Fence Raises $20M to Rebuild the $15T Asset-Backed Finance Market

NEW YORK, NY – April 29, 2026 – Fence, a technology company aiming to overhaul the core infrastructure of asset-backed finance, today announced a $20 million funding round led by Galaxy Ventures. The oversubscribed round signals strong investor confidence in the firm’s mission to modernize a $15 trillion industry that remains a critical, yet notoriously inefficient, engine of the global economy.

The investment also saw renewed participation from seed investors ParaFi Capital and Crane Ventures Partners, who increased their stakes just months after Fence's initial seed round. The new capital is earmarked to accelerate the company's expansion into the U.S. market, which includes the relocation of Co-Founder and CEO Juan Montero to New York to spearhead the growth of its team and operations.

The Industry Running on Email

Asset-backed finance is the mechanism that allows companies to bundle assets like auto loans, mortgages, or credit card receivables and sell them to investors, freeing up capital for new lending. Despite its massive scale, the industry's operational backbone is startlingly archaic.

“Asset-backed finance is the backend of the real economy, but it still runs on PDFs, spreadsheets, and email threads," said Fence Co-Founder & CEO Juan Montero in a statement. “Lending has been transformed over the last decade including underwriting, origination, and risk management. However, debt capital markets, the layer that actually funds lending operations, has not kept up technology-wise with the rest of the sector."

This reliance on manual processes creates a cascade of problems. Transactions are slow, reporting is periodic rather than continuous, and data verification is often based on sampling rather than a comprehensive review. These inefficiencies not only create significant operational overhead but also introduce systemic risks. The lack of real-time visibility leaves investors with blind spots that can lead to significant losses, a vulnerability exposed in recent market disruptions across private credit.

Legacy trust and agency providers—the intermediaries responsible for verifying assets, calculating payments, and ensuring compliance—are at the heart of this outdated system. Their fragmented, manual approach is the primary reason why a multi-trillion-dollar industry still communicates and transacts with the same tools used in the 1990s.

Rebuilding the Financial Plumbing

Fence is positioning itself not as an incremental improvement but as a fundamental rebuild of this broken infrastructure. The company’s platform uses smart-contract technology to create a unified, software-driven system that replaces the traditional, siloed roles of verification, calculation, collateral, and paying agents.

“What Stripe did for payments, Fence is working to do for debt capital markets,” noted Will Nuelle, General Partner of lead investor Galaxy Ventures. “Fence is not layering software on top of a broken system, they are rebuilding the system itself. Their approach to real-time verification, programmable cash flows, and institutional-grade execution represents a step change for asset backed finance, in our view.”

The impact is not theoretical. Fence reports that in live facilities, its platform has delivered up to a 40% lower cost of capital for borrowers and an 80% reduction in operational overhead. This is achieved by providing capital providers with complete, real-time visibility into 100% of the underlying assets, continuous cash reconciliation, and automated covenant tracking.

In a recent facility with global banking giant BBVA, Fence’s technology enabled near-instant fund drawdowns multiple times a day—a process that would have traditionally occurred weekly or even monthly. This acceleration eliminates idle capital and dramatically increases efficiency. The platform monitored hundreds of thousands of transactions per month in real time, a task that would be impossible through manual methods.

“Others digitize the paperwork,” Montero explained. “Fence rebuilt the plumbing. The data that verifies the asset and the collateral is the same data that moves the money. That’s where the real value is.”

Investor Confidence and Market Traction

The $20 million investment from a crypto-native leader like Galaxy Ventures, alongside continued backing from enterprise-focused firms, underscores the growing consensus that financial market infrastructure is ripe for a blockchain-inspired overhaul. These investors are betting on the thesis that programmable, transparent, and automated systems are the inevitable future.

Fence is not just a concept; it already has significant traction, managing $1.5 billion in assets under administration. Its client roster includes some of the biggest names in finance, such as BlackRock, Fortress, i80 Group, and BBVA, demonstrating that its institutional-grade platform is already powering complex, real-world financial facilities.

This ability to handle the demanding requirements of major financial institutions is a key differentiator. The platform is capable of processing tens of thousands of loans per second and onboarding new, complex facilities in a matter of weeks, a process that traditionally takes months of legal and operational setup.

“Capital providers want control, but nobody wants the operational burden," Montero stated. "Fence provides real-time transparency, automated execution, and infrastructure that actually scales.”

An AI-Powered, Internet-Native Future

Looking ahead, Fence plans to use the new funding to deepen its product capabilities, with a particular focus on integrating AI-driven automation. This move aims to position the company to power an emerging category of agentic debt capital markets, where intelligent systems can handle increasingly complex operations with minimal human intervention.

The ultimate vision is to establish Fence as the foundational layer for a new generation of debt capital markets—one that is global, fully programmable, and inherently internet-native. By automating not just data and reporting but the actual movement of cash and collateral, the company is building the infrastructure for a future where capital flows in real time and risk is managed with absolute transparency.

“We’re building the rails for how debt capital markets will operate going forward,” said Montero. “Not just making the current system more efficient, but preparing for a future where capital moves in real time, risk is fully transparent, and financial infrastructure is truly internet-native.”