Jolla’s Chairman Antti Saarnio and other former mobile company Jolla team announced the launch of the new token investment platform Zipper to fund 1,000+ startups. Zipper aims to disrupt early stage funding with milestone and token-based investments.
The platform solves a pivotal startup problem – how to make fundraising less painful and more effictient. According to Zipper founders, traditional startup funding is broken: early seed funding is missing, fundraising in several rounds takes too much time, investments are not liquid, and they generate bubbles instead of real value, while only 10-20% of startups succeed.
“Back in 2011 when we started building Jolla and Sailfish OS, former Nokia directors told me that we need at least $100M to build a mobile operating system. Jolla has now raised $70 M in six years with five funding rounds. We have spent tremendous amount of time doing fundraising, while the company has constantly suffered from shortage of capital, and early investors haven’t had a chance to exit. I started thinking ways to fund startups in a more efficient model to address these problems, and Zipper was born.” – comments Antti Saarnio, Founder of Zipper.
Zipper aims high trying to fund more than 1,000 early stage startups. However, such venture will require just as much as 1 Billion USD. This does not haze the company, since Zipper is backed by Eagles Fund, awarded as the third best early stage fund in China in 2016.
Steve Lau, Founder and Managing Partner comments: “The velocity and volume of cryptocurrency investments is growing very fast, and it has big advantages for both the investors and startups due to great liquidity of the tokens. However, currently the 100 Billion USD cryptocurrency investing space is a wild west and there’s a great demand for solutions like Zipper to bring safety and rationale to token investments.”
Zipper plans to pilot the platform and make its own token sale during the upcoming few months.
“We will start sales of our own ZIP token soon and plan to fund a portion of startup investments with the token sales revenue, and the remaining would be funded by other investors using the platform, which is open for all professional investors.” – explains Saarnio.
