Birch Hill, a New York-based onchain credit firm, closed a $4 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital, bringing its total financing to $6.5 million.
ParaFi Capital, Castle Island Ventures and Nascent also participated, according to the company's release. The figures are company-reported. Birch Hill's earlier $2.5 million pre-seed, announced in February, was led by ParaFi and Castle Island and is included in the cumulative total.
Birch Hill says it assesses, structures and distributes credit on public blockchains. It runs three divisions: Vaults, where it is an official curator on the Morpho lending protocol and sets risk parameters; Strategies, which builds onchain credit products; and Enterprise, which is designed to offer private credit to verified accredited investors through its own platform. The enterprise offering is pending approval from FINRA, the broker-dealer regulator. Birch Hill has applied for broker-dealer membership, and an application is not an approval. It also met the SEC's Crypto Task Force in August.
Longer term, the company plans to securitize pools of U.S. multifamily, agriculture and energy loans and hold them onchain within the U.S. regulatory framework. It describes banks and insurers as prospective buyers of that credit, though the release names none as committed participants.
The eight-person team includes four people who came from Yearn, an onchain vault management platform, and one from Gauntlet, which manages risk for onchain lending. Bhavin Vaid is chief executive. The company has not disclosed a valuation or a timetable for the securitization plans.
"Birch Hill is building the platform that connects loan originators with stablecoin capital," said Shayon Sengupta, a general partner at Multicoin Capital.