Ibis, an onchain credit platform focused on expanding institutional lending to frontier markets, has emerged from stealth with a $250 million credit facility from FalconX.
The company also announced the closing of its pre-seed funding round, backed by FalconX and other investors from the digital asset, institutional credit and financial infrastructure sectors.
Ibis is seeking to link institutional creditors with firms looking for flexible sources of credit. The platform generates, tokenize, and manages risk and services structured credit facilities to make financing available in markets that may not be easy for banks to evaluate.
Initially, the company will focus on the digital asset market with special emphasis on crypto firms. The credit platform will handle companies with complicated risk profiles and their changing collateral needs.
Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., will serve as Ibis’ custody, banking, and design partner. Innovating Capital will provide expertise in credit, transaction structuring, and strategic development.
Ibis’ pre-seed round included FalconX, Anchorage Digital, and Innovating Capital, along with executives from companies and organizations including Erebor, Revolut, Injective Foundation, Agora, Selini, Superstate, Flowdesk, Blockchain.com, DV Chain, and Pyth, among others.
“Frontier markets are developing faster than the financial infrastructure built to support them. Today, many high-quality businesses with strong fundamentals are underserved, not because they lack creditworthiness, but because traditional underwriters refuse to innovate,” said Cooper Emmons, Founder and CEO of Ibis. “Our goal is to build a credit platform that can evolve alongside these markets, bringing a more sophisticated approach to how emerging businesses are evaluated, financed, and managed as they scale, and offering those opportunities to a broader audience. We identified the need across institutions within the crypto & prediction markets vertical as our starting point, but the underlying need extends well beyond digital assets.”
“Access to reliable, institutional-grade credit is an important part of the continued maturation of digital assets,” said Joshua Lim, Co-Head of Global Markets at FalconX. “Ibis is building infrastructure to help bridge the gap between institutional capital allocators and a new generation of onchain market participants. As the digital asset market and other onchain asset classes continue to evolve, scalable credit infrastructure will be increasingly important to supporting sustainable growth.”
Expanding Institutional Credit to Emerging Industries
Ibis was founded to address weaknesses in conventional lending systems, especially in emerging markets where companies find it hard to obtain institutional credit. The company is currently developing technologies that could help lenders assess borrowers, organize credit agreements, and keep track of loans’ entire lifecycle.
The $250 million credit facility from FalconX provides credit capacity for eligible crypto trading firms, giving Ibis an initial foundation to develop its lending platform.
Beyond digital assets, Ibis plans to expand into other emerging sectors, including GPU infrastructure, robotics, and venture capital. The company also intends to grow its network of institutional lenders and capital providers.
Using its onchain credit framework, Ibis intends to enable businesses in new sectors to gain access to structured loans while giving institutional investors new avenues to access these sectors.
