Hivemind raises $17M from M&G as asset managers test tokenisation

Hivemind Digital Group has completed a $17mn strategic funding round led by M&G Investments, the asset management arm of the British savings and investment group that ran £371bn of assets at the end of March. The round gives M&G a seat on Hivemind’s board and a position in a firm whose business sits between conventional fund management and the tokenisation of real-world assets.

Alex Seddon, M&G Investments’ head of impact and private equity, has been appointed to the board as part of the deal. The investment is the first between the two firms, and neither has disclosed a valuation or the size of the stake acquired.

The round drew a mix of Asian financial institutions and crypto infrastructure companies. CPIC Investment Management (HK), ZA Bank, FalconX, and Sonic Boom Ventures all took part, alongside what Hivemind describes as board members and former senior executives from Man Group, Apollo Global Management, Coinbase, Citi, First Citizens Bank, and GoldenTree Asset Management.

The composition tilts heavily towards Hong Kong and towards firms that already handle digital assets professionally, with ZA Bank among the territory’s licensed virtual banks and FalconX operating as a prime broker for institutional crypto trading. It is an investor list assembled to open doors in Asia rather than to maximise the cheque.

Hivemind was founded in 2021 by Matt Zhang, who previously ran trading at Citi, and operates from New York and London. The firm allocates institutional capital across digital asset strategies and builds the technical plumbing that moves assets onto blockchain rails.

Zhang framed the round as a change of direction rather than a top-up. “Hivemind was founded on the conviction that digital assets deserved recognition as a distinct and institutional-grade asset class,” he said, describing the next phase as “taking blockchain technology beyond digital assets and supporting the development of new applications across asset management and financial infrastructure”.

“At M&G we take a selective approach to innovation, focusing on opportunities where new technologies meet institutional standards and robust governance,” Seddon said, adding that the investment reflects an interest in how tokenisation “could support practical, long-term applications across financial markets”.

That gap in register between the two statements is the honest shape of the deal. A $17mn cheque and a directorship is a research position for an asset manager of M&G’s size, not a strategic commitment, and it buys visibility into a market it has not yet had to compete in.

CPIC IMHK, the Hong Kong asset management arm of the Chinese insurer, was more forthcoming about why it joined. “Blockchain and tokenization represent a fundamental shift in that landscape, and Hivemind is one of the few firms with the track record and institutional relationships to capitalize on that opportunity at scale,” said chief executive CG Zhou.

Hivemind says the money will go towards deploying capital into tokenisation-enabled opportunities across asset classes, expanding its institutional partnerships internationally, and building infrastructure for what it calls the next generation of the asset management industry. It has not given a timeline or named the asset classes it intends to start with.

The forecast the company cites for the opportunity, a tokenised asset market reaching $18.9tn by 2033, comes from a 2025 report by Ripple and Boston Consulting Group that also sets out substantial obstacles to getting there. Projections in this field vary widely depending on who is producing them and what counts as a tokenised asset.

What is less speculative is that large institutions have started shipping products. JPMorgan has filed a second tokenised money market fund on Ethereum, and the argument among incumbents has moved from whether to tokenise to who owns the infrastructure underneath.

That is the position Hivemind is buying into with this round, and the reason a firm with M&G’s balance sheet is willing to spend a comparatively small sum to sit in the room while it is decided.