News

• The fundraising round consisted of $10 million equity investment and $28 million of investments in real-world assets on Huma's platform.
• Investors included Distributed Global with significant participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, and TIBAS Ventures.
• Huma merged with cross-border payments firm Arf earlier this year and the two are projected to hit a combined $10 billion in payments-financing transactions next year.

Huma Finance closed a $38 million investment round to boost its payment-financing (PayFi) platform built on tokenized real-world assets (RWA).

The round comprised $10 million of equity investment and $28 million in yield-bearing RWAs on the San Francisco-based company's platform.

The equity component was led by venture capital firm Distributed Global, with significant participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation and TIBAS Ventures, the venture arm of İşbank, Turkey's largest private bank. For the RWA component, Stellar Development Foundation was the largest participant, dedicating $10 million.

The real-world assets were multitranche bonds of varying maturities wrapped into exchange-traded products issued by Switzerland-based Arf Capital under Swiss DLT laws, Erbil Karaman, co-founder of Huma, said in an email interview.

The company said the investment will help expand the platform to the Solana blockchain and Stellar's Soroban smart-contract network in the coming months.

Tokenized RWAs are among the fastest growing applications for blockchain technology, with global financial institutions and digital asset firms racing to bring traditional instruments such as bonds, credit and funds onto distributed ledgers. The process could bring operational efficiencies, faster settlement and increased transparency.

The PayFi platform aims to address the liquidity needs of trade financing using blockchain technology, and claims to offer more efficient, more accessible services than traditional alternatives.

Earlier this year, Huma Finance merged with Arf to focus on tokenization of RWAs, with both operating independently under a joint holding entity to offer a full-stack tokenized-asset platform. The two companies combined are projected to hit $10 billion in payments-financing transactions next year, Huma said.

"Huma's PayFi network marks a paradigm shift in payment financing, bringing essential liquidity and interoperability to an industry long plagued by inefficiencies and limited access," said Chao Deng, CEO of Hashkey Capital, one of the investors in the company.