We’re leading Fission Labs‘ $10M Series A to build the liquidity infrastructure for tokenized private markets.

 

For decades, private markets birthed assets that juggle the tradeoff between access and illiquidity. Banks and investment firms get access to institutional-grade returns in exchange for capital locked up for years, with exits limited to capped quarterly redemption windows. Tokenization is now attacking the access side of that equation. The world’s largest alternative asset managers including Apollo, Blackrock, KKR, Hamilton Lane, and others are rapidly bringing private market products on-chain. In fact, tokenized RWAs have grown from under $5B in early 2024 to $26.4B by March 2026, growing roughly 4x in the past year alone.

 

 

The initial catalyst for this adoption can be largely attributed to a wider audience of capital. An abundance of stablecoin holders can now access institutional private investments through tokenized funds. This is fundamentally expanding access to US private markets on a global scale.

 

But tokenization alone doesn’t solve the industry’s issue of liquidity. Investors redeem these products through manual paperwork, broker coordination, and settlement cycles that can take weeks. Even in the age of digitized finance, the process of redemption for the average investor today remains unbelievably complex.

 

Meanwhile, we see record high levels of redemption of these assets this past year. During periods of elevated selling, issuers face concentrated redemption windows that can create unnecessary pressure on otherwise long-duration portfolios. As a result, liquidity increasingly flows through fragmented OTC desks and bilateral transactions rather than transparent markets.

 

 

That secondary ecosystem has already grown into a $20B market today, and Carlyle AlpInvest, one of the largest secondaries buyers globally, expects it to exceed $80B by 2030.

 

 

The convergence of these three trends provide evidence that a tokenized private market has sufficient supply, demand, and incentives to flourish. However, tokenized private markets require the same level of dedicated market infrastructure that every major asset class relies on.

 

Enter Fission

Fission is building the first liquidity and exchange network purpose-built for tokenized semi-liquid private funds.

 

Fission enables investors to buy and sell institutional private market products with one click while preserving the structural integrity of the underlying funds. That’s why they built alongside issuers like Apollo from day one. Instead of forcing these issuers to redesign their products around continuous liquidity, Fission creates liquidity around existing fund structures using Apollo’s ACRED as the primary launch asset.

 

Over the past year, Fission has laid the foundation for what can become the industry’s core trading venue. Fission has successfully processed live redemption transactions, earned an exchange license, validated its liquidity model, and generated millions of dollars of inbound liquidity demand. That’s exactly the type of signal we look for before infrastructure reaches scale.

 

Meet the Team

Founders building financial market infrastructure need more than technical ability. They need credibility across traditional finance, crypto, regulators, and institutional counterparties. Jonathan and Steve bring that combination.

 

Before founding Fission, Jonathan was a research analyst at Credit Suisse and later an investor at Point72, where he invested across both public and private markets. That background gave him a deep understanding of institutional market structure and digital asset finance.

 

Fission’s leadership team also includes Steve Bendit, who previously led global business development and institutional sales at Securitize (NYSE: SECZ). During his tenure, he worked closely with many of the world’s leading asset managers and DeFi institutions, helping distribute more than $4 billion in on-chain assets during the market’s early development.

 

Our Thesis

Today, investors can access public equities, ETFs, bonds, commodities, and crypto through exchanges offering transparent pricing and continuous liquidity. There is no equivalent platform for tokenized semi-liquid private funds.

 

History shows that every major asset class eventually converges toward centralized liquidity. The NYSE emerged from the Buttonwood Agreement by concentrating fragmented trading into a single marketplace. NASDAQ digitized an opaque dealer network and made markets dramatically more efficient. Electronic exchanges transformed equities, fixed income, commodities, and increasingly even crypto itself. We believe tokenized private markets will follow the same path and this transition is exactly what we’re underwriting.

 

The terminal state of tokenized private markets is not a collection of dealer networks and OTC desks. It is a global exchange where investors around the world onboard once and gain access to the world’s best private market products through a single liquidity venue. This is the universe we see in the future, and believe Fission is best positioned to become the de facto venue for tokenized private markets.

 

Learn more at fission.xyz and follow Fission on X and LinkedIn.

 

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