Multiliquid, a Los Angeles-based startup building instant settlement infrastructure for tokenized funds, has secured $8 million in funding across pre-seed and seed rounds, the company announced Tuesday. Polychain led the seed investment, joined by Strobe Ventures, CMT Digital, Metalayer Ventures, Generative Ventures and Circle Ventures.
The company declined to break out how much came from its earlier pre-seed round, raised via SAFE note, versus the later priced equity seed round. Multiliquid also wouldn't disclose its post-money valuation. But the timing speaks to a market inflection point: tokenized real-world assets have recently reached approximately $39 billion in market capitalization, nearly doubling from levels seen earlier in the year, according to data from RWA.xyz, though the figures can be volatile and vary by methodology.
That growth, however, has exposed a friction point. Liquidity has struggled to keep pace with issuance. Investors who hold tokenized money-market or Treasury funds often face delays of a day or more to redeem their holdings, along with discount spreads that erode returns. For an asset class pitched as bringing traditional finance onto 24/7 blockchain rails, the redemption experience has felt decidedly analog.
Multiliquid's pitch centers on fixing that gap. The platform lets users swap between tokenized funds and stablecoins in a single atomic transaction, executed on-chain at net asset value with no slippage. It's available around the clock, cutting out the wait times and valuation haircuts that typically come with pulling capital out of tokenized products.
The protocol runs on Ethereum and Solana, supporting tokens from Wellington Management, VanEck, Janus Henderson, Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree and Fasanara, according to the startup. One product, Liquid Treasury, automatically sweeps idle stablecoins into tokenized money-market exposure and allows instant redemptions back to USDC. Another offering, called Carry, provides tools for capital providers willing to underwrite instant redemptions in exchange for earning discount spreads and the underlying yield.
Founder and CEO Will Beeson, who previously co-founded Allica Bank in the U.K. and served as chief product officer at Libeara, Standard Charitable's tokenization arm, launched Multiliquid late last year. The company went live with its first instant redemption facility on Solana earlier this year, partnering with Metalayer Ventures as an initial capital provider.
Since then, Multiliquid has processed pilot transactions, though it declined to share volume figures or name end customers beyond the fund issuers whose tokens it supports. The startup plans to onboard additional liquidity providers later this year.
Beeson's team includes Angelo D'Alessandro, who designed and launched UniCredit's buddybank digital subsidiary in Italy, as chief operating officer. Michal Benedykcinski, formerly at Arca and Hedera with prior stints at Evercore and 3i, serves as chief commercial officer. The five-person team is hiring protocol engineers and institutional business-development staff into early next year, the company said.
Part of the proceeds will go toward expanding engineering capacity, adding more liquidity and trading-venue partnerships, and integrating additional tokenized cash and Treasury products across EVM-compatible networks and Solana. Multiliquid also positions its infrastructure as a compliance pathway under the GENIUS Act, federal stablecoin legislation enacted last summer that bars payment-stablecoin issuers from paying yield or interest directly to holders. Multiliquid's model sidesteps that restriction by enabling users to rotate between yield-bearing tokenized funds and non-yielding payment stablecoins without the issuer compensating holders directly.
"Tokenization only matters if the assets are actually liquid," Beeson said in Tuesday's statement.
The company isn't operating in a vacuum. Ondo Finance already offers instant subscriptions and redemptions for its OUSG tokenized fund by maintaining a reserve of BlackRock's BUIDL token to facilitate round-the-clock stablecoin redemptions. Centrifuge and Janus Henderson have collaborated on instant-redemption infrastructure for the JTRSY Treasury token. Franklin Templeton teamed up with MoonPay earlier this year to build a direct conduit between stablecoins and its BENJI money-market fund. WisdomTree rolled out 24/7 trading for its WTGXX tokenized mutual fund using a dealer-principal structure.
Still, the market remains fragmented. Each issuer has tended to build its own redemption plumbing, and few solutions work across multiple tokenized products. Multiliquid's bet is that standardized settlement rails will prove more efficient than bespoke arrangements, especially as the number of tokenized funds continues to expand.
Polychain founder Olaf Carlson-Wee said in Tuesday's announcement that "tokenized assets have started to gain traction but liquidity remains the bottleneck." The venture firm did not take a board seat. Multiliquid said it has not yet constituted a formal board of directors.
Whether the startup can carve out a defensible position will depend partly on how quickly it can sign up both liquidity providers willing to underwrite instant redemptions and fund issuers willing to integrate its protocol. The tokenization space is crowded with infrastructure plays, and the winners will likely be those who can aggregate the most capital and the widest range of assets. For now, Multiliquid is placing its chips on the idea that seamless liquidity is the missing piece that will finally let tokenized funds compete with their off-chain counterparts.
