Birch Hill Holdings, a digital asset infrastructure firm focused on onchain lending and tokenized asset markets, has successfully closed a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round. The investment was co-led by ParaFi Capital and Castle Island Ventures.
Additional participants in the funding round include Nascent, FalconX Ventures, Coin Operated Group, The Operating Group, JST Digital, and Flowdesk. Industry executives, such as Ramin Kamfar, Founder & CEO of Bluerock, also contributed to the round.
Birch Hill Holdings emphasizes capital preservation and structuring institutional lending strategies with a focus on risk discipline. The firm aims to provide fiduciaries with a compliant framework for accessing income opportunities within blockchain-based credit markets, supported by institutional-grade risk modeling and governance.
The founding team brings diverse experience from both traditional credit markets and digital asset infrastructure. CEO Bhavin Vaid previously worked in structured credit at Goldman Sachs and private equity at Cerberus Capital, in addition to his time at digital asset investment firm 10T Holdings. CTO Jack Forlines and COO Connor Flanagan contributed to institutional risk systems within BlackRock’s Aladdin platform before transitioning to digital asset data and infrastructure. They later co-founded a digital asset research and analytics firm, now operating as Birch Hill Labs, which informs the firm’s quantitative risk framework.
Bhavin Vaid stated, “Credit markets stand to benefit from the efficiencies of blockchain-based settlement, but institutional participation has been limited by the need for stronger risk oversight and operational clarity. Our goal is to bring the discipline of traditional credit investing together with modern infrastructure in a way that meets institutional standards for governance, transparency, and risk management.”
Birch Hill collaborates with institutional-grade service providers for custody, monitoring, identity verification, and audit infrastructure to maintain a compliant operating environment. The firm plans to launch its initial strategies through established blockchain lending platforms, with intentions to broaden its suite of institutional credit strategies to accommodate varying compliance and risk requirements.
Ben Forman, Founder & Managing Partner at ParaFi Capital, commented, “Birch Hill’s approach to risk management reflects the kind of discipline institutional allocators expect. Their focus on governance, reporting, and credit fundamentals is well aligned with the direction institutional capital is moving in digital asset markets.”
Matt Walsh, Founding Partner at Castle Island Ventures, added, “We continue to see growing interest from institutional investors in thoughtfully structured exposure to blockchain-based credit. Birch Hill’s team brings the combination of traditional finance experience and digital asset expertise required to build durable infrastructure in this space.”
A central component of Birch Hill’s offering is its Collateral Risk Framework, designed to mitigate potential losses and support transparent, auditable governance. This framework incorporates real-time oversight of collateral quality, liquidity conditions, and pricing data integrity. The newly secured capital will be utilized to expand Birch Hill’s technical risk and engineering teams and to pursue the necessary regulatory registrations to offer compliant institutional access to onchain credit and tokenized asset markets.
