Exclusive: Tokenized asset company Dinari raises $12.7 million from Hack VC and Blockchange Ventures

Dinari, a California-based crypto company that allows non-U.S. investors to buy shares in American companies with blockchain technology, announced Thursday that it has raised $12.7 million in Series A funding. 

The round was led by Hack VC and Blockchange Ventures, with participation from VanEck Ventures, F-Prime and the Avalanche Fund. The latest round brings the total amount of money the company has raised to $22.65 million. 

The company said it will use the money from this latest round to enhance compliance with regulations in the various countries in which it operates. Dinari’s valuation in 2024 was $40.15 million, according to Pitchbook. The current valuation is unclear, but the company says it is generating revenue, although it declined to disclose exact numbers. 

Gabriel Otte, co-founder and CEO, says he created Dinari to make investing in the U.S. stock market a more viable option for people in foreign countries. Currently, non-U.S. investors can do this through depository receipts, which are certificates issued by a bank that represent shares in a foreign company. However, those can be expensive and restricted to specific stocks. 

“We're allowing people to have access to it in an efficient way that they didn't have before,” he tells Fortune. “It can't really be just about tokenizing one-off stocks. It has to be tokenizing every stock, eventually, and every asset.”

Here’s how it works: Financial platforms including fintechs and digital banks pay Dinari a subscription fee for access to its API, a type of computer code. Once Dinari’s software is integrated with the financial platform, users can buy shares in an American company like Apple, and Dinari will send the user a token that represents the ownership of that share. Then, Dinari buys that share directly from the U.S. stock market and holds it to ensure that customers’ assets are backed 100%. 

Otte says the majority of new Dinari users have come from Latin America over the past year, especially Argentina and Brazil. He added that the company has also been building a user base in Africa and Southeast Asia. 

Crypto companies have long hoped to digitize the stock market with tokenized securities—digitized versions of traditional stocks that are traded on a blockchain. As the U.S. government pivots to embrace the crypto industry, some companies have revived a push to offer tokenized securities to U.S. investors. 

Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, said last month that it is renewing its effort to offer tokenized securities.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com