May 20, 2022 | Business
The round is led by Sino Global Capital, Amber Group and Spartan Group, with participation from Alameda Research, Gate Ventures, Impossible Finance and Shima Capital.
The Pine Platform, which is built on top of the Pine Protocol, enables permissionless instant lending and borrowing of cryptocurrencies using NFTs as collateral. The Pine Platform offers distinctive features to provide a better user experience: The “Pine Now, Pay Later” feature allows anyone to purchase NFTs on open NFT marketplaces with a mortgage, providing flexible financing terms. Currently, OpenSea and LooksRare are supported with more marketplaces to be added. Additionally, NFT owners will be able to keep the utilities of their NFTs, such as receiving airdrops and accessing gated channels, even when they are pledged as collateral.
Since its alpha launch in February and official product launch at the end of April 2022, the Pine Platform has facilitated over $2M in lending. NFT owners can currently get a crypto loan on 30 popular NFT collections including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, CloneX, Moonbird, Doodle and many more.
“A year ago, I wanted to buy a Meebit but did not have spare ETH in my wallet. I sold my Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) at 7 ETH to execute the trade. I wanted to buy back another BAYC but I never did and I still have my Meebit right now. In hindsight I wish I had access to a platform like Pine. I decided to build out Pine so that NFT owners like myself are able to unlock liquidity without having to sell their NFTs. They can also obtain financing for their dream NFT purchases,” says Alex “Azure” Ho, co-founder of Pine. “We are building Pine with a diverse team that comes from different professional backgrounds but most importantly, we are all NFT lovers, collectors, and believers,” adds Alex.
“We believe NFTs have a multi-decade growth runway and will unlock tremendous value for artists, builders, creators, curators and owners. But we are still early, and infrastructure needs to be built out. Pine’s mission to provide DeFi primitives for NFTs will be a critical piece of the puzzle. We are extremely excited to partner with the Pine team and look forward to working with them to accelerate the emergence of an open, inclusive, and flourishing creator economy,” says Wang Jian, Head of Principal Investment of Amber Group.
“Pine is a perfect example of how breakthrough innovation occurs at the intersection of different ideas. By building the infrastructure to facilitate the use of NFTs as collateral, Pine protocol brings needed capital efficiency to the NFT market and is a key step in the continued integration of the NFT and DeFi ecosystems. Sino Global Capital could not be more thrilled to support this amazing team of builders as they push our entire industry forward,” concludes Matthew Graham, CEO of Sino Global Capital.
The funds will be used to further develop the Pine Platform and the Pine Protocol and add multi-chain support for Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche and Fantom, among others.
Connect your wallet to the Pine Platform and get access to instant liquidity: https://pine.loans/
May 13, 2022 | Business
Soluna Holdings, Inc. (“SHI” or the “Company”), (NASDAQ: SLNH), the parent company of Soluna Computing, Inc. (“SCI”), secured $35 million in project financing to develop green data centers co-located with renewable energy assets. Spring Lane Capital, a private equity firm, invested private funds in Soluna as a part of their strategy focused on hybrid project capital for sustainability solutions in the energy, food, water, waste and transportation industries. The capital will help develop three behind-the-meter (BTM) projects designed to convert wasted renewable energy into clean computing services such as bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence.
“Soluna is the only true green bitcoin company we’ve yet seen,” said Rob Day, Spring Lane Capital Partner and Co-Founder. “Going after wasted renewable energy ‘spilled power’ is a compelling solution and fixes both bitcoin’s climate problem and wind power’s grid problem.”
Michael Toporek, CEO of Soluna Holdings, Inc. said, “Consistent with our previously articulated strategy, we continue to pursue opportunities that we believe enable us to optimize our cost of capital. The Spring Lane Capital approach helps us develop a mature repeatable model that can be scaled.”
The first of the three projects, Dorothy, named in honor of African American mathematician and human computer Dorothy Vaughan, is expected to be energized later this summer and coincide with the launch of a local STEM program. The Dorothy project is a 100 MW data center with a 50 MW initial phase, connected to a Texas wind farm that produces more electricity than the grid can consume. Soluna’s data center is currently estimated to create between 25 to 50 highly skilled jobs for technicians, security and electrical staff.
