Rayo Withanage family invests in fintech for real world assets – London Business News | Londonlovesbusiness.com

The Withanage family, led by Rahula Withanage, is leading a $40 million investment into real-world asset tokenization. The first platforms will focus on unitising the intrinsic value of cultural and environmental assets making them a powerful store of value while proving a means for long term conservation.

Digital tokenisation of real-world assets offers a myriad of advantages, such as 24/7 availability, increased liquidity and democratised access. The Withanage-backed start-ups hope to capture these advantages to develop the un-monetised potential of cultural and real-world passive assets. This is a rapidly expanding field in the UK, with UK investment funds given the greenlight last year for fund tokenisation. In March 2024, the Technology Working Group of HM Treasury provided an outline for the development of the tokenisation industry in the UK, with a final phase to be confirmed by the end of this year.

The Withanage family office is led by Rahula Withanage, an accomplished financier with over 20 years of experience leading a multi-family office. The Withanage family office was behind the BMB Group and Scepter Partners, both highly successful investment platforms which unified sovereign investors across the Middle East and Asia. The BMB Group, established in 2006, became one of the leading asset management vehicles to unify some of the largest family offices from the Middle East & Asia, across diversified holdings. Scepter Partners is a principal investment firm and capital syndicate of sovereign investors.

Rahula Withanage, head of the Withanage Family Office

Rahula’s son, Rayo Withanage, recently moved away from finance this year, to work in philanthropy. He is currently working as Program Coordinator for the Withanage Foundation. A prominent New Zealand entrepreneur, Rayo Withanage was the co-founder of the BMB Group and Scepter Partners, and in 2017, purchased the famed Château de Vie estate, Pablo Picasso’s final home in the South of France. Château de Vie is one of the most important art production estates in the world, where Picasso produced artworks worth over $4 billion. The house is steeped in history and artistic legacy, having hosted Winston Churchill, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, and iconic entertainers as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Édith Piaf and the Rolling Stones. The estate has since been transferred to a new investment consortium.