Credos Partners secures $1.1M in first close of pre-Series A
What's the deal? Credos PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has locked in more than 1.5 billion KRW (about $1.1 million) in a pre-Series A round that it is targeting at over 2 billion KRW. K-Net Investment Partners led as anchor investor, with existing shareholders following on. The company expects to close the round next month.
What's the endgame? Founded in 2022 by chief executive officer Ha-yan Lee, the B2B fintech supplies real-world asset (RWA) and security token (STO) infrastructure. Its platform handles product issuance, distributed-ledger trading, asset management, and trust administration in one place, treating blockchain as infrastructure software that cuts the friction costs of creating and managing assets.
Why now? Credos Partners has twice won regulatory sandbox designation from the Financial Services Commission, and it is positioning for South Korea's move to legalise tokenised securities. The company plans to use the new capital to expand its RWA and security token business from bases in South Korea and Hong Kong.
What's next? Its pipeline is widening across Asia. This year it signed a supply-chain finance platform deal with a major Southeast Asian financial firm, began selling tokenised foreign-currency bond portfolios to private-banking clients in Singapore, and started building an institutional B2B token-trading system through a joint venture in Hong Kong. Domestic supply-chain finance work is targeted to launch this year.
What they said: "The security token market, after legislation, will move beyond a simple issuance platform, and infrastructure that can stably handle regulation, settlement, and ledger management for financial institutions will become the core competitive edge," said Ju-han Yoon, an investment manager at K-Net Investment Partners (translated from Korean).
The signal: The round reflects investor appetite for the plumbing beneath tokenised finance rather than front-end trading venues. As regulators in South Korea and Hong Kong build out rules for tokenised securities, cross-border infrastructure providers are angling to become the default rails for institutions entering the space.
Read more: startuptoday.kr
Image credit: Yu. Samoilov