The other two projects funded by the new capital will come from Soluna’s robust pipeline.
John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna Computing, Inc., said, “We are honored to have a pioneering sustainability project finance firm like Spring Lane Capital back our vision. Our model of leveraging excess clean energy to generate low-cost computing is the future of green bitcoin mining and green data centers.”
Spring Lane Capital has a successful track record helping sustainable technology companies raise capital to build flagship projects. Their ‘hybrid project capital’ approach provides project equity along with additional growth capital.
Added Day: “Soluna is driving demand for clean power by giving a floor price and improving the bottom line of the renewable power partners they work with. The ultimate result is more wind farms and solar farms that would not otherwise be built.”
At power plants like the wind farm where the Dorothy project is under construction, excess energy is wasted when the grid becomes overloaded or demand is too low. Soluna’s scalable solution allows every excess megawatt to be used for batch-oriented, computing-intensive processes, such as cryptocurrency mining and machine learning. Additionally, flexible demand consumers help stabilize the grid by preventing power overload, which can otherwise lead to blackouts and grid malfunction.
Last month, Soluna Holdings (SCI’s Computing’s parent company), sold its Albany-based MTI Instruments subsidiary for $10.75 million, expanding its focus on helping the modern grid absorb more renewable energy through flexible green data centers.
About Soluna Holdings, Inc.
Soluna Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: SLNH), which operates through its subsidiary, Soluna Computing, Inc. is the leading developer of green data centers that convert excess renewable energy into global computing resources. Soluna builds modular, scalable data centers for computing-intensive, batchable applications such as cryptocurrency mining, AI and machine learning. Soluna provides a cost-effective alternative to battery storage or transmission lines. Up to 30% of the power of renewable energy projects can go to waste. Soluna’s data centers enable clean electricity asset owners to ‘Sell. Every. Megawatt.’ For more information about Soluna, please visit solunacomputing.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Investor Relations:
Kirin Smith, President
PCG Advisory, Inc.
646.823.8656
Ksmith@pcgadvisory.com
Dec 26, 2021 | Business
Dista, an AI-based location intelligence platform, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding. Dista was incubated in 2017 and registered as an independent entity on October 17, 2020. Pentathlon Ventures led the investment with participation from Core 91 and other individual investors.
Dista plans to use the investment to scale its presence in international markets, strengthen its workforce, focus on R&D, and elevate the user experience.
Founded by Shishir Gokhale – Co-founder and CEO, Deepak Garg- Co-founder and CTO, and Nishant Kumar – Co-founder and CPO, Dista’s location intelligence platform streamlines business processes and enhances customer experience with its robust suite of products.
Dista has helped global businesses achieve quicker TATs, higher conversion and engagement rates, and enhanced customer experience.
“Our core platform gives us the launchpad to solve new and rapidly changing location data-driven solutions,” said Shishir Gokhale.
Talking about using funding for growth, expansion, and technology upgrade, Nishant Kumar said, “Now that we have a strong base of over 50 enterprise customers, we plan to take our offering worldwide. We will use the funds to achieve scale-market expansion, brand building, and strengthening our product lines by focusing on R&D and advanced User Experience to amplify further the value delivered to our customers and end-users.”
Talking about the road ahead and the opportunities democratizing location intelligence holds, Deepak Garg said, “Being a sophisticated AI-enabled platform, we have an enormous potential to cater to a large number of location-triggered challenges across industries.
The road ahead is challenging yet exciting as more and more enterprises are becoming location-aware, and the need to apply location intelligence to every dimension of business decisions is becoming imperative. We will need to match this demand with tremendous scale and reach.”
Dista’s USP is converting location data into intelligence, applying them to solve real-world business problems, and achieving this rapidly, keeping it unique to every customer. Solutions engineered on Dista’s no-code/low-code customizations aim to offer tailored SaaS experiences to customers.
The platform is designed with the fundamental principles of:
Operating with efficiency
Monitoring with visualization
Strategizing business decisioning
Dista has applicability across all industries; however, our priority industries are BFSI, Delivery Services, Logistics and Supply chain, Healthcare and Pharma, and Manufacturing globally.
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