Investment Manager Hamilton Lane Opens First Tokenized Fund With Securitize

Last October, Hamilton Lane (HLNE) – an investment management firm with $824 billion in assets under management and supervision – announced plans to tokenize three of its funds under a partnership with digital assets securities company Securitize to make private market funds available to a broader set of investors.

The Pennsylvania-based company has now opened the first of those funds, it said in a statement shared with CoinDesk. The flagship Equity Opportunities Fund V recently closed with $2.1 billion in investor commitments, and the firm is making a portion accessible to individual investors through a tokenized feeder fund on Securitize that’s backed by the Polygon blockchain. The fund offers “diversified exposure to unique and differentiated deals through an efficient fee structure,” according to Hamilton Lane.

With the tokenized version of the feeder fund, the minimum investment amount drops to $20,000 from at least $5 million for the traditional version.

“The new Hamilton Lane tokenized fund is a major step in the continued democratization of the private markets by significantly expanding access to the historically high-performing private equity asset class, particularly through reduced investment minimums,” Securitize co-founder and CEO Carlos Domingo said in statement. “Private equity has outperformed the S&P 500 by 70% over the past 20 years, but that performance has mostly been enjoyed by major institutions, sovereign wealth funds and university endowments. Individual investors can begin accessing these opportunities, too.”

Hamilton Lane plans to launch the previously announced two additional feeder funds, which offer exposure to private credit and secondary transactions, in the coming months.

Read more: Swiss Bank Cité Gestion Becomes First Private Bank to Tokenize Its Own Shares