The ex-Blackstone team wants to move beyond crypto-collateralized loans and into ‘real economy credit’ as the tokenized RWA sector continues to grow.
Valinor, a New York-based startup building what it calls “Open Credit” infrastructure at the intersection of institutional capital and decentralized finance (DeFi), has raised $25 million in a seed round to bring private credit onto the blockchain.
Castle Island Ventures led the round. Other investors include Susquehanna’s crypto arm, Maven11, Apollo, Neoclassic Capital, The Venture Dept, 57Blocks, The Fintech Fund, and the founders of Bitcoin miner-turned-AI company TeraWulf, according to the company’s website. The round’s valuation was not disclosed.
Co-founders Connor Dougherty and Lily Yarborough both worked in Blackstone’s GSO Special Situations credit division before launching Valinor in late 2023.
Valinor is targeting the operational overhead embedded in private credit. The firm argues that rules-based lending operations — such as revolving credit facilities where borrowers draw and repay millions weekly — can be automated through smart contracts rather than managed through chains of human verification and manual wire approvals.
The company has already deployed blockchain-based loans to a handful of fintech and crypto companies, Fortune reported.
Private Credit Dominates RWA Market
The deal comes as private credit has become the largest category in tokenized real-world assets (RWA). The total distributed value of on-chain RWAs has reached approximately $26.7 billion, according to RWAxyz, up from roughly $5.5 billion at the start of 2025. Private credit accounts for the bulk of that total, with Figure alone holding roughly 75% of the category’s active loans through its Provenance blockchain.
RedStone projected that the total tokenized RWA market could reach $50–60 billion by the end of 2026, with private credit expected to maintain roughly 45–50% market share.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
