Spiko has raised $90 million, the company said this week, in a round that positions the French tokenized-funds startup squarely against BlackRock in the market for cash-like products. The company pitches blockchain-based versions of money market funds as a faster, cheaper alternative to the traditional cash fund machinery that asset managers have run for decades. The raise is a straight shot at the most conservative corner of finance.
A cash fund with a different plumbing
The target is the money market fund — the product where institutions park idle cash and expect it back the same day, with a yield attached. BlackRock is the incumbent here, and its scale is the whole point of its business. Spiko's argument runs the other way: that tokenized versions settle faster, trade around the clock, and don't need the layers of intermediaries that make the traditional version expensive to run.
That's the pitch. The execution is harder. Cash funds live and die on trust, and trust in this category has historically been built over decades, not funding rounds.
Why the round landed now
Investors putting $90 million into a European tokenization play is a signal in itself. The last few years have moved tokenized treasury and cash products from a curiosity to something asset managers actually staff up for. Spiko isn't the only company chasing this. It is, for now, one of the better-funded ones in Europe.
The funding also fits a broader pattern: crypto-native infrastructure firms raising institutional money to compete with asset managers rather than with each other. The line between a fintech and a fund manager is thinner than it used to be.
The BlackRock problem
Competing with BlackRock isn't a marketing line. It's a distribution problem. BlackRock's cash funds sit inside existing relationships with pension funds, corporates, and treasurers who don't move cash on a whim. A tokenized fund has to win those same mandates, and it has to do it while convincing compliance teams that the rails underneath are sound.
Spiko's bet is that the product wins on mechanics — settlement speed, operating hours, cost — and that those mechanics matter more to a corporate treasurer than brand heritage. That's plausible. It's also unproven at scale.
What the money is for
The company hasn't detailed the split between product, hiring, and expansion. What it has said is that the raise signals a shift toward blockchain-based finance — a framing that has become standard for tokenization startups, and one that regulators in both Europe and the US are still working out how to treat.
That regulatory question is the one to watch. Tokenized cash funds sit at the intersection of securities law, payments rules, and fund regulation, and the answer isn't the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Spiko's fundraising gets it into the fight. The next milestone is whether it can get institutional cash allocated into the product — the number that actually matters.
For now, the round is closed and the competitor is named. Everything after this is distribution.
