Jack Ma invests in blockchain, and his holding company Hang Seng Electronics makes a strategic investment in Symbiont

On May 5, blockchain startup Symbiont raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Chinese software company Hang Seng Electronics.

It is reported that Hang Seng Electronic focuses on the field of wealth asset management and provides overall IT solutions and services to financial institutions such as securities, banks, funds, futures, trusts, and insurance.

It is worth noting that the largest shareholder of Hang Seng Electronics is Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba. According to reports, Jack Ma spent 3.299 billion yuan to acquire Hang Seng Electronics Group in mid-2014 and became the largest shareholder of Hang Seng Electronics. According to a statement from Hang Seng Electronics in the past, the company began investing in financial technology companies in January this year.

The reporter contacted a representative of Symbiont, but he refused to disclose the funds involved in the transaction. In addition to providing funds, Hang Seng Electronics will become an observer on Symbiont's board of directors.

According to Symbiont, Hundsun will integrate Symbiont’s smart contract software into its Chinese client base. In particular, the collaboration will focus on streamlining business processes in public and private securities markets.

In a statement, Hundsun Electronics CEO Guan Xiaolan said:

“We chose Symbiont because of its superior, mature, and highly differentiated distributed ledger (DLT) stack. Its data layer is protected by market-leading security and privacy solutions, and its smart contracts have the proven ability to automate complex business logic, such as highly customized employee salary waterfalls for private companies.”

(Photo: Guan Xiaolan, Executive President of Hang Seng Electronics)

It is reported that this investment came about two years after Symbiont received US$1.25 million in seed round financing.