Valereum PLC (AQSE:VLRM) has raised £500,000 through a placing, and at the same time announced it will invest £1.85 million ($2.5 million) in Blubird Global Inc.
It comes after last week’s announcement that Valereum would partner with Blubird, to advance a collaboration to launch a tokenised asset exchange.
The share placing, arranged by Fortified Securities, sees Valereum issue 12.5 million shares at 4p each – a discount of about 18.7% to the average closing price of £0.049 over the past five trading days.
Valereum’s investment in Blubird will be made in eight tranches, between June and September.
It will hold a minority stake in the company and will be granted a board observer seat.
Blubird, a SaaS firm that delivers tools to Web3 and blockchain startups, has expertise and experience with cap table management, tokenomics modelling, Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenisation, and smart contract deployment.
More than $55 billion of assets have been tokenised and administered on Blubird’s platform, and, the new collaboration announced last week aims to initially target up to US $2 billion of these assets for listing on Valereum's marketplace.
"This investment forms an extremely exciting step in Blubird's development journey and allows Blubird to scale from its current team of 25 to meet the increasing demand for Blubird services globally,” Blubird chief executive Corey Billington said in a statement.
“A key for us isn't just the funding but the active involvement and additional skills pool that this partnership with Valereum brings."
Valereum chair James Formolli added: “Blubird have an impressive suite of tools and are already partnered up with leaders like Sony via the Soneium project and Redbelly Network.
“This investment is designed to speed up innovation and open opportunities for both companies to push forward in real-world asset tokenisation."