A New York startup backed by Pantera Capital has raised $10 million to attack one of Wall Street's newest frictions: liquidity.
Fission said Thursday that it closed a Series A led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Circle Ventures, Borderless Capital and Ari Rubenstein. The round closed in September. The company declined to disclose its valuation.
Founded in 2024 by CEO Jonathan Shaffer, CRO Steve Bendit and CTO Curtis Humphrey, Fission is trying to make it easier for investors to sell tokenized fund shares. In the company's model, investors connect digital wallets and submit a sale, while Fission handles the legal and trading mechanics behind the scenes.
Shaffer told Fortune that it can normally take about 200 days to sell a product, but that 'for a fee, you can sell it right now and get your money back, and this will settle... in 90 seconds or less.'
The pitch arrives as tokenization gains traction across asset management. BlackRock expanded its lineup in August with two tokenized money market products, and JPMorgan's asset management arm launched its second tokenized money market fund for U.S. investors in May. Federated Hermes also announced a partnership with Prometheum this month to offer tokenized funds through brokerages, with the first product expected in early 2027.
But the market problem remains familiar: money can move into tokenized private funds much faster than it can move out. An earlier report by the International Organization of Securities Commissions found that firms had made more progress creating digital tokens than establishing markets where investors could sell them to one another. In June, InvestaX said investors in tokenized private-credit products mostly put money in or withdrew it through the funds, instead of selling their holdings to other buyers.
Fission's founders said they saw that mismatch up close. Shaffer said that as an investor at Point72, he watched Wall Street turn private fund shares into digital tokens without shortening investors' waits to cash out. He later connected with Bendit, then head of business development at Securitize, before the team built Fission around what it calls the post-tokenization problem.
Today, the startup says it has eight employees, with team members on Long Island and in Los Angeles. Shaffer said most customers are institutional investors or organizations holding assets on blockchains, including U.S. and overseas hedge funds with tokenized private-credit or equity holdings, crypto organizations managing treasuries, stablecoin issuers keeping reserves in tokenized investments that earn interest, and a growing group of wealthy individuals.
The company had previously raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round led by SALT Fund and Kraynos Capital. Existing investors New Form, gumi Cryptos Capital, Anthony Scaramucci, Manhattan Venture Partners, Reflexive Capital and Lattice Capital also continued their backing.
The market has already voted: tokenization is moving from a promise to a product. But if the exit still takes months, the technology is only half-built. Capital rewards clear rules and real liquidity, not just digital wrappers around old bottlenecks.
