Many of you who have been following our current funding round on BnkToTheFuture will have seen a significant increase in the amount raised. We’re delighted to give you an initial heads up on an upcoming exciting development. We have reached an investment agreement with a Hong Kong based company, but while we’re finalising the terms, we can provide only high level details. The agreement reflects a direct investment within MaidSafe UK, in addition to the formation of a joint venture, based in Hong Kong.

MaidSafe Asia (the working title for the joint venture) will benefit from the local market knowledge, trading licenses and established business relationships of MaidSafe’s new partner, while MaidSafe will provide network licenses, know how and technical support for customers using the SAFE Network. The location of MaidSafe Asia will be an excellent launch pad for the Chinese market with its 720 million internet users. Additionally, with around 50% Internet penetration, MaidSafe Asia will have a huge opportunity to reach the broader Asian region as it is one of the world’s most exciting areas for growth.

The focus of the joint venture will be to enable Chinese companies and projects to leapfrog traditional data centre models, and move to decentralised secure networking. Data protection and security from cyber attacks is obviously very appealing to businesses around the world, while a low cost infrastructure will provide increased profit margins.

We anticipate this will encourage existing application developers to engage deeply with the current API roll out and examples. Thus they will be able to exploit a much larger marketplace and possibly also engage with partners globally to adjust their offerings to various markets.

This deal reflects part of our global strategy to grow the company and the SAFE Network through a series of partnerships, and we see this push into the Asian market as a first step. In time, we plan for further ventures within areas like; Dubai, South Africa, South America as well as the UK, USA and Europe, with the local partners driving business adoption, which in turn will increase end user take up.

As you can imagine we have a lot of details to work through in the coming months and we will keep you updated with developments as we progress.