Citi Ventures and venture capital firm Accel co-led a $6 million funding round for xalts, an institutional-grade digital asset management startup founded by a former trader at banking giant HSBC and a former Meta Asia executive. The funding comes as institutional investors continue to move into the cryptocurrency industry despite the crypto bear market.

“With xalts, we are building innovative, institutional-grade investment products and solutions which focus on high compliance and control standards – things institutional investors care about,” said xalts Chief Investment Officer Ashutosh Goel, formerly of HSBC, in the press release. “The next leg of growth in digital assets will be driven by institutional participation in the asset class. We are starting to see the early signs of that with a lot of new initiatives coming from banks and asset managers.”

Founded by Goel and Supreet Kaur, Hong-Kong based xalts expects to launch multiple digital asset-related investment products, including mutual funds and exchange-traded funds on several global exchanges. The development pipeline includes partnerships with asset management firms and staking infrastructure providers to launch and manage other financial products.

“Xalts is our first investment in a digital asset manager, and we support its vision of creating innovative products to meet the growing appetite of institutional investors for more efficient and robust crypto-access investments,” said Citi Ventures Managing Director Luis Valdich in a sttement.

Citi’s investment continues a busy season for institutional investments in crypto. Last month, financial titans Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities and Fidelity Investments launched a new cryptocurrency exchange, EDX Markets, while Earlier this week, Fidelity launched a new Ethereum index fund for accredited investors.