Birch Hill's $2.5M Pre-Seed Round
Co-Led by ParaFi Capital & Castle Island Ventures
Credit is the backbone of the global financial system. It is how companies fund growth, how real estate gets built, how infrastructure gets financed. It is a $300+ trillion market and it is already moving onchain.
This adoption is not because blockchain is novel, but because it is better. Blockchains and the capital market stack built on its rail offer: (1) Real-time settlement, (2) Programmable risk parameters, (3) Transparent collateral, and (4) Immutable audit trails. The efficiency gains are not theoretical. They are structural.
Yet, with all the progress this industry has made since the earliest days of DeFi Summer, our goal of institutional adoption has not yet been achieved. Simply put, institutional capital has not shown up.
They see the opportunity onchain, but the infrastructure is not built for them. Most of what exists today was designed and optimized for crypto-native users chasing yield. That works for the earliest adopters of a nascent technology, but it does not scale to a pension fund, an RIA, or a family office with fiduciary obligations and compliance requirements. That infrastructure does not exist within a vertically-integrated, institutional-grade stack. This is what we set out to build.
Birch Hill is an institutional credit infrastructure company, designed to bridge the gaps that separate TradFi capital and onchain efficiency. We curate lending strategies through an institutional-grade risk and compliance engine that prioritizes capital preservation over yield chasing.
We are not aggregating DeFi yields. We are building the underwriting discipline, risk monitoring, and governance frameworks that let institutions actually participate in onchain credit markets.
Since closing our round, we have onboarded as a new institutionally focused curator on Morpho, with plans to launch our first vaults in Q1 and expand to additional platforms thereafter.
Regardless of chain, protocol or strategy, our process remains the same. Our Collateral Risk Framework provides real-time monitoring of collateral quality, liquidity conditions, and pricing integrity - paired with auditable decision trails for regulatory and client reporting. This is about building financial infrastructure that works for the largest pools of capital in the world. The capital will follow when the infrastructure meets them where they are.
Our team has spent years on both sides. Bhavin originated structured credit at Goldman Sachs and invested at Cerberus before transitioning to digital assets at 10T Holdings. Jack and Connor built risk systems on BlackRock’s Aladdin platform, infrastructure managing over $10 trillion, before researching onchain lending protocols at what is now Birch Hill Labs.
We have seen how institutional capital moves. We have seen what is missing onchain. Birch Hill is the bridge. To everyone who backed us early to get here today, thank you. We are just getting started.
Bhavin, Jack, and Connor
Press Coverage:
The Block - link
BusinessWire - link
On The Brink Podcast: