Why we invested in Tare
We have passed on most tokenization companies we've seen, and usually for the same reason: they focus on the thin layer of tokenization itself versus the processes and ecosystem around it. Tare is the exception, and today we're proud to share our investment in it. The company announced $13.25 million in seed financing led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Strobe Ventures, Janus Henderson, Neoclassic Capital, the Avalanche Foundation, and The Venture Dept. The capital funds product development and hiring as Tare opens its platform to third-party lenders and institutional investors. Forbes has the story here: https://fortune.com/2026/09/16/exclusive-tare-13-million-blockchain-capital-private-credit-transactions-blockchain/.
Credit today moves from investors to borrowers through a long chain of intermediaries. An originator underwrites the loan, a servicer collects the payments, a trustee holds the assets, an administrator produces the reporting, and an investor receives a loan tape weeks later that may not reconcile. Tare replaces that cumbersome process with a shared asset ledger and three applications sitting on top of it: a Loan Origination System that writes standardized loan data into the registry at the moment of underwriting, a Loan Management System that handles servicing, waterfalls, and securitization, and a Digital Investor Hub where institutional buyers analyze, purchase, monitor, and sell those assets.
I first met the CEO and Co-Founder, Kevin Miao, while doing diligence on Uniform Labs, a company in which we subsequently invested. When he later started Tare, he called us early. I’ve learned that many of the best relationships can come from diligence calls such as this. Diligence calls put you in rooms with people you have no other reason to be talking to, and some of those people turn into the best investments you make. The first venture investment I ever made also came out of a diligence call: I was speaking with Edward Woodford to get his read on a different company, and the conversation led to Nyca’s investment in his company, ZeroHash, in 2021.
Here's why we invested in Tare:
1. On-chain lending has demonstrated real product market fit and structural resilience.
Decentralized protocols such as Aave and Compound outperformed their centralized counterparts through the last period of market stress, while Celsius and BlockFi did not survive it, and that contrast validated the robustness of blockchain-based credit systems rather than the marketing around them. Public-market validation followed. Figure's 2025 IPO demonstrated investor confidence in blockchain-enabled lending platforms that deliver lower costs and operational efficiency, reinforcing the model's viability at scale. Stablecoins and asset tokenization have now established the necessary infrastructure for more advanced financial primitives to move on chain. We believe institutional credit is the natural next category to migrate. Tare is designed explicitly for this transition, with lending executed natively on blockchain infrastructure rather than layered on top of legacy systems.
2. The company is intentionally built to operate within the regulatory framework from day one.
Tare views compliance and licensing as a competitive advantage rather than a constraint, and we agree this approach can become a meaningful moat over time, particularly for institutional and B2B adoption. Tare Credit LLC is a licensed U.S. consumer lender, now holding licenses in roughly 30 of 50 states, and begins originating this month. Most infrastructure companies at this stage are selling a roadmap to design partners. Tare built and licensed the regulated entity first, which means the origination system, the servicing engine, and the investor hub are tested against real borrowers, real payment flows, and real compliance obligations before a third party ever touches them.
3. The founding team represents exceptional founder-market fit.
It’s hard to envision a stronger team more well-suited to the problem they’re solving than this one. Kevin Miao traded subprime mortgages and crisis-era securitizations at Citigroup before founding BlockTower Credit, a private credit fund that reached $1.9 billion in AUM and delivered over 20% gross IRRs by financing consumer credit assets with on-chain capital. Lucas Vogelsang built Tinlake in 2017, executing the first securitizations ever run on a public blockchain, then grew it into Centrifuge, which today supports billions in tokenized assets for Janus Henderson, Apollo, and New York Life. Keerthi Moudgal began her career at J.P. Morgan, building a deep understanding of financial settlement infrastructure before ultimately becoming the Head of Product at JPM Kinexys, where she led the development of next-generation transactional infrastructure that has since settled more than $3 trillion in volume. Origination and capital markets, on-chain securitization, and institutional product. The company needs all three and each founder has already done one of them at scale, which materially increases our confidence in long-term execution.
We're proud to back Kevin, Lucas, and Keerthi as they build the shared, intelligent ledger that connects loan originators and credit investors directly.