Source: Unite.AI
Marble, a capital markets startup founded by former BitGo and Galaxy Digital executives, announced its launch on November 10, 2026, with an $11 million Series Seed round led by Polychain Capital. The company is building private-credit infrastructure for AI compute operators alongside an institutional trading platform spanning digital assets, prediction markets and compute.
Maven 11, Ripple, Susquehanna Crypto, Lattice and Blockwall Ventures participated, together with other venture and strategic investors and a group of AI-focused angel investors. Marble plans to use the proceeds to hire across compute financing, trading, risk, legal and operations and to establish the trading, custody and banking connectivity behind Marble Markets.
Co-founders Matt Ballensweig and Leon Marshall serve as co-CEOs. Ballensweig was most recently BitGo’s global head of trading and previously co-headed trading and lending at Genesis. Marshall was CEO of Galaxy Digital’s European business and previously worked at Genesis, Apollo and Trafigura.
Credit for Mid-Market AI Operators
Marble Compute is designed as an asset-management platform connecting institutional investors with independent AI cloud providers, or neoclouds, and GPU operators. The founders say the largest neoclouds and hyperscalers can finance growth through public markets and major banks, while smaller operators have fewer and less flexible options even when customers have committed to purchasing their capacity.
Marble Compute is not designed to lend from its own balance sheet. Instead, it will source opportunities, conduct diligence and underwriting, and structure each financing for investors. Its underwriting will examine the hardware, the creditworthiness of contracted customers and the operator’s ability to service debt, while seeking diversified customer commitments so that financing is supported by contracted cash flows.
Subject to regulatory approvals, the planned sequence begins with loans syndicated directly between operators and institutional lenders. Later stages would add single-opportunity off-chain vehicles and on-chain vaults for individual GPU operators, followed by diversified multi-opportunity funds as deal flow and a track record develop.
Principal Trading and Shared Collateral
Marble Markets is planned around principal trading: clients would face Marble directly, with Marble trading from its own capital. Client assets would remain with their existing custodians, brokerages and banks. A high-touch desk would handle trading, backed by a client platform showing positions, collateral and exposure in one place.
The planned product set includes digital-asset spot trading, borrowing, lending and derivatives; large-block bilateral prediction-market trading; over-the-counter compute forwards; and, over the longer term, tokenized equities and equity swaps. Rather than requiring clients to prefund each counterparty separately, the design would let them use one pool of eligible digital and traditional collateral across markets. Marble says its Markets lending would be overcollateralized, meaning backed by collateral exceeding the loan’s value.
Compute forwards connect the two businesses. They would let an operator fix a rental price for capacity delivered in the future, which Marble says would give lenders clearer cash flows to underwrite and operators a better basis for determining borrowing capacity and equity requirements. In the launch release, Marshall said: “Two GPU operators can buy identical hardware and raise very different amounts of debt against it. A lender wants to know who’s buying the compute, at what price and for how long.”
Marble Compute would originate the operator relationships, with Marble Markets deepening them through hedging. The founders also describe Compute as a structured route for digital-asset capital to finance AI infrastructure and earn returns from it.
Initial Operating Targets
For now, the products remain development plans rather than live services, and their rollout is subject to applicable regulatory approvals. Marble Compute expects to close its first loan syndications for mid-market GPU operators in early Q1, while Marble Markets is aiming to begin digital-asset trading in January.
The launch links two requirements for expanding independent AI compute: financing for the hardware and a mechanism for hedging the revenue it generates. The first syndications and trading launch will test whether Marble can turn that combined design into an operating business and broaden institutional financing beyond the largest cloud providers.
