Aspen Digital Secures $8.8M in Pre-Series A

Digital asset investment platform Aspen Digital has secured $8.8 million in pre-Series A funding as it continues to build solutions for the growing demand of institutional investments in the crypto space, the company said in a statement. 

The financing round was led by Liberty City Ventures and RIT Capital Partners, the investment trust founded by Jacob Rothschild, a British investment banker and member of the prominent Rothschild banking family. Additional investors include Cherubic Ventures, Token Bay Capital, Somerley Capital, and Chatchaval Jiaravanon & Chaval Jiaravanon. 

The company was seeded and co-founded by digital assets group Everest Ventures Group and and TT Bond Partners, which is the boutique advisory firm of Jonathan Bond, son of the former HSBC Chairman Sir John Bond. 

Aspen’s platform is tailored to asset managers, institutional investors and other professional investors through a single account, which brings together dozens of digital assets service providers like FTX, Celsius Network, Hex Trust and others. Through their accounts, users can trade, grow yield and automate investments, the company said. 

“Asset managers and family offices manage generational wealth, their primary goal is to manage risk by constructing a portfolio of diversified assets that will perform across economic cycles,” said Yang He, co-founder and CEO of Aspen in an email to Blockworks. 

Digital assets are quickly maturing and becoming a new asset class and the main driving force for investors is the need to create a diversified portfolio and relentless search for risk-adjusted returns, He said.

The company is headquartered in Hong Kong, but plans to use the new funding to create a second headquarters and expand the team in London, which will serve clients in Europe and the Middle East. In the future, the company plans to establish a Singapore office to target the Southeast Asian market, which is continuously growing in the crypto space. 

The company’s strategy is to target the segments of investors currently underserved by existing solutions in the marketplace, He said. Right now, the focus is either on serving large institutional organizations like NYDIG and Anchorage Digital or appealing to the mass retail audience through applications like Coinbase and Binance, He added. 

“There is an underserved white space where family offices and asset managers are increasingly looking to create a diversified crypto portfolio, that’s where we are targeting,” He said. 

In the future, Aspen plans to have additional funding rounds post product launch and after it has gained more traction. 

“I don’t know for certain where crypto will go in the end, but what I do know is that crypto is quickly becoming a new, innovative asset class that can no longer be ignored by institutions,” He said. “We are here to help make digital assets investing more accessible by creating a platform that would give asset managers a single portal to create a diversified crypto portfolio.”

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