San Fransisco based Securitize has announced a ‘seven-figure’ investment from Japanese financial services conglomerate, SBI Holdings. Although the exact amount injected by SBI was not disclosed, it is expected to be a seven or eight figure number.
For the last year, Securitize have been trying to disrupt the Asian security token market. In January 2019, Securitize partnered with Coinstreet Partners and STO Global-X to introduce security tokens into what was then an ‘untapped’ Asian market. Securitize then partnered with the Japan Security Token Association in an effort to strengthen its presence and influence in that country.
In September, Securitize announced a $14 million raise in a Series A extension from strategic partners to include Banco Santander, MUFG, and Nomura Holdings. It brought the firm’s total amount raised to north of $30 million.
Securitize currently has a subsidiary in Japan. According to Carlos Domingo, CEO of Securitize, the funds will be used establish a new office in Japan. The office is scheduled to be up by the end of 2020. Domingo stated that:
We’re going to do business there and that involves not only finding customers in Japan, but also localizing the technology and making sure you know the language for the next similar types of integrations that you might be looking at.
As far as Securitize is concerned, Domingo stated that such interest only strengthens the idea of security token adoption as inevitable:
I think that the fact that [SBI is] putting their faith and investing in a company like us [is] signifying the move towards more adoption of security tokens.
Besides Securitize, the tokenized security space continues to see further developments. Just a few weeks ago, iSTOX announced a live secondary market which completed the “world’s first issuance, custody, and trading of a regulated blockchain-based security on a single platform”.