Analysis
Fission raised a $10 million Series A led by Pantera Capital, with Circle Ventures, Borderless Capital and investor Ari Rubenstein also participating, the company announced Thursday, according to Fortune. The round closed in September; Fission did not disclose a valuation.
Fission lets investors sell shares of tokenized funds -- private credit, equity or treasury vehicles represented as on-chain tokens -- without waiting for the fund itself to process a redemption. Investors connect a wallet, submit a sale, and Fission acts as the buyer, handling the legal and trading mechanics itself. CEO Jonathan Shaffer told Fortune a sale that would normally take about 200 days can settle "in 90 seconds or less" for a fee. Shaffer, CRO Steve Bendit and CTO Curtis Humphrey founded the New York company in 2024; Shaffer previously invested at Point72, and Bendit led business development at Securitize.
Fission's bet is on a specific friction point in the broader tokenization wave: funds can issue tokens representing an interest, but most still process redemptions on the same slow timeline as a traditional fund administrator. That gap has drawn other entrants building secondary liquidity for tokenized assets, including exchanges such as INX and tZERO that offer secondary trading for tokenized securities, though Fission's pitch is a direct buyer-of-last-resort model rather than a matching marketplace.
“CEO Jonathan Shaffer told Fortune a sale that would normally take about 200 days can settle "in 90 seconds or less" for a fee.”
Fission's Series A is modest next to the AI megarounds dominating this week's funding news, but the jump from its pre-seed reflects investor appetite for infrastructure plays in tokenization specifically, a category several analysts have forecast could represent trillions of dollars in assets by the early 2030s.
For LPs in tokenized vehicles, Fission's model is a signal that liquidity -- not just custody or compliance -- is becoming its own venture category. For founders building adjacent infrastructure, the fact that Pantera, a crypto-native fund, led rather than a generalist firm suggests the buyer pool for this kind of liquidity-provision business is still narrow and specialist.
Fission's eight employees are split between Long Island and Los Angeles; the company has not disclosed revenue or transaction volume.
