Sometimes timing, experience, and street smarts line up. When Emily and Keith told us what they set out to build at Zaria, we knew this could be one of those moments.
We backed them from the earliest days because we saw a chance to rebuild the crufty back-office software behind loan servicing. They came at it from the deals it would enable: securitizations that could not happen before.
To service any single deal, whether TradFi or digital, the country’s largest corporate trustees stitch together a dozen or more third-party systems. Most were bought off the shelf years ago and are kept alive by an IT team. Zaria built all of it in one place.
Today we’re announcing that Lightspeed is leading Zaria’s $5.2M seed round.
Emily and I have known each other for over fifteen years. In that time, she ran lending books at SoFi, SVB, and Barclays, then managed crypto loans as Head of Lending Operations at NYDIG. Keith built SVB’s crypto banking architecture as Director of Blockchain Innovation, which is where the two of them met. Between them, they have run deals in both TradFi and crypto, and they know the servicing problems firsthand.
In traditional deals, warehouse lenders and bond investors mostly rely on originators to report their own collateral. In Tricolor’s case, prosecutors allege the subprime auto lender had pledged about $2.2 billion in assets by late summer 2025 against roughly $1.4 billion in real collateral. Loans pledged to more than one lender still passed the checks, because those checks ran on Tricolor’s own data.
Digital asset lending is still harder, because collateral prices move around the clock and a margin call can trigger at any hour, including weekends. Legacy servicers aren’t built to hold or monitor crypto, and custodians lack the licenses and systems to service loans. That gap matters more now that the asset class has reached the bond market. In February, Ledn closed a $188 million securitization of bitcoin-backed consumer loans, the first deal of its kind in bitcoin lending, with Zaria acting as backup servicer.
Zaria handles loan servicing, backup servicing, collateral management, and agency services on one real-time platform. Its verification agent ingests the document behind every loan in a portfolio, compares it against the data the originator sends, and flags mismatches for review with an audit trail. Across a few thousand loans, that work would take a team weeks in Excel, and in practice it rarely gets done at all. That capability is why Ledn, Maple, Galaxy, Kraken, and Figure already run warehouse facilities, forward flow programs, and securitizations on Zaria.
We believe Zaria will become the default servicer and trustee for securitizations as more lenders and investors require continuous, real-time monitoring of the assets they underwrite.
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