Birch Hill, a New York startup founded by Wall Street alumni, has raised a $4 million seed round to put US apartment, farm, and energy loans on public blockchains. Multicoin Capital led the round, with ParaFi Capital, Castle Island Ventures, and Nascent participating. Total funding now stands at $6.5 million. Chief executive officer Bhavin Vaid is a former Goldman Sachs analyst who later worked at Cerberus Capital Management. Co-founder Connor Flanagan spent more than four years at BlackRock. The firm curates vaults on the Morpho lending protocol, builds onchain credit products, and has applied to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) for broker-dealer membership. Longer term, it plans to securitise pools of US multifamily, agriculture, and energy loans designed to be held onchain. The money funds an eight-person team.

Union Labs has raised $4 million in seed funding to build what it describes as the first fully trustless bridge connecting appchains, layer 1, and layer 2 networks. The round included participation from Galileo, Semantic Ventures, Tioga Capital, Nascent, Lightshift, and Chorus One. The company is developing a zero-knowledge interoperability layer aimed at addressing security vulnerabilities in blockchain bridges. Bridge hacks resulted in over $1.6 billion in losses in 2022. Union Labs' solution uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify messages rather than granting special authority to relayers, which reduces private key vulnerability. The funding will support team expansion ahead of the mainnet launch. The team includes former leaders from Composable Finance, ConsenSys, Tokensoft, and Polygon.