Quote from: Korbman on April 11, 2014, 03:56:59 PM

That's sort of what I figured (and freedomno1 pointed out my oversight before), but there wasn't any detail surrounding it in the prospectus. In any case, thank you for the clarification.
Quick question: How did you guys arrive at the $3.6M figure for mass manufacturing, and what happens if you only end up raising, say, 10% of the total $4M?

If the total amount of funding is not raised, the IPO will not be successful and all investors will receive their funds back. The funds are held in escrow by Havelock at the moment.

Regarding the $3.6M for manufacturing, the cost is around $1.5 - $2M for 40nm mask and tooling and about $1.5M - $2M for wafers, packaging, and equipment assembly. I'm working to get more detailed numbers if possible.

Quote from: Korbman on April 12, 2014, 03:05:32 PM

Quote from: jomay on April 12, 2014, 01:04:56 PM

My fear/impression is that the VC's got their shares much cheaper than IPO investors. To my understanding, developing a chip up to the mask is not that expensive and surely does not cost $4 Mio (that would be >20-40 man years in salary!!!). There are many ASIC companies that develop a working prototype up to the mask using only 30% of the pre-order money (e.g. Alpha-tech).

Just wanted to touch on this part specifically. In just about all cases, yes, Angel investors receive their shares vastly cheaper than IPO investors. I'll speculate that in this case the Angels put in less than $1M to help get the company off the ground. Since VC and Angel investing can be quite risky, it's normal to see a smaller investment be worth 20-30% of a company prior to IPO.

Korbman is correct on this point; funding that gets the company going is nearly always valued higher than the funding of the retail/IPO investor - the reason is that that funding has gotten the IPO to this point; a lot of time and money has already been spent to get here.

In addition, neither Tom nor Sophia has taken a salary yet. IC design isn't cheap - you have to spend the money to get the good engineering talent required for a project like this. In addition, a 40nm backend design project can cost upwards of $400,0000.

Quote from: kenmomotaro on April 13, 2014, 09:42:41 AM

Some questions for ALC,
1. Why focus on Scrypt miner not SHA256 miner. What's the strategy behind that?

2. So far KNC's Titan scrypt miner is 2 times efficient than ALC's miner. And both the price are the same. And we all know KNC is a promising company so those data are very likely to be true. Do you think 3 months ship date ahead KNC's Titan is worthy the high price?

3. Do you mind a investor or customer visit in your Taipei 101 office?

Ken, thanks for the questions - I'll let you know when I have responses from the founders for you. For the first point, the SHA-256 ASIC is extremely competitive and has many well-funded, entrenched companies already in the space. Scrypt ASIC is just now coming to market, allowing lower competition to AlcheMiner and more potential profit than SHA-256.

Quote from: jomay on April 12, 2014, 01:04:56 PM

1. Can you be more specific about the VC funding received so far? How much money has been invested by VC's?
My fear/impression is that the VC's got their shares much cheaper than IPO investors. To my understanding, developing a chip up to the mask is not that expensive and surely does not cost $4 Mio (that would be >20-40 man years in salary!!!). There are many ASIC companies that develop a working prototype up to the mask using only 30% of the pre-order money (e.g. Alpha-tech).

2. What salary was/is paid to the founders and head of development? Surely they should be working for a low salary given their high profit share (30%)?
I see the risk that AlcheMiner ends up not profitable, not only because of market risk and extreme competition, but also because certain key figures earn a very high fixed salary. Who would control/prevent this?

3. How do you expect to compete time-wise? When did you start with the ASIC verification etc.? KnC passed the RTL stage, Fibonacci is also starting tape out later this quarter.

Thanks for the questions - I'll see if the company can disclose how much as been invested by Angels/VCs so far. Regarding salary, Sophia and Tom have not taken any salary yet - I would hope that investors see both that and the promise to pay profits to investors first as a sign of faith in the company and its business model.

I'll be back in touch with responses from the founders regarding the stages of development; July is the delivery date which should precede KNC's shipping and match Alpha's shipping time (with better power consumption and $/MH).

Finally, a great announcement from the engineering team regarding power consumption! This was taken from the press release, so please excuse the PR-speak Cheesy

04/12/14

The Most Power Efficient Scrypt Mining Chip Announced to Date: AlcheMiner Has Achieved Significant Technology Breakthrough in Power Consumption with Less than 3W per Mh/s.

Mr. Tom Soong, CEO of AlcheMiner, is pleased to announce that our engineering team has achieved technology breakthrough in power consumption. Specifically, AlcheMiners newly developed Scrypt mining chip is expected to attain less than 3W per Mh/s based on assessment by backend IC design tools.

Mr. Tom Soong said, To our best knowledge, this is the most power efficient Scrypt mining chip announced to date. We are glad that our engineering team is able to deliver such brilliant results. This technology breakthrough will significantly reduce AlcheMiners customers electricity cost.