Crypto finance startup Circle has successfully completed its acquisition of equity crowdfunding platform SeedInvest, paving the way to possible tokenization of the latter. Circle made the announcement following approval of the deal from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) in the US, according to an official blog post by Circle (Mar 4).

While the terms of the deal have not been disclosed, the entire SeedInvest team has joined Circle, including both its co-founders – CEO Ryan Feit and COO James Han. They join Circle’s team of supposedly more than 300 people with a global customer base of more than 8.5 million individuals, and 1,000 institutions.

In a separate SeedInvest blog post, Feit and Han said, “We are also delighted to let you know that we will continue operating as we always have, focused on democratizing startup investing, just with greater resources… We believe that tokenizing startups can take things to another level by providing liquidity, enabling capital to flow across geographic borders, and paving the path for completely new types of capital formation.”

Circle said on its blog that the acquisition is reportedly to further a vision of “a more open, global, connected, and inclusive financial system”, as part of its aspiration to bring the “economic and technical breakthroughs” of crypto and blockchain to traditional forms of financial contracts like equities.

Circle’s co-founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire believe that private equity will gradually be tokenized given time, with tokenization also leading to new business opportunities by leveraging tokens linked to ecosystem behaviors.

The completion of Circle’s acquisition comes fresh on the heels that Circle is looking to raise another $250 million in funding in a mix of debt and equity, which TheCryptoSight reported earlier.