East Ventures and EMTEK Invest to the Real Estate Project NFT Developer

Fraction, a Hong Kong and Bangkok-based fintech startup, announced $3 million (nearly 43 billion Rupiah) pre-series A round led by East Ventures. Also participated in this round  EMTEK Group, Thakral Limited, V Ventures, and other regional investors.

This fundraising is in line with the Thailand's ICO Portal License (subject to activation approval) from the Securities and Exchange Commission of Thailand (SEC). In addition, the previous plans to offer partial ownership (fractional ownership) of some of Thailand's iconic real estate assets in the first quarter of 2022 through an end-to-end fractional ownership platform powered by NFT and blockchain.

In the earlier seed round, Fraction was backed by several well-known ventures, both from the technology and conventional finance industries, including SINGHA Ventures, John Wylie's Tanarra Capital, and Skystar Capital Indonesia.

Fraction was founded by Eka Nirapathpongporn, an ex-Director and Partner in  Lazard, a New York-based global financial advisory and asset management firm. And Shaun Sales, a seasoned tech entrepreneur. Fraction creates access to wealth creation by enabling partial and digital asset transactions for people to own or trade, starting with world-famous iconic real estate projects.

With Fraction's plug-and-play platform, individuals and companies can invest, sell, and partially manage ownership from small stakes in city condominiums, beachfront inns, or artworks, also to manage personal funds, assets and investors.

“Removing barriers and providing equal access to opportunities to achieve wealth for all has become an urgent global issue. We are pleased to be a pioneer in implementing NFT and a decentralized Ethereum digital solution to partially manage ownership of multiple assets," Nirapathpongporn said in an official statement, Monday (17/1).

He continued, “From now on, we can enable financial inclusion that allows small investors to participate in attractive  asset classes that weren't accessible before. Fraction has great opportunities where the real estate token market estimated to be worth US$80 trillion and we are delighted to be at the forefront of this new wave of finance and blockchain technology convergence.”

East Ventures' Co-founder & Managing Partner, Willson Cuaca showed his gratitude to be part of Fraction's vision to create access to investment capital currently reserved for limited community.

“However, we are getting excited about the huge growth of this platform; making digitization and partial ownership of real-world assets an easy day-to-day activity. Real estate is the first asset class and we look forward to supporting Fraction as it evolves into multiple asset classes and jurisdictions,” said Willson.

The products

With the ICO license obtained from Thai's authorities, companies can link offline assets such as real estate to non-fungible tokens (NFT), digitize them, and offer a small portion to interested communities. “We share ownership of this NFT, and this ownership token is offered to investors. Therefore, it is an asset-backed proprietary token,” the Co-founder and CEO, Eka Nirapathpongporn was quoted by Tech in Asia.

Fraction prints an NFT with a "real world legal link" to a property. These tokens will consist of different exchangeable tokens, or fractions, with each representing a portion of the property. Furthermore, the token will be listed through IFO with a fractional ownership equivalent to a partial ownership of the actual real estate asset. Fraction can be traded between investors.

“Now you can […] legally own part of this villa – maybe 1% of it – instead of having to pay $5 million to buy the whole thing,” he added.

In its journey, Fraction has developed an integrated platform that includes, i) Digitalization and integrated fractional asset ownership, ii) Initial Fraction offering to investors (IFO). Also, iii) Fraction token trading platform on secondary market among investors, iv) All services to accommodate end-to-end experience.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian