Ex-Blackstone staffers raised $25M for Valinor, a startup using smart contracts to move private credit workflows on-chain and lend first to crypto firms.

Valinor, an on-chain private credit startup co-founded by former Blackstone employees, has raised $25 million in seed funding to move the mechanics of private lending onto public blockchains. Fortune reports that the round was led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from the crypto arm of trading giant Susquehanna, venture firm Maven11 and the founder of bitcoin miner TeraWulf, which is currently pivoting part of its business toward artificial intelligence. The capital will go toward scaling Valinor’s loan book, broadening its customer base and hiring beyond its current six-person team.

In its current form, Valinor’s core pitch is straightforward: take the revolving credit lines and structured loans that dominate traditional private credit, and transplant the back-office process onto smart contracts. As Fortune explains, conventional lenders still lean heavily on “manual verification and spreadsheet collaboration” to manage covenants, drawdowns and repayments, a structure that is slow, opaque and operationally brittle. Valinor plans to replace those workflows with contracts that “automate routing of funds and condition-triggered execution,” essentially turning legal and operational terms into on-chain logic that runs by itself once parameters are met.

Ex-blackstone founders start with crypto borrowers

Both Valinor co-founders come out of traditional finance, having worked in banking and in Blackstone’s private credit division before moving into crypto in 2022. That background gives them familiarity with how large allocators think about risk, documentation and recovery—skills they now want to port into a blockchain-native environment. In its first phase, the company is focusing on lending to crypto companies rather than trying to underwrite the entire corporate universe at once, using the sector it knows best as a testing ground for its on-chain underwriting and servicing rails.

Fortune notes that Valinor “has completed lending for several fintech and crypto companies through blockchain technology,” suggesting that the platform is already live with real borrowers rather than just in pilot mode. Over time, the founders say they intend to introduce more of the loan lifecycle—origination, servicing, covenant monitoring—onto the chain, with the goal of improving efficiency and transparency for both lenders and borrowers. That aligns with a broader tokenization and real-world-asset push in credit markets, where other projects have started to bring trade finance, consumer loans and SME receivables on-chain under regulated structures.

Private credit meets on-chain rails

The timing of Valinor’s raise underscores how quickly private credit has become a focal point for both traditional funds and crypto-native investors. In earlier crypto.news coverage of real-world-assets, asset managers described private credit as one of the most promising use cases for blockchain rails, precisely because of its fragmented data and heavy operational burden. A separate crypto.news story on tokenization highlighted how on-chain structures can give lenders near real-time visibility into collateral and payment flows, a sharp contrast with quarterly PDF reports and email chains. Another crypto.news story on institutional DeFi noted that some of the most active experiments now pair off-chain underwriting with on-chain execution, a model Valinor appears to be embracing.

For now, the startup’s immediate challenge is execution: proving that smart contracts can handle the messy edge-cases of private credit as reliably as seasoned back offices, and convincing conservative allocators that on-chain rails reduce, rather than add, operational risk. If it can do that at scale, the $25 million seed round led by Castle Island may look less like a niche crypto bet and more like an early stake in a new operating system for private lending.