Blueseed, the planned startup community on a ship, has just announced seed funding from leading venture capitalists. The project’s backers include Floodgate Fund, Correlation Ventures, and Xu Xiaoping and Wang Qiang of ZhenFund.
Based In Palo Alto, CA, Floodgate Fund is led by visionary investor Mike Maples Jr, an early investor in Twitter, digg, and Chegg. Palo Alto and San Diego, CA based Correlation Ventures raised $165M in 2012 with its revolutionary analytics-based startup evaluation approach. High-profile Chinese venture capital firm ZhenFund which is co-founded by famous Chinese angel investors and entrepreneurs Xu Xiaoping and Wang Qiang, raised $30 million for its most recent fund, launched in conjunction with Silicon Valley heavyweight Sequoia Capital.
Blueseed is creating a high-tech startup community in international waters 12 miles from the California coast. Its model is to take in startups from around the world, connect them with resources in Silicon Valley, and help them scale until they’re ready to move into Silicon Valley proper. As Dan Dascalescu, the press officer of Blueseed said, its mission is to create jobs and fostering technological innovation.
So far, Blueseed has formalized partnerships with over 70 organizations, including Start-Up Chile, Startup Weekend, Fenwick & West, RocketSpace, the Unreasonable Institute, Entrepreneurial Poland, and Nanyang Technological University.
Blueseed was actually introduced by us to Xu Xiaoping at TechNode’s event at InnoSpring back in September. Xu Xiaoping was saying that it one of the craziest idea he ever heard of.
