KAIO raises $8m from Tether to bring BlackRock‑style funds onchain with $100 tickets.

Abu Dhabi-regulated tokenization infrastructure company KAIO has closed an $8 million strategic financing round led by stablecoin issuer Tether, bringing its total funding to $19 million, according to a report from CoinDesk.

KAIO raises $8m led by Tether

New backers in the latest round include Systemic Ventures, Further Ventures and Nomura-backed Laser Digital, while existing shareholder Brevan Howard Digital also participated, underscoring rising institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets.

KAIO, which operates under Abu Dhabi’s regulatory framework, is focused on putting traditional fund products from managers such as BlackRock, Brevan Howard and Hamilton Lane onto public blockchains as tokenized feeder funds.

Tether bet on institutional tokenization

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the investment is aimed at pushing “institutional-grade assets onto the blockchain” and “achieving broader accessibility,” arguing that tokenization can “open new pathways for capital formation and investment” beyond the existing stablecoin market.

The KAIO platform currently manages around $100 million in on-chain assets and has processed more than $500 million in transactions, positioning it as a regional hub in the fast-growing tokenization segment tracked by analytics firms such as RWA.xyz.

According to CoinDesk, KAIO lowers entry barriers by allowing qualified users to access tokenized fund strategies with minimum tickets of roughly $100, a sharp contrast with traditional private fund minimums that often run into six figures.

Looking ahead, KAIO plans to expand its product set to include on-chain credit, structured products and exchange-traded fund-style vehicles, while also deepening its collaboration with UAE private equity heavyweight Mubadala Capital.

Mubadala, which oversees about $385 billion in assets, intends to work with KAIO to launch tokenized funds that give professional investors digital access to private market strategies, mirroring similar experiments in Europe and Asia with tokenized treasuries and money market funds.

KAIO says its infrastructure embeds a compliance framework designed to support regulatory regimes in Abu Dhabi, the Cayman Islands and Singapore, as policymakers from Hong Kong’s stablecoin regime to the EU’s MiCA rules race to define standards for tokenized securities and fund tokens.

As Tether expands from its flagship USDT product into mining, AI infrastructure and now institutional tokenization, Ardoino has repeatedly cast the company’s strategy as building the “financial backbone” for a world where real-world assets and digital dollars move natively on-chain around the clock.