Mill City Ventures plows $450 M into SUI—allocating 98% of its raise to the native token and installing Karatage founders as board chair and CIO in a bold on‑chain pivot.

Mill City Ventures III, a Nasdaq-listed specialty finance and non‑bank lending firm, has raised about $450 million via a private placement and is committing roughly 98% of the net proceeds (around $441 million) to buying SUI, the native token of the Sui blockchain. The deal is structured as a PIPE (private investment in public equity) involving the sale of over 83 million Mill City shares at $5.42 each, led by London-based hedge fund Karatage Opportunities and matched by the Sui Foundation, with additional participation from crypto-focused investors such as Galaxy Digital, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital and ParaFi. Once the offering closes, SUI will become Mill City’s primary treasury reserve asset, making the company one of the first public vehicles explicitly dedicated to a Sui token treasury strategy. As part of the pivot, Karatage co‑founders Marius Barnett and Stephen Mackintosh will take key leadership roles at Mill City, with Barnett becoming chairman of the board and Mackintosh serving as chief investment officer to oversee the Sui‑focused treasury strategy. Mill City plans to acquire SUI through a combination of open‑market purchases, institutional off‑market deal flow typically reserved for crypto funds, and a negotiated purchase agreement with the Sui Foundation, aiming to build a large on‑chain treasury without excessive market impact. The move effectively transforms Mill City from a traditional specialty lender into a publicly traded SUI treasury vehicle with foundation backing, offering institutional and public‑market investors equity‑based exposure to the Sui ecosystem under a regulated, liquid structure. This strategy is notable for both size and structure: a mid‑cap U.S. public company is allocating nearly all of a substantial capital raise to a single blockchain token, rather than to Bitcoin or Ethereum, and is doing so with direct coordination from the network’s foundation. For Sui, the transaction channels hundreds of millions of dollars of institutional capital into its token and establishes a new route for traditional investors to gain SUI exposure through a familiar stock‑market instrument. For broader markets, Mill City’s shift illustrates a growing convergence between traditional finance and on‑chain treasuries, and will likely be watched as a test case for whether public companies can sustainably run crypto‑native treasury strategies centered on newer Layer‑1 networks.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• Mill City Launches First Public SUI Treasury with $450M Investment (stocktitan.net)
• Mill City goes all-in on Sui with $450m treasury strategy | MEXC News (mexc.com)
• Mill City Ventures III, Ltd. Announces $450,000,000 Private ... (businesswire.com)
• Nasdaq-Listed SUI Treasury Access is Here: Introducing Mill City ... (blog.sui.io)
• Mill City Ventures (MCVT) Stock Soars On $450M Deal To Create ... (benzinga.com)

Explore the topic

• BOLD
• SUI