Brassica Technologies – a newly-launched financial infrastructure technology company developing enterprise solutions for the new era of alternative assets – announced the closing of its $8 million seed round. This funding round was led by Mercury Fund, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Long Journey Ventures, NGC Fund, Neowiz, Broadhaven Ventures, Armyn Capital, VC3DAO, Alpha Asset Management, and other global FinTech investors. The seed funding round brings the total capital raised by Brassica to date to over $12 million.
Plus the company announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary Brassica Trust Company has been granted a Trust Charter by the Wyoming State Banking Board. And by offering multiple distinct but related financial infrastructure services via API, Brassica will become a “one-stop shop” for the alternative assets industry with institutional-grade backend solutions that can seamlessly integrate with any platform’s native UX/UI preferences. By combining proprietary technology and unique regulatory licenses, Brassica enables clients to securely and efficiently build their businesses on a modern and flexible backend infrastructure instead of relying on outdated, manual, and fragmented vendor systems.
In the middle of an ever-changing regulatory environment and a widespread lack of trust in the financial markets, traditional financial institutions and legacy vendors are ill-equipped to serve the evolving private investing and digital assets industry. Brassica was founded in 2021 by experienced entrepreneurs and FinTech executives Youngro Lee (CEO) and Bob Dunton (CTO), who were previously co-founders of NextSeed, a FinTech startup that received the first Funding Portal license from the SEC and closed the first-ever Regulation Crowdfunding offering in 2016 pursuant to the JOBS Act Title III. Lee currently also serves as EVP & Head of Asia at Republic, a leading FinTech & blockchain solutions firm that operates the largest private investment marketplace globally, which acquired NextSeed in 2020. Brassica’s leadership team features senior executives with decades of professional experience at various FinTech startups, financial institutions, and global law firms, including Republic, Cleary Gottlieb, Kirkland Ellis, Morgan Stanley, Custodia Bank, LedgerX, Prime Trust, JP Morgan Chase, and M1 Finance.
Brassica will utilize the new funding round to scale its product, engineering, business development, and customer success teams and accelerate new service offerings. And the company expects to hire a full-service trust operations team in Wyoming. Collaborating closely with strategic global investors and partners, Brassica plans to serve customers globally, drawing on the senior leadership’s extensive experiences and insights into key legal and regulatory considerations in the US and other major international markets.
KEY QUOTES:
“The future of finance will depend on the ability of trustworthy institutions to provide secure and seamless transitions between traditional financial services and web3 innovations while complying with strict regulations and still providing great customer experience. Today’s infrastructure solutions for alternative assets are often cobbled together through multiple incompatible vendors in a complex regulatory environment, which often creates unreasonable risk, errors, and single points of failure for market participants. We started Brassica to address this fundamental problem and provide solutions to enable innovators in both traditional and web3 industries to build properly within a constantly evolving global regulatory framework.”
“Amid unprecedented crises in confidence in traditional financial institutions, investors are looking for safe, trustworthy institutions to protect their assets. Brassica will focus on maintaining the safety of customer assets while enabling and accelerating thoughtful innovation in the alternative investments industry.”
— Youngro Lee
“The revolution of the private markets is here, and it is clear that the traditional, legacy infrastructure currently in place is not designed for the present and future investment world. Brassica’s API-forward, institutional grade solutions make investing in private and digital assets more trustworthy, compliant, and secure than ever before, further bridging the gap between the worlds of traditional and decentralized finance. Their highly qualified and experienced senior business, legal, and technology executive team makes Brassica well-positioned to usher in this new era of alternative investments. We are proud to support Brassica on their ongoing mission to democratize finance globally.”
— Blair Garrou, Managing Director at Mercury Fund
