In the heart of London, Untangled Finance is breaking new ground by offering a platform that brings the real world into the digital realm. This London-based firm is revolutionizing finance by turning assets like invoices and small business loans into digital tokens on the blockchain. In a recent funding coup, Untangled Finance secured an impressive $13.5 million in a seed funding round. Leading the charge was Fasanara Capital, a prominent London-based fintech venture capital firm known for its investments in groundbreaking startups like Scalapay and Lendable. The injection of new capital will be channeled into product development, ecosystem nurturing, and growth initiatives.
Established in 2020, Untangled Finance empowers its users to access liquidity from their real-world assets (RWAs) without the need to part with them. Simultaneously, it provides a gateway to the broader DeFi (Decentralized Finance) ecosystem. Untangled Finance offers two distinct avenues to asset pools: actively managed accounts and passively managed accounts. The former caters to institutions and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), allowing them to create tailored lending strategies based on their risk preferences and return targets. In contrast, the latter offers users a choice of predefined asset pools with fixed terms and conditions.
The platform extends a host of advantages to its users, including optimizing returns from uncorrelated RWAs, reducing crypto concentration risk, facilitating exits from lending positions via refinancing or liquidating asset NFTs, and offering lending and borrowing options against the entire portfolio under user-defined terms. It also ensures compliance with crucial regulatory requirements such as anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC), and investor accreditation.
Untangled Finance brings additional benefits such as safeguarding lenders through recognized legal structures and jurisdictions, enabling users to earn yields from well-understood RWAs while gaining exposure to the broader DeFi landscape, and reducing costs while generating new products and services based on a new financial rail. The platform leverages the efficiency, transparency, and automation of DeFi while demonstrating composability with the rest of the DeFi sector and cross-chain interoperability, ensuring seamless interactions with other protocols and platforms across different blockchains.
Manrui Tang, Co-founder of Untangled Finance, articulated the company's mission, saying, "Since 2017, our focus has been on real-world asset tokenization where we see growing interest. Our partnership with Fasanara is a step towards developing reliable DeFi yield mechanisms, broadening the investment possibilities in crypto but also helping to mitigate its inherent volatilities, all while striving to make finance more accessible around the world."
Francesco Filia, CEO and CIO of Fasanara Capital, underlined their unique collaboration, saying, "We see an upcoming merging of worlds, on one side, fintech lending which fills the gap in underserved SME and consumer markets and, on the other, the way values are being transferred within the new world of digital assets. The Untangled team has a rare combination of being rooted in real-world finance and yet has acquired deep expertise in blockchain and DeFi. We are looking forward to working with Untangled to engineer these entirely new financial rails so, for the first time, being able to handle users at scale."
Untangled Finance and other platforms focused on Real World Assets (RWA) are seeking to bridge the technology gap by linking the conventional world with the digital landscape. Founded by Manrui Tang and Quan Le, Untangled Finance boasts a leadership team with extensive experience in strategy, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and asset initiation across diverse global locations. The founders first crossed paths while assisting financial institutions during the 2008 global financial crisis. Their previous venture, Binkabi, played a pivotal role in asset tokenization back in 2017. Quan Le brings additional expertise in agritech, having worked on rice farming projects spanning 13 African countries. This experience provides valuable insights into the supply chain and financing challenges faced by SMEs.
The co-founders are enthusiastic about introducing RWAs to DeFi and creating a new paradigm for asset-backed lending. They are eager to collaborate with their investors and partners to expand their platform and enhance its offerings. Quan Le, Co-founder of Untangled Finance, emphasized, "From the outset, it has been important for us to have liquidation as a built-in feature of our protocol, not an afterthought. Together with institutional-grade assets, we hope to contribute to the RWA ecosystem by further developing its liquidation infrastructure that will help this new market to scale."
