Social Giant Line Raises $140 Million for NFT Push, ‘Brown and Friends’ Games

Line Next, the NFT subsidiary of Japanese messaging giant Line, has raised $140 million in a funding round led by private equity firm Crescendo Equity Partners. The investment marks the largest backing for an Asian blockchain company this year, the company claims.

The firm plans to use the fresh capital injection to expand its global NFT business and introduce new services to promote wider Web3 adoption. First on the agenda is the official launch of Dosi, Line Next’s global NFT marketplace, in January 2024.

Integrated with Line’s existing NFT platform in Japan, Dosi will be offered as a mobile app that enables global trading of digital assets.

Line Next—which is based in South Korea but also has offices in the U.S. and Japan—is also developing a social app powered by AI avatars, as well as blockchain games utilizing Line’s popular Brown & Friends characters from the Line Friends IP. The company also operates the Game Dosi platform, which hosts a number of NFT games.

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In April, Line Friends IP owner IPX announced a collaboration with popular Ethereum NFT project Azuki that will yield things like merchandise, content, and events.

Line’s new services will be built on the blockchain network Finschia, which was previously called Line Blockchain (and originally the Link Chain). Finschia’s native cryptocurrency is LINK. Line Next and the Peter Thiel-backed Crescendo will join the Finschia Foundation to contribute to expanding the blockchain’s ecosystem.

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“Line’s global competitiveness and its vision to lead Web3 services were the investment thesis,” said Crescendo Managing Partner Kevin Lee. “We hope to build a standard for Web3 apps that general users can easily use and adopt blockchain to all sorts of services and brands of Web2.”

Editor’s note: This article was written with the assistance of AI. Edited and fact-checked by Andrew Hayward.