Lately I have been researching a relatively new project in the blockchain industry called Covalent. They are creating a new internet in which they redefine the utilization of data. The previous two articles were about the overall project, its main selling point and its technological advancements. This week I will be writing about the Covalent team and its investors. But first a small reminder about what Covalent is all about:
Covalent is building upon the new internet Web 3.0 standard with an innovative and unique view on how to utilize data. By building the COVA protocol they will create their own programming language called Centrifuge, in which ‘Smart Policies’ can be written. The COVA Virtual Machine (CovaVM) will enable smart policies to be implemented containing terms and conditions on how to utilize specific data. All while incentivizing Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) Nodes to perform administrative tasks on the network and process the blockchain transactions.
Covalent core team members
According to a recent interview between Covalent’s team and Blockchain Research Laboratory TOP SIX Lab, currently the tech team is comprised of 10 people, of which 8 of them are developers that design the code base.
Vincent Li
Education: Harvard University Bachelor Degree and Ph.D student
Working experience: during his doctorate studies at Harvard University Vincent decided to pursue a career in finance in stead of finishing his Ph.D candidacy in Philosophy. He worked in New York at investment management firm Tower Research Capital during the years 2013–2014 after which he took on a job at Chicago based investment firm Citadel. In 2016 Vincent joined the Gigster team in an undisclosed job description. Starting 2018 he became the co-founder of Covalent (together with his business partner Raymond Gao).
Raymond Gao
Princeton University Masters Degree and Peking University Bachelor Degree
Working experience: According to his LinkedIn profile, it has only been a 2 years since Raymond Gao has finished his Master’s Degree at Princeton University, while working there as a Research Assistant. Raymond has since had positions as an early stage investor at FreeS Fund and as an executive assistant, before landing the job of co-founder at Covalent.
Looking at his profile, you can see he has experience in Machine Learning (ML) and Big Data.
Shundan Xioa
Education: University of North-Carolina Master Degree and Harbin Institute of Technology bachelor Degree.
Working experience: Shundan Xioa has a lot of experience in coding. She was a software engineer at Amazon, LinkedIn, Gusto (formerly known as ZenPayroll) and Gigster.
Shundan joined Covalent to be their software engineer.
Joyce Ji
Education: National University of Singapore Master Degree and Peking University Bachelor Degree.
Working experience: As a former National University of Singapore research assistant and journalist, Joyce Ji has recently been focusing on PR, marketing and media.
Covalent’s engineering and outreach department is comprised of full stack engineer Abrar Shariar, software engineer Nazim Uddin, software engineer Md Riazal Islam Riaz, Tarik Moon, Tonmoy Mollik, Nazmur Rashid Noor, Yana Bai and Danny Yang.
Covalent investors
According to the same interview as stated above, more than 20 investors already jumped onboard the Covalent project. Some of the professional investment parties include FBG Capital, IOST/ Bluehill, ZhenFund, Huobi Capital, Alphabit Fund, Kenetic and others. Over 10,000,000 USD is raised through these private investments. To highlight some of the professional entities supporting the Covalent project:
Huobi Capital
As a subsidiary of Huobi Global, investment arm Huobi Capital invests in various blockchain projects that they feel have a high potential in becoming widely successful. Previous Huobi Capital investments include: IOST, Ontology, Aelf, Thunder Token, Republic Protocol and Nervos Network. Having a parent company that also include a top volume digital asset exchange, does increase its chances to list on this exchange, it's not a guarantee but it can help.
FBG Capital
Beijing based Venture Capital firm FBG Capital has been investing in blockchain projects for several years now and with great success. They are frontrunners in investing in high potential lucrative blockchain projects. According to this article in Forbes, they are entangled into several blockchain branches and have a big influence in having their investments listed in major exchanges.
FBG Capital’s Founder Shuoji Zhou is an advisor to COVA as well as FBG Capital Consultant Jia Tian.
Bluehill
Blockchain incubator and accelerator company Bluehill, founded by blockchain platform IOStoken, has recently announced the launch of a 50,000,000 USD investment fund to support innovative blockchain projects that are built within the IOST ecosystem. Bluehill has already announced its partnership and support of 7 promising blockchain projects. Covalent is one of the 7 projects they partnered with and will support into launching a successful product.
For more information on Covalent:
Website: http://covalent.ai/index.html
Telegram: https://t.me/covalentofficial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/covatoken
Blog: https://medium.com/@covatoken
Github: https://github.com/covalent-hq
Whitepaper: https://docsend.com/view/dvvb75n
Full disclosure: This article is not intended as investment advice. It is just my personal opinion about Covalent and its COVA protocol. You should always do your own research. Covalent rewards me for writing this article and supports me for ventilating my own personal opinion.
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LindaCrypto