Asterion Ventures becomes the principal investor in Dowgo, the Paris-based startup building a regulated market infrastructure where equities, bonds and fund shares will be issued, traded and settled in tokenized form. The operation strengthens the company's capital and governance, a few months after its €2M round backed by 50 Partners and Bpifrance, and while its licence application is under review by the French regulators.
Illiquidity, the blind spot of transition finance
A renewable energy project may generate predictable cash flows for 20 or 30 years, but investing in it usually means committing large amounts of capital into bespoke structures that are difficult and expensive to trade afterwards. Unlike listed equities, there is generally no efficient secondary market.
This is how Charles-Henry Choël, partner at Asterion and lead on this investment, sums up a structural problem: the assets that need the most capital are among the hardest to trade.
That illiquidity has a cost. It makes capital more expensive, stretches out fundraising, and deters investors reluctant to lock up positions for decades. Exactly where the transition needs financing most.
Putting these assets on a common digital infrastructure makes issuance, transfer and settlement simpler and cheaper, and makes it viable to trade smaller positions. Tokenization removes the structural barriers that kept liquidity from developing; liquidity itself, Charles-Henry points out, still requires buyers and sellers.
The summer the markets tipped
Timing matters as much as the thesis.
In the US, the DTCC, the post-trade infrastructure that settles most of Wall Street's securities, ran its first live trades of tokenized securities in mid-July: Russell 1000 stocks, ETFs and Treasuries, traded with more than forty institutions including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, ahead of a full launch announced for October. The SEC is preparing a dedicated framework for tokenized equities in parallel.
Europe wrote the rules first, regulating these activities as early as 2023 with the Pilot Regime, which ESMA now proposes to make permanent and which the AMF has made a supervisory priority for 2026. Only four platforms have been authorized across the entire EU so far.
In July, Dowgo also took part in the launch of Permissioned Pools alongside Uniswap, the world's leading decentralized exchange, with Franklin Templeton, Superstate and Securitize. The only European player in the group, Dowgo contributed to testing the standard and to supporting ERC-3643, the token standard that verifies at the protocol level that each investor is authorized by the issuer of the security.
The product: a regulated, natively tokenized market infrastructure
Dowgo is building a European market infrastructure where securities will be issued as permissioned ERC-3643 tokens on the public Ethereum blockchain, with atomic, near-instant (T+0) delivery-versus-payment settlement in euro e-money tokens compliant with the MiCA Regulation.
The platform will allow issuers to raise capital and give banks, brokers and professional investors direct access to these new markets. Dowgo will operate the market without holding either its clients' assets or their keys.
More than €300 million in transactions, mostly impact projects linked to the energy transition, are already waiting in the commercial pipeline. The company will target energy and infrastructure issuers from September.
The platform will open once Dowgo obtains its investment firm licence under the EU Pilot Regime (Regulation EU 2022/858). Its application is under review by the French authorities (AMF, Banque de France, ACPR). Dowgo is not yet licensed and does not currently operate any trading platform.
Governance turned institutional
The round brings recognized figures from regulation and sustainable finance into the company's capital.
Dowgo's supervisory board is chaired by Faustine Fleuret, co-founder and former president of Adan. Anne Maréchal, partner at law firm De Gaulle Fleurance and former legal affairs director at the AMF, is handling the licence application. Several individual experts in regulation and sustainable finance are also joining the capital and will support commercial development from September.
Asterion joins the strategic committee and becomes, at the close of the operation, the principal investor in the company. When the people who shaped French regulation and sustainable finance commit to a tokenized market infrastructure, the subject has changed status: it has become institutional.
Why we back Dowgo
At Asterion, we have financed transitions from pre-seed onwards since day one. With Dowgo, we are investing in the channel that will let European savings finance them at scale, in euros, within a regulated framework.
Charles-Henry Choël, who leads the operation, held senior positions at GL Trade, the French electronic trading pioneer long tied to Euronext:
In the 2000s, France's head start on electronic trading allowed GL Trade to become a global player in trading. Europe now has the same head start on regulated tokenization, because it wrote the rules before everyone else. Dowgo is in a position to turn it into a European impact asset, provided it is supported over the long term and with the right governance standards. That is what Asterion intends to do with this investment.
Market infrastructure is built over the long run, with shareholders able to support a licensing process through to the end. That is the profile of this round, and that is the role we intend to play.
A regulatory head start only creates value if players seize it. Congratulations to Oscar Dumant, Romain Menetrier and the entire Dowgo team: the work starts now.