Securitize to buy River One, eyeing $6T asset-backed finance market

Securitize said Monday it has struck a definitive agreement to buy River One, a startup that channels stablecoin liquidity into institutional, asset-backed lending. The deal adds a lending layer to Securitize’s platform, moving it beyond issuing and servicing tokenized assets into asset-backed lending itself — pairing Securitize’s tokenization rails with River One’s warehouse-lending technology so institutions can bring assets onchain and borrow against them through one system. Securitize frames the move as its entry into the global private asset-backed finance market, which KKR estimated at $6 trillion as of March 2024 and projects could reach $9.2 trillion by 2029 — a KKR forecast, Securitize notes, not its own prediction.

River One was founded in New York in 2025 and was incubated by Framework Ventures, which backed it alongside Maple Finance. It specializes in warehouse financing — capital that lets lenders fund loans as they’re originated — against portfolios of income-generating assets such as small-business loans and receivables, using AI-driven underwriting for origination, structuring, borrowing-base reporting and collateral monitoring in a single system. CEO Carlos Domingo said the deal “opens up a significant new addressable market for Securitize, with opportunities for higher-value services, additional revenue streams and greater monetization” across the platform, framing credit as one of the most promising emerging asset classes for blockchain-based finance.

River One’s co-founder and CEO, Braham Mehta, said the startup set out to bring modern AI and blockchain technology, plus new sources of capital, into institutional lending while preserving the credit discipline and legal protections — such as bankruptcy-remote special-purpose vehicles and ongoing portfolio monitoring — that these markets require; joining Securitize, he said, lets River One bring that approach to a much bigger market. This arrives as worldwide stablecoin circulation has swelled to roughly $321 billion, Securitize said, giving the industry fresh ways to deploy digital capital in traditional commerce. Securitize expects the purchase to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, pending the usual closing conditions.

Why it matters

The acquisition tests whether tokenization platforms can move beyond simply wrapping existing assets onchain into originating credit themselves — a bigger, more regulated business that would give Securitize new revenue streams if it can make blockchain-based underwriting work at institutional scale.