Pavel Durov will collect $3 billion in secret

The public March ICO of Telegram may not take place, according to two presentations of the project for potential investors, which were reviewed by RBC. In documents on behalf of venture capital funds iTechCapital and Da Vinci Capital, investors are invited to participate in the second closed round of pre-ICO. The company expects to raise the $3 billion it needs following the results of two closed placement rounds, and this will be enough for it to develop the TON blockchain project, sources say.

• In just two closed rounds, Telegram is going to raise $3 billion from all investors, according to the whitepaper of the project. The company will issue 5 billion Gram tokens, of which 52-54% will be distributed among investors of the first and second rounds of closed subscription, another 4% will go to TON developers, and 42-44% of the tokens will be kept as a reserve.
• The price of one Gram token in the first round was $0.38, in the second - from $1.1 to $1.45.
• True, at the end of February it became known that during the second closed round the messenger wants to raise $850 million, the same amount as in the first round. In this case, the amount of investment will be less than $3 billion - $1.7 billion.
• However, RBC's source is confident that the company will be able to collect the required amount in closed rounds. The first one has already made the messenger's ICO the largest in history. Initially, the company expected to raise $500 million, but received applications for $3.8 billion. So there really shouldn't be any problems with attracting the required amount.
• One of the arguments of RBC sources is that a closed placement allows Telegram to refuse unsuitable investors - this will not work with a public ICO.
• Initially, it was assumed that the public offering of Telegram will take place in March. in the January first round 81 major investors took part . Most of the names are unknown, but some were called - one of the founders of Qiwi Sergey Solonin ($17 million) and the former co-owner of Wimm-bill-dann David Yakobashvili ($10 million). Both wanted to invest more, but Telegram management limited the amount of their investments. According to Vedomosti , Roman Abramovich became another Telegram investor. $20 million each in the ICO in the first round The largest funds in Silicon Valley invested .
• All investments in Pavel Durov ’s project are partially made blindly: Telegram’s ICO is one of the most closed ones , there are almost no technical details and information on how the future project will work in the placement materials.

What do I get from this?

It seems that Telegram itself did not expect such a stir around its project. If you expected to buy Gram in the open part of the deal, you probably won't be able to do so.

Artem Gubenko