Birch Hill raises $4M to bring US loans onchain

Birch Hill wants to take some of the least glamorous corners of American lending and put them onchain. Apartment buildings, farms, and energy projects are on its list.

The New York startup said Wednesday it closed a $4 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital. ParaFi Capital, Castle Island Ventures, and Nascent also joined the round.

What Birch Hill is building

The company’s long-term plan is to securitize multifamily, agriculture, and energy loans onchain. Securitization means bundling many individual loans into one investable product. Investors then buy slices of that bundle instead of underwriting each loan themselves.

Birch Hill’s pitch is to run that process on public blockchains instead of through layers of intermediaries and paperwork.

The startup was founded by Wall Street alumni. Its team includes executives with experience at financial firms like Goldman Sachs and BlackRock. Bhavin Vaid serves as CEO, and Connor Flanagan serves as COO.

The hiring tells a parallel story. Birch Hill has brought on three people from Yearn and one from Gauntlet.

The first product is already live

Birch Hill isn’t starting from a blank whiteboard. Its first live product is the Birch Hill RWA USDC Vault, running on the Base blockchain.

The vault is built on Morpho’s lending infrastructure and uses Yearn v3 vault standards.

Borrowers in the vault post GRO tokens as collateral. Those tokens are tied to GromaREIT, a US multifamily real estate investment trust. In plain terms, lenders supply USDC, and the loans are backed by tokenized exposure to apartment real estate.

Access is restricted. The vault is designed for accredited investors and comes with strict risk controls. The firm frames its approach around capital preservation.

The seed round also builds on earlier backing. Birch Hill previously closed a $2.5 million pre-seed round co-led by ParaFi Capital and Castle Island Ventures. Both firms came back for the seed.

Why real-world credit keeps attracting crypto money

Real-world assets, or RWAs, have become one of the more durable themes in crypto. The idea is simple: take assets that already generate cash flow in the traditional economy and represent them on a blockchain.

Much of that activity so far has gravitated toward the cleanest, most liquid assets. Birch Hill is aiming at messier territory. Multifamily housing, agricultural lending, and energy finance each come with their own underwriting quirks, legal structures, and cash-flow patterns.

The investor lineup is worth noting. Multicoin Capital, ParaFi Capital, Castle Island Ventures, and Nascent are all crypto-native funds.

What this means

For the onchain lending ecosystem, Birch Hill is a test of whether institutional-style credit can live comfortably inside DeFi plumbing. Its first vault leans on Morpho and Yearn standards rather than reinventing them.

The accredited-investor gate matters too. It signals that Birch Hill is prioritizing compliance over open access.

The bigger question is execution on the roadmap. Running one vault backed by tokenized REIT exposure is a meaningful first step. Securitizing pools of farm loans and energy loans onchain is a much heavier lift. A $4 million seed round buys time to prove the model, not a finished product.

Tokenized credit doesn’t eliminate credit risk. It simply moves it onto a blockchain where it is more visible. If borrowers default, the underlying loans behave the same way they would anywhere else.