Yesterday Luxembourg tokenization company Tokeny announced that fund administration firm Apex Group became its lead strategic investor. Tokeny did not share the terms.
Apex was announced as a participant in Tokeny’s €5 million ($5.5m) funding round in early 2022, alongside Inveniam and K20 Fund. However, as Apex is a major investor in Inveniam, Apex did not appear directly on Tokeny’s cap table until now. Tokeny confirmed the investment was a mix of primary and secondary transactions.
Euronext was an early investor in 2019, paying €5 million ($5.5m) for a 23.5% stake at the time.
Apex has grown to become a major force in the fund adminisration sector with more than 12,000 employees. As of 2022 it had $2.75 trillion in assets under administration. Backers include Genstar Capital, Mubadala and Carlyle.
“This investment is more than a financial commitment; it represents our belief in the transformative power of tokenization in the financial sector,” said Peter Hughes, Founder and CEO of Apex Group. “We are confident that our collaboration with Tokeny, a leader in this revolutionary field, will pave the way for innovative, digitized financial solutions that meet the evolving needs of our clients and the market.”
Tokeny provides a compliant tokenization platform and its clients are a mix of startups and institutions. For example, it tokenized the public blockchain green bond issuance recently managed by ABN Amro.
“We have successful use cases in funds (open-ended, closed-end), debt, equities, commodities, B2B payment systems and stablecoins, Ip rights and loyalty programs,” said Tokeny CEO Luc Falempin via email. “We work with top tier banks, asset managers, fund servicers and exchanges.”
It also created a permissioned security token standard, the T-REX protocol, which became the ERC3643 standard.
Tokeny has tokenized €28 billion+ in assets
The tokenization platform says it has tokenized €28 billion ($30.8 billion) in assets. That sounds like a lot but we guessed it might be partially explained by partner Inveniam, which uses tokenization to provide automated valuation services for private assets. Inveniam says it has $55 billion in assets on its platform.
We asked Tokeny about the €28 billion figure. It turns out that it’s an old number derived from a two year old client survey. As Tokeny provides a SaaS platform and the valuations are not necessarily visible, it otherwise wouldn’t know.
“We think it is much more now,” said CEO Falempin. “Most of the time (we work) under NDAs as we are a white-label platform. We are the provider behind a large number of the tokenization initiatives announced in this space.”
Meanwhile, Apex was the lead investor in Inveniam’s 2021 $25 million Series A funding round. It followed that up by taking a majority stake in FundAdminChain in 2022. And it has various other tokenization collaborations.
