Fission Raises $10 Million to Sell Tokenized Fund Shares in 90 Seconds

Pantera Capital has led a $10 million Series A in Fission, a New York startup that lets investors sell tokenized fund shares in 90 seconds or less instead of waiting roughly 200 days. The round, which closed in September, also drew Circle Ventures, Borderless Capital, and Ari Rubenstein. Fission declined to disclose its valuation.

Jonathan Shaffer, the company's CEO and cofounder, told Fortune: "It would take you normally about 200 days to sell [a] product. For a fee, you can sell it right now and get your money back, and this will settle… in 90 seconds or less."

Why can't investors cash out of tokenized funds?

Tokenization has sped up the way money moves into private funds, not out. Asset managers including BlackRock, Apollo, and Janus Henderson have turned fund shares into digital tokens, cutting cumbersome paperwork. But a token doesn't guarantee a buyer when an investor wants to sell — and liquidity gaps can leave holders waiting months.

Fission's fix is to become the buyer itself. Investors connect their digital wallets, submit a sale, and Fission handles the legal and trading mechanics behind the scenes, rather than forcing them to wait for the fund to process a withdrawal.

The problem is well documented. In June, the digital-investment platform InvestaX said investors in tokenized private-credit products mostly moved money in and out through the funds themselves rather than selling to other buyers. An earlier report by the International Organization of Securities Commissions found firms had made more progress creating digital tokens than building markets where investors could trade them with one another.

Franklin Bi, general partner at Pantera Capital, told Fortune: "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."

In short: issuance got solved, exits didn't.

Who built Fission?

Shaffer founded the company in 2024 with CRO Steve Bendit and CTO Chris Humphrey. The trio's backgrounds map directly onto the problem. Shaffer saw it as an investor at Point72, the hedge fund of billionaire Steve Cohen, watching Wall Street tokenize private fund shares without shortening exit timelines. Bendit ran business development at Securitize, a firm that puts financial assets on blockchains. After more than two years comparing notes on why fund liquidity stayed elusive, they teamed with Humphrey to build the faster exit.

The startup now has eight employees split between Long Island and Los Angeles.

Who uses it?

Most customers are institutional investors or organizations holding assets on blockchains, Shaffer said. They include:

• U.S. and overseas hedge funds with tokenized private-credit or equity holdings
• Crypto organizations managing their treasuries
• Stablecoin issuers keeping reserves in interest-earning tokenized investments
• A smaller but growing group of wealthy individuals cashing out personal holdings

How big is the tokenization push behind it?

The market context is moving fast. BlackRock expanded its lineup in August with two tokenized money market products. JPMorgan's asset management arm launched its second tokenized money market fund for U.S. investors in May. Federated Hermes, the Pittsburgh-based investment manager, announced a partnership with Prometheum this month to distribute tokenized funds through brokerages, with the first product expected in early 2027.

Each new issuance adds inventory that will eventually need an exit. Fission's Series A follows a $1.6 million pre-seed round led by SALT Fund and Kraynos Capital, with continued backing from New Form, gumi Cryptos Capital, Anthony Scaramucci, Manhattan Venture Partners, Reflexive Capital, and Lattice Capital.

As Wall Street's tokenized products multiply through 2027, the bottleneck shifts from issuance to liquidity — and that's the gap Fission just raised $10 million to own.