Profiling of the series contractor who runs Blockchain Innovation at Roxe
According to CoinDesk, Roxe announced that it will list on Nasdaq through a combination with the specialty acquisition company (SPAC) Goldenstone Acquisition Ltd. (GDST), in a deal worth 3.6 billion dollars. Although there is relatively little information about Roxe and its leaders, it is surprising that Roxe is led by a father and son duo, namely Haohan Xu, CEO, and his father Maodong Xu, Roxe’s president.
Maodong Xu has an interesting and long background as a Chinese series founder who rose to fame and fortune (he was listed on Forbes’ list of Chinese billionaires in 2016) through his many successful mobile, e-commerce and FinTech industry ventures. In recent years, he has focused on starting businesses that utilize blockchain technology to reinvent payments and other financial services.
Xu came from a humble beginnings and was born in a small fishing village in Shandong Province, China. He took his degree in computer application and automation and business management from Wuhan University of Technology and used a $ 10,000 wedding gift to create what became Shandong Province’s largest supermarket, QiLu Supermarket.
After that in 1998, Xu founded DotAd, which became the largest SMS application and leading 2G company in China and was acquired by Focus Media for $ 30 million in 2006. DotAd was then renamed Focus Wireless. The actual amount of the acquisition was $ 60 million due to the increase in the share price after the acquisition. So in 2007, Xu co-founded EGLS, a leading mobile game developer in China, which was acquired by a public company Dragon Pipe for $ 500 million in 2015. A year later, in 2008, he founded Lmobile, which became the largest mobile MMS an advertising platform and leading 2.5G company in China. Softbank Asia Investment Bank (SAIF) invested in Lmobile, which was acquired by Telstra for $ 159 million in 2010.
In 2010, he founded Xu Welink, which became the leading mobile marketing platform and 3G company in China and was sold for $ 110 million to CSC in 2015. The same year, he founded WoWo, which received a $ 100 million investment from CDH, Zero2IPO and Bauhinia Capital . Wowo became the leading e-commerce platform for lifestyle services in China. He successfully led the company to listing on the NASDAQ in 2015 with a market value of $ 1 billion. In 2011, he founded Galaxy Internet, which has received $ 350 million in funding from CSC and several other private equity firms and became the leading industrial Internet group in China, with a value of $ 1.9 billion in 2016.
After its many successes, Xu also faced unjustified setbacks, as Galaxy Internet’s second-tier subsidiary bought 29% of the shares in a Chinese public company, Tianma, and ended up in a gray area in Chinese government regulations. Unfortunately, this led to Xu being sanctioned by the China Securities Regulatory Commission.
Xu overcame this adversity and brought his entrepreneurial spirit to the United States to help his son Haohan start his own business (Apifiny). Haohan, together with his father’s help, later founded Roxe, where they aimed to transform the future of digital payments in banking and e-commerce. Roxes’ fast-growing network enables users to send and receive payments from 113 countries around the world. Over the past six months, the company has doubled the number of global partnerships to over 44.
Xu has an impressive track record as a series founder after founding several successful companies and obtaining more than ten patents in the field of technology. This led to him being recognized, along with Jack Ma, as one of the top ten news creators in China and a leading founder of the Chinese government. Xu has used his entrepreneurial talents and skills to pay for it, and has provided funds to alma mater in high school and sponsored more than a dozen students of outstanding character who attended prestigious schools such as Harvard, Tsinghua and Peking University.
