the time of writing, notes that its token sale has ended; however, there is no obvious launch information.

That status matches what the Wall Street Journal reported in August: “[T]he tokens being bought in this sale won’t be delivered until the Filecoin Network launches. Currently, there is no launch date set.”

From a normal investing perspective, this is odd—at least in terms of when a company should raise external capital. But let’s ask ourselves a different question: just how much money is $258 million?

• More than either Cloudera or Carvana raised in their IPOs this year, during which each raised a more modest $225 million.
• About 4.4 times as much as Microsoft raised in its IPO, including secondary sales but sans the greenshoe option, unadjusted for inflation.
• 5.2 times as much as Uber raised through its Seed, Angel, Series A, and Series B.
• Around 2.2 times as much as Airbnb raised through its own Series B.
• More than Freestyle Capital has raised across 5 funds ($230.21 million).

That’s an attempt to show how $258 million compares to early-stage funding, super late-stage funding, and even venture firms that run seed-ish funds. To summarize: $258 million is a lot of money.

What is interesting in the case of Filecoin is that the bet is placed and the wheel is spinning. We’ll see.

From The Crunchbase Daily:

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