NewTech Friday: Kriptown – Facilitating financing for startups and SMEs
Kriptown, the European neo-exchange for SMEs, is a marketplace that enables companies to raise funds while providing investors with access to a secondary market. Its CEO and Founder Mark Kepeneghian tells more about it.
Kriptown, the European neo-exchange for SMEs, is a marketplace that enables companies to raise funds while providing investors with access to a secondary market. Its CEO and Founder Mark Kepeneghian tells more about it.
What led to the creation of Kriptown?
The objective of Kriptown is to create the first tokenized and regulated market infrastructure within the European Union. Our goal is to initially dedicate this new, more efficient and robust infrastructure to facilitate the financing of SMEs by creating a dedicated stock exchange compartment for them.
This new infrastructure allows, for the first time, the merging of the roles of stock exchange and central security deposit. This new operation model enables instant settlement and delivery without counterparty risk. This is a major evolution in market infrastructure, which, in Europe, has always had settlement and delivery taking place over two days!
Could you present Kriptown's offer?
Kriptown allows SMEs to easily secure equity financing through a digitized process tailored to their size. Alongside this, Kriptown enables the wider public to finance these operations and to access a novel secondary market.
In an economic climate where interest rates are rising, it seems essential to us to offer new financing methods to SMEs, which are often collateral victims of these rate hikes when financing their projects. Traditional IPOs are not well suited to their size, whether in terms of cost or operational complexity. Our infrastructure and processes, which are entirely dedicated to them, allow us to change the meaning of the term IPO to make it realistic for these SMEs.
At the same time, we are democratizing access for investors to this asset class, both in the primary and secondary markets.
What's coming next for Kriptown?
The next step for us is to capitalize on the new European regulation, the DLT Pilot Regime. This is the first regulation that allows for the creation of unified, tokenized market infrastructure. This will position us as pioneers in next-generation market infrastructure and will allow us to deploy our first use case for SMEs. Subsequently, we aim to expand to other financial instruments or jurisdictions.
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