Fence Raises $20M to Replace the Legacy Trust & Agency Industry for Asset-Backed Finance

Fence, the technology platform rebuilding the infrastructure of asset-backed finance, announced $20 million in new funding, led by Galaxy Ventures. The round was oversubscribed and includes participation from seed investors ParaFi Capital and Crane Ventures Partners (FKA MassMutual Ventures), both of whom re-upped only some months after Fence’s seed round.

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A $15 Trillion Industry Running on Spreadsheets, PDFs, and Emails

Fence is built to address the $15 trillion asset-backed finance market, which remains slow, opaque, and operationally inefficient despite a decade of technological transformation in lending itself. The company’s infrastructure for debt capital markets replaces the legacy trust and agency providers (verification, calculation, collateral and paying agents) that sit between borrowers and lenders in asset-backed finance. These intermediaries have historically relied on manual processes, spreadsheets, and fragmented systems, which is why the industry still transacts over email and spreadsheets today.

“Asset-backed finance is the backend of the real economy, but it still runs on PDFs, spreadsheets, and email threads,” said Juan Montero, co-founder and CEO of Fence. “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.

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

Modern Debt Capital Markets demand Real-Time and Programmatic Infrastructure

Fence’s smart-contract based platform replaces legacy providers in the trust and agency industry with a unified, software-driven system that verifies assets, calculates borrowing bases, enforces covenants, and moves cash and collateral programmatically and in real time. Clients can use Fence for a single role (verification, calculation, collateral or paying agent) or collapse all three into one continuous system. End-to-end is where the product is most powerful, but modularity is the point. Fence meets capital providers where they are, then earns the rest of the stack.

The impact is material. In live facilities, Fence has delivered up to 40% lower cost of capital for borrowers and up to 80% lower operational overhead. This is done simultaneously while providing capital providers with full, real-time visibility into 100% of underlying assets, continuous cash reconciliation, and real-time covenant tracking.

“Structured credit has operated for decades on infrastructure that was never designed for today’s velocity or complexity,” said Will Nuelle, General Partner of Galaxy Ventures. “What Stripe did for payments, Fence is working to do for debt capital markets. 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 need for modernization has become increasingly urgent. Recent disruptions across private credit and structured finance markets have exposed systemic risks tied to manual verification and delayed reporting. In most facilities today, the underlying assets are reviewed only periodically and on a sampled basis, leaving investors exposed to blind spots that can result in significant losses.

Institutional-Grade Infrastructure Powering $1.5B For Leading Financial Institutions

Since launching, Fence has grown to $1.5bn in assets under administration across live facilities, funded by leading financial institutions and asset managers including BlackRock, Fortress, i80 Group, and BBVA. The platform is capable of processing tens of thousands of loans per second and onboarding new facilities in weeks rather than months.

In one recent facility with BBVA, Fence enabled near-instant drawdowns several times a day where funding would have previously occurred weekly or monthly, while monitoring hundreds of thousands of transactions per month in real time and eliminating idle capital that had historically driven up borrowing costs. These are not pilots or sandboxes, they are traditional, complex, demanding asset-backed finance facilities that institutional capital providers already depend on. The company’s differentiation lies in its ability to automate not just data and reporting, but the actual movement of cash and collateral.

“Others digitize the paperwork,” Montero said. “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. Originate an asset, sell it immediately, recycle capital. That is what debt capital markets look like when the infrastructure actually works.”

The newly raised capital will be used to accelerate Fence’s expansion into the U.S. market, with Montero relocating to New York to grow the NYC-based team, as well as to grow its engineering team and deepen product capabilities. This includes the integration of AI-driven automation, positioning Fence to power an emerging category of agentic debt capital markets operations and invest in institutional-grade infrastructure and branding.

Looking ahead, Fence aims to become the foundational infrastructure layer for a new generation of debt capital markets: one that is global, programmable, and increasingly automated. The company intends to power the capital providers and originators of today but, as financial markets continue to evolve toward greater digitization and automation, Fence is positioning itself as the infrastructure that enables that transition.

“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.”

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