Tenka Closes Pre-Seed Round Led by Maven 11 for Asset-Backed Finance Infrastructure

Maven 11 has led a pre-seed investment into Tenka, a liquidity platform targeting the origination, placement, and trading of asset-backed instruments. Gami Capital and a cohort of angel investors also participated in the round, though the total raise amount was not disclosed.

Tenka's pitch sits squarely in the real-world asset (RWA) infrastructure thesis: the idea that tokenizing credit instruments, trade receivables, and other asset-backed securities on-chain requires purpose-built market plumbing before institutional capital can flow at scale. The funding will support the build-out of market infrastructure connecting the origination, placement, and trading of asset-backed instruments.

The round lands during a sustained institutional push into RWA infrastructure. Platforms like Ondo Finance and Centrifuge have attracted significant venture backing over the past two years as asset managers and credit desks explore on-chain rails for structured products. Maven 11, the Amsterdam-based crypto venture firm, has positioned itself as an early backer of DeFi infrastructure plays. Its lead here signals conviction that the RWA stack still has foundational gaps worth funding at the earliest stages.

Those gaps are real, but so are the headwinds. Asset-backed finance on-chain remains a regulatory patchwork: what qualifies as a security, who can hold tokenized credit instruments, and how cross-border settlement gets handled differ materially across the EU, US, and Asia-Pacific. Tenka's infrastructure thesis depends on that clarity eventually arriving, and on institutional originators trusting a pre-seed-stage platform with deal flow before the product has demonstrated scale. Competition from incumbents is not abstract either. Traditional prime brokers and custodians have been quietly building or acquiring RWA capabilities, and established on-chain platforms already have head starts in specific verticals like US Treasury tokenization and private credit.

What Tenka is betting on is that no single platform currently stitches origination to secondary trading in a way that serves the full lifecycle of an asset-backed instrument. That is a credible gap to identify. The analogy is roughly what Bloomberg did for fixed income data in the 1980s: the individual data points existed, but no one had built the connective tissue that made them tradeable at speed. Whether Tenka can occupy that role in on-chain credit markets remains an open question at the pre-seed stage. What the Maven 11 backing does confirm is that sophisticated capital still sees the infrastructure layer of RWA as underfunded relative to the opportunity, even as the headline names in the space have already raised nine-figure rounds.

The broader RWA market crossed $15 billion in tokenized assets earlier this year, according to on-chain aggregators, with private credit and government securities accounting for the bulk of that figure. Infrastructure enabling more asset classes to reach that market is a prerequisite for the next order-of-magnitude growth. Tenka is early, undisclosed in size, and unproven in execution. But the timing of the bet, and the identity of the lead investor, tells you something about where smart money thinks the next layer needs to be built.