Ironlight

About Ironlight

Ironlight is a financial technology company focused on incorporating blockchain technology into the asset management sector. Founded in 2022 by Rob McGrath, Matthew Celebuski, Jake Moilanen, and Vivian A Maese, the company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with executive presence in New York. The founders include former global trading heads from prominent financial institutions like Schroders and the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund (ADIA), bringing substantial Wall Street experience to the venture. Former TD Bank President and CEO, Greg Braca, also serves as a strategic advisor and board member, lending significant financial services expertise to the team.

The company's core business revolves around the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), providing a platform for public and private fund managers. This service digitizes traditionally illiquid assets—such as private equity, real estate, fine art, and natural resources—into blockchain-based security tokens. The primary goal is to increase liquidity, enhance transparency, reduce transaction fees, and ensure faster settlement times for these assets. By converting these assets into tradable tokens, Ironlight aims to remove the illiquidity discount, potentially increasing the assets' value.

Ironlight is developing what it describes as a premier U.S. fintech ecosystem for tokenization, listing, and trading, built on distributed ledger technology (DLT). The platform is engineered to institutional-grade standards, capable of processing two million messages per second with minimal latency. The business model involves creating a regulated secondary trading venue for these tokenized assets, structured to conform to existing Traditional Finance (TradFi) standards to facilitate widespread adoption. A key milestone for the company was securing $12 million in funding in May 2024, largely from individual investors with backgrounds in finance. The company is in the final stages of developing its exchange and has applied for regulatory approval to operate as a proprietary broker, with plans to initiate an SEC registration process to become a regulated Alternative Trading System (ATS).