Canine memecoin project Shiba Inu (SHIB) has raised $12 million from a private token sale of its not-yet-released TREAT utility and governance token.

According to the April 22 announcement, investors include Comma 3 Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Cypher Capital, Shima Capital, Hercules Ventures, Animoca Brands, Morningstar Ventures, Woodstock Fund, DWF Ventures, Polygon Ventures, Stake Capital, Illuminati Digital Capital, Primal Capital, Mechanism Capital, DWF Ventures and Spirit Dao. All investors participating in the private token sale were outside the United States.

The participation of venture capital firms and their partners will help the Shiba Inu project expand its network and “increase what Shiba Inu can truly be capable of for our community,” commented Shytoshi Kusama, the anonymous core developer of Shiba Inu. 

Kusama has maintained a low profile this year, with user reports of his sightings in New York, Japan and the Maldives. However, Kusama claims that he is on vacation to enjoy himself “just like everyone else.” That said, the core developer resurfaced on Telegram on April 21. "I have put my heart in soul to build this, and you are a worthless fudder who is not deserving of the breath God gave you,” wrote Kusama in response to a user’s critique. 

Shiba Inu staff explained that “TREAT is the final unreleased token by the popular meme brand that will unlock Shiba Inu’s newly announced blockchain featuring Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).” Two months prior, Shiba Inu partnered with Zama.ai to deploy the FHE technology, which forms the basis of the protocol’s novel privacy layer, Tre. 

The fund will be used by Shiba Inu’s Panamian entity, Shiba Inu Mint S.A., to build the Treat platform. The project noted that possible applications of the technology include encrypted lending platforms, tokenized asset exchanges and encrypted machine learning models. 

Shiba Inu has been a top-performing memecoin, with a gain of 164% over the past year. Last December, the protocol introduced .shib domains for its tokenholders. Meanwhile, Shibarium, its layer-2 scaling solution, has surpassed over 1 million users since its inception. 

Related: Shibarium denies bridge issues, calls it FUD