New York-based fintech start-up Fission has raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Pantera Capital as it seeks to make it easier for investors to sell tokenised private fund holdings.
The funding round, which closed in September, also included Circle Ventures, Borderless Capital and Ari Rubenstein. Fission, founded in 2024, has not disclosed its valuation.
The company is developing a platform designed to provide an alternative to waiting months for a fund to process a withdrawal or for another investor to buy a tokenised holding. Investors connect their digital wallets and submit a sale, while Fission manages the legal and trading arrangements.
Jonathan Shaffer, Fission’s chief executive, said a transaction that could normally take about 200 days could be completed in 90 seconds or less for a fee.
Fission targets tokenised fund liquidity
Tokenisation has allowed asset managers to represent fund shares and other investments as digital tokens on blockchains. It has also reduced some of the paperwork involved in investing in products offered by major managers including BlackRock, Apollo and Janus Henderson.
However, creating a digital token does not ensure that an investor will find a buyer when they want to sell. Investors in tokenised private-credit products have generally continued to put money in or withdraw it through the funds, rather than trade their holdings with one another, according to InvestaX in June.
An earlier report by the International Organization of Securities Commissions also found that financial firms had made greater progress issuing digital tokens than creating markets in which investors could sell them.
“Where tokenization is today has really been focused around the bridging layer and the issuance layer… but what Fission is focused on—the post-tokenization problem—almost nobody is focused on,” said Franklin Bi, a general partner at Pantera Capital.
BlackRock expanded its tokenised money-market offering in August, while JPMorgan’s asset management division launched its second tokenised money-market fund for US investors in May. Federated Hermes has also announced a partnership with Prometheum to distribute tokenised funds through brokerages, with its first product expected in early 2027.
Shaffer encountered the liquidity problem while working as an investor at Point72, the hedge fund of billionaire Steve Cohen. He later connected with Steve Bendit, then head of business development at blockchain financial-asset company Securitize, and the pair spent more than two years discussing why investors still faced lengthy waits to cash out.
They eventually teamed up with chief technology officer Chris Humphrey to launch Fission. The company now has eight employees, with staff in Long Island and Los Angeles.
Its customers are mainly institutional investors and organisations holding assets on blockchains. They include US and overseas hedge funds with tokenised private-credit or equity holdings, crypto organisations managing treasury assets, stablecoin issuers holding interest-bearing tokenised investments and a smaller but growing number of wealthy individuals.
The Series A follows a $1.6 million pre-seed round led by SALT Fund and Kraynos Capital. Existing backers including New Form, gumi Cryptos Capital, Anthony Scaramucci, Manhattan Venture Partners, Reflexive Capital and Lattice Capital also participated in the latest funding.
