Marble has launched with $11 million in seed funding led by Polychain Capital to develop institutional trading services and private credit financing for AI infrastructure operators. Participants in the round included Maven 11, Ripple, Susquehanna Crypto, Lattice, Blockwall and other venture and strategic investors, alongside AI-focused angel investors.
Co-founders and co-CEOs Matt Ballensweig and Leon Marshall are building two businesses: Marble Markets, an institutional trading platform, and Marble Compute, a financing operation that connects lenders with independent AI cloud providers and GPU operators.
Marble Compute
Marble Compute will originate, underwrite and structure financing for operators that may have limited borrowing options despite having customer commitments to purchase their computing capacity. Its underwriting will consider equipment, the contracted customers’ creditworthiness and an operator’s ability to service debt. The business plans to offer both traditionally structured and on-chain credit opportunities. Subject to applicable regulatory approvals, Marble intends initially to finance opportunities through individual investment funds before expanding toward funds covering multiple opportunities.
“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. We’re bringing buyers, operators and lenders together so operators can secure customers for their capacity, lock in pricing on the share they want to hedge and raise financing against those cash flows. That gives lenders a clearer basis for deciding how much they can lend and operators a clearer view of how much equity they’ll need to build the next cluster,” Leon Marshall, co-founder and co-CEO of Marble, said.
Marble Markets
Marble Markets is developing spot trading, lending and derivatives for digital assets, as well as block trading in prediction markets and over-the-counter forwards on computing capacity. Compute forwards would allow operators to agree today on rental prices for capacity delivered later; the company intends to connect those arrangements with financing based on contracted cash flows. Longer-term plans include tokenized equities and equity swaps, subject to regulatory approvals.
The trading platform is designed to accept eligible digital and traditional assets held with participating custodians and brokerages as collateral, reducing separate prefunding requirements.
“Matt and Leon have built and run institutional trading and lending businesses at scale through multiple market cycles, and they understand market structure from the inside. That experience positions Marble to compete in two of the largest opportunities of this decade: bringing institutional trading to frontier markets and building the credit markets that AI infrastructure needs. We’re excited to lead Marble’s seed,” Angelo Goepel, Partner at Polychain Capital, said.
“Institutions want exposure to the markets that will define the next decade, from prediction markets to AI compute, but the liquidity and credit in those markets are still fragmented. Marble brings the trading and financing infrastructure institutions rely on to the markets they actually want to be in,” Matt Ballensweig, co-founder and co-CEO of Marble, said.
Ballensweig most recently served as global head of Trading at BitGo and previously co-led trading and lending at Genesis. Marshall was CEO of Galaxy Digital’s European business and held earlier roles at Genesis, Apollo and Trafigura. Marble plans to expand its team with senior hires from trading firms, exchanges and AI infrastructure companies.
