Marius Jurgilas spent years inside central banks—the Bank of Lithuania, Norges Bank, the Bank of England—watching capital markets machinery grind through its daily routines. Now he's trying to rewire it.
His company, Axiology, announced a €5 million seed round in early February, led by Exponential Science, e2vc, and Coinvest Capital. TIBAS Ventures and Plug and Play joined as new investors, while earlier backers BSV Ventures and NGL Ventures doubled down. The fresh capital brings total funding to €7 million since the company spun out of Lithuania's SUPER HOW? tech lab in 2023.
The pitch is deceptively straightforward: take fixed-income securities—bonds, essentially—and move them onto a blockchain. Issue them there. Trade them there. Settle them there. All under one regulatory roof.
Simple in theory. In practice? Most platforms trying this find themselves stitching together disparate systems, each with its own compliance headaches. Axiology claims to have solved that problem, though whether institutional investors buy in remains to be seen.
One of Four
What gives the company credibility, perhaps more than the founders expected early on, is its regulatory standing. Last July, the Bank of Lithuania granted Axiology one of Europe's rare combined DLT Trading and Settlement System licenses—a designation that allows it to handle both the marketplace and the back-office plumbing.
According to Ledger Insights, only three other companies hold similar combined licenses: 21X, Lise, and Securitize. The distinction matters in a region where regulators have historically moved at glacial speed on crypto-anything. The EU's DLT Pilot Regime, launched in 2023, created a narrow sandbox for exactly this kind of experimentation. Axiology slipped through the opening.
The platform runs on a permissioned version of the XRP Ledger—not the public, speculative-token version that day traders obsess over, but a private, controlled instance. It's a telling choice: conservative enough to satisfy regulators, modern enough to satisfy technologists.
Live Trades, Real Money
Axiology's Multilateral Trading Facility went live in September 2025. The first actual secondary trade didn't clear until December 23, just before the holidays—a timing that felt almost anticlimactic for a milestone years in the making.
Two brokers have plugged into the MTF so far: Myriad Capital and Fundvest. Not exactly household names, but for a platform barely six months old, it's a start. Meanwhile, the company's shareholder registry service has logged more than €21 million in recorded shares across Lithuania. Crowdfunding platforms are also using Axiology for depository services, though the company declined to name them publicly.
One project stands out: Axiology is collaborating with Lithuania's Ministry of Finance to digitize the country's Government Defence Bonds. The goal? Broaden distribution across the European Economic Area without the friction of legacy systems. It's the kind of partnership that signals institutional legitimacy—or at least the early stages of it.
The Bundesbank Stamp
"Axiology is one of the few platforms able to operate each stage within a single regulated system," said Jochen Metzger, a board member and retired Bundesbank official, in a statement accompanying the funding news.
Coming from a former central banker, that's not faint praise. It's shorthand for: this isn't some garage operation cobbling together smart contracts. Whether that translates to widespread adoption is another question entirely.
Kaan Eren, a partner at e2vc, framed the investment as a timing play. "Axiology combines regulatory compliance with technological innovation at a time when Europe is actively building its Capital Markets Union," he said. That's investor-speak for: the policy winds are favorable, so we're betting now before the window closes.
What the Money Buys
The €5 million will go toward scaling the platform—vague, perhaps, but standard fare for seed-stage companies. More concretely, Axiology plans to deepen institutional partnerships and accelerate go-to-market efforts. Translation: get more brokers and issuers on board before competitors do.
The company is also eyeing integration with the European Central Bank's wholesale central bank digital currency experiments, including projects named Appia and Pontes. And there's TARGET2 connectivity on the roadmap—Europe's real-time gross settlement system, the plumbing that moves trillions of euros daily.
None of this happens overnight. Jurgilas and his team—somewhere between 11 and 50 employees, depending on how you count contractors—are playing a long game. The question is whether the market will wait for them to get there, or if bigger players will muscle in first.
For now, Lithuania's fintech scene has a rare trophy: a blockchain infrastructure company that's not just compliant, but actually operational. Whether that's enough to build a moat in European capital markets? Ask again in two years.
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Disclosure: Funding details were announced by the company in early February 2026. Axiology's DLT TSS license was granted by the Bank of Lithuania on July 9, 2025. Reporting on the number of combined TSS licensees is based on data from Ledger Insights.
