Image credit: Global Startup Insights.
Marble announced its launch and an $11M seed round on November 10, 2026. Polychain Capital led the round. Maven 11, Ripple, Susquehanna Crypto, Lattice, Blockwall, and other venture and strategic investors also participated, along with a group of AI-focused angels.
Matt Ballensweig and Leon Marshall founded Marble and serve as co-CEOs. Ballensweig was most recently Global Head of Trading at BitGo, where he built and led the institutional trading business. He previously co-headed trading and lending at Genesis. Marshall was CEO of Galaxy Digital’s European business and has also worked at Genesis, Apollo, and Trafigura. The company says it plans to hire senior people from trading firms, exchanges, and AI infrastructure companies in the coming months.
Marble is organized into two businesses. Marble Compute focuses on private credit for AI infrastructure. Marble Markets focuses on institutional trading across digital assets, real-world assets, prediction markets, and compute.
Marble Compute targets a gap in AI infrastructure financing. The largest publicly traded neoclouds can raise money in public markets and from large banks. Smaller independent operators often have fewer options, even when customers have already committed to buying their capacity.
Marble plans to originate, underwrite, and structure financing for these operators, then bring the deals to institutional lenders, including through on-chain credit products. Its underwriting will look at the equipment, the creditworthiness of contracted customers, and the operator’s ability to service its debt. Subject to regulatory approvals, Marble intends to fund these deals through single-opportunity funds first, then move to multi-opportunity funds on one asset management platform.
Marshall said two operators can buy identical hardware and still raise very different amounts of debt, because lenders care about who is buying the compute, at what price, and for how long. Marble aims to connect buyers, operators, and lenders so operators can secure customers, lock in pricing on the capacity they want to hedge, and raise financing against those cash flows.
Marble Markets is building a platform where institutions can trade across several markets with Marble as their counterparty. The company is developing spot trading, lending, and derivatives for digital assets, block trading in prediction markets, and over-the-counter forwards on compute capacity. Longer-term plans include tokenized equities and equity swaps, subject to regulatory approvals.
The platform is also designed to improve capital efficiency. Clients could post eligible digital and traditional assets held with participating custodians and brokerages as collateral, which would reduce the need to prefund trades separately with each counterparty.
Compute forwards connect the two businesses. They let operators agree on a rental price today for capacity they will deliver in the future, which feeds into the financing side.
Angelo Goepel, Partner at Polychain Capital, pointed to the founders’ experience running institutional trading and lending businesses through multiple market cycles. He said it positions Marble to compete in two large opportunities: institutional trading in frontier markets and credit markets for AI infrastructure.
Chase Lax, CEO of Susquehanna Crypto, said his firm sees market structure evolving quickly as a liquidity provider and shares the founders’ view of that shift. Balder Bomans, CIO at Maven 11 Capital, said the market needs a more nimble player to bring frontier markets together on one platform. He noted his firm has traded with both founders through BitGo and Galaxy.
Institutions can register interest in Marble Markets or Marble Compute at marblegroup.xyz. The company has not disclosed customer numbers or product launch dates, and the plans described above remain subject to regulatory approvals.
Source:
Global Startups Insights: Marble Launches with $11 Million Seed Funding to Build AI Infrastructure Financing and Trading Platforms
