Birch Hill, a New York startup founded by former Goldman Sachs and BlackRock employees, has closed a $4 million seed round to bring American apartment, farm, and energy loans onto public blockchains.

The round, announced Wednesday, was led by Multicoin Capital with participation from ParaFi Capital, Castle Island Ventures, and Nascent. It brings the firm's total funding to $6.5 million.

Private credit—loans issued outside traditional bank lending channels—has grown into a major asset class, and the tokenization of real-world assets such as loans and Treasury securities has drawn increasing attention from established financial institutions in recent years.

Birch Hill is led by CEO Bhavin Vaid, a former Goldman Sachs investment banking analyst who later worked in private equity at Cerberus Capital Management and co-founded crypto investment firm Halo Capital. Co-founder and COO Connor Flanagan spent more than four years at BlackRock, including on its Aladdin risk platform, before holding roles at Digital Currency Group and analytics firm Flipside.

The company operates across three divisions. Its Vaults arm is an official curator on Morpho, an onchain lending protocol, where it assesses credit and sets risk parameters for vaults and markets. Its Strategies unit builds onchain credit products, including a strategy called Birch Hill Absolute Value. Its Enterprise division has applied to FINRA for broker-dealer membership, which would allow it to place private credit offerings with verified accredited investors.

“Loan originators need new sources of capital, and onchain lenders need credit they can trust,” Vaid said in a statement.

Longer term, Birch Hill plans to securitize pools of U.S. multifamily, agriculture, and energy loans designed to be held onchain within the U.S. regulatory framework. As part of that effort, the firm said it met with the SEC's Crypto Task Force in August. It argues that banks, insurers, and other fiduciaries will only allocate to credit packaged in structures they recognize. The three divisions map onto that requirement—credit assessment on Morpho, packaged onchain credit products, and, pending FINRA approval, placement of offerings with verified accredited investors.

The new capital funds an eight-person team that includes three hires from vault platform Yearn: Brad Schlagel, who led development of Yearn v3, along with Ian Plosker and Alex Cornwell. Traver Normandi joins from risk management firm Gauntlet to lead business development.

“Private credit is a fragmented, relationship-driven market, which makes it one of the clearest opportunities to build new financial infrastructure onchain,” said Shayon Sengupta, general partner and co-head of venture at Multicoin.

The raise comes as Washington warms to onchain finance. In August, the SEC proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, which would let projects raise money through token sales without full registration. Morpho has also gained traction with traditional players, powering Coinbase's fixed-rate USDC loans against Bitcoin—the same protocol on which Birch Hill's Vaults arm serves as a curator. For now, both the FINRA application and the SEC's rulemaking process remain pending.