Tether, Systemic Ventures back $8M round in UAE firm Kaio

Kaio announced Monday that Tether and Systemic Ventures participated in an $8 million strategic funding round for the United Arab Emirates–based firm, which tokenizes blue-chip funds to give investors on-chain exposure to traditional assets. The financing raises Kaio’s total capital to $19 million.

Other investors in the round include Further, Brevan Howard and Karatage. Kaio added the funds will accelerate its on-chain fund distribution infrastructure and support expansion across asset classes. The firm reports about $108.5 million in assets under management.

Kaio packages traditional fund exposures into blockchain tokens. In February the company opened a waitlist for Kash, a yield-bearing token that provides exposure to a diversified basket of blue-chip funds sourced from asset managers including BlackRock, Hamilton Lane and Laser Digital. Kaio noted a product from Mubadala Capital is in the pipeline.

In a statement distributed by Kaio, Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CEO, described Kaio as bringing institutional-grade assets on-chain and making them more broadly accessible to expand participation in global financial markets.

Tokenization, Kaio says, means putting assets such as real estate, money market funds and equities on-chain so investors can access familiar fund exposures without moving underlying funds off-chain.

Kaio is headquartered in the United Arab Emirates and focuses on packaging institutional-grade fund exposures into digital tokens for broader investor access.

Kaio also disclosed that Tether acquired nearly a 2 million-share stake in Antalpha, a Bitmain-linked firm, stemming from an IPO allocation completed in 2025.