Pavel Durov’s Telegram launched the second secret pre-sale of his company’s cryptocurrency Gram in advance of the ICO, reported The Verge.

This week, accredited investors have received e-mails with announcement of starting of a new round of pre-sale.

Earlier, Pavel Durov together with his brother Nikolai reported that they were able to attract $850 million from 81 investors. The company expects to receive more than $1.6 billion before the ICO.

Durov brothers do not disclose the names of their investors, but earlier the news broke that Sergey Solonin, Qiwi co-founder, and David Yakobashvili, co-founder of Wimm-Bill-Dann, had invested in the project. They said they invested $17 and $10 million in Telegram, respectively. But they wanted to invest more, but Pavel Durov did not allow them. Russian venture capital company TMT Investments also invested in Telegram’s ICO.

According to Vedomosti, Roman Abramovich is another Russian investor in Telegram, Presumably, Abramovich invested about $300 million in the project.

The maximum check from one investor was $20 million. The raised funds will be used to establish and develop the new block-platform Telegram Open Network with its own cryptocurrency — the Gram, — as well as Telegram's messenger.

The Telegram’s public ICO is scheduled for March. Bloomberg suggested that high demand for the Gram Token could raise public sales to as much as $1.5 billion, which means that Telegram could soon raise $2 billion to develop its TON network.

Sources:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/17037606/telegram-open-network-app-ico-cryptocurrency-ton

https://cryptoslate.com/telegram-claims-raised-850-million-massive-ico/