Québec City-based Tenor, which is developing a blockchain-based lending platform for asset managers and businesses, has raised $2.5 million USD ($3.5 million CAD) in seed funding.
The news: Variant led the round, with support from fellow digital asset-focused investors like Nascent and existing backers Prelude, Coinbase Ventures, Lattice, Very Early, and undisclosed angels. This financing comes just five months after Tenor revealed $2.5 million USD in pre-seed funding. Tenor plans to use this capital to continue building its decentralized finance (DeFi) platform for institutional lending and borrowing “on-chain” through smart contracts. Variant, Nascent, and Prelude were all also early investors in Ethereum-based French credit network Morpho; Tenor is built on one of Morpho’s fixed-rate lending protocols.
From the source: “The global fixed-rate market is $200 trillion, and most of it still runs on legacy infrastructure. Large segments trade in a non-standardized fashion, coordinated over phone calls and managed using spreadsheets. These are the markets with the most to gain from moving on-chain,” Tenor said in a blog post.
Following the thread: Founded in 2025 by Hugo Boisselle-Morin, David Dallaire, and Pierre-Yves Gendron, Tenor aims to provide easier access to on-chain markets for institutions looking to borrow and lend stablecoins. The startup is targeting asset managers already allocating digital assets on-chain, as well as lending desks and funds focused on the space. Tenor’s DeFi platform is already live on Base, which was developed by Coinbase, and Tenor plans to deploy it on other blockchains in the near future.
Final thought: Toronto-based APX Lending is also betting that the future of borrowing involves crypto-backed loans, which traditional financial institutions have been reluctant to offer. Unlike APX, which has received approval from the Canadian Securities Administrators to provide crypto-backed loans, Tenor does not take custody of users’ assets, holding collateral in Morpho’s non-custodial smart contracts instead. While Tenor has geoblocked its product in Canada for now as the country’s regulatory framework for such products continues to develop, the startup hopes to eventually serve Canada, a Tenor spokesperson told BetaKit over email.
Feature image courtesy Tenor.