Zaria Systems raises a $5.2M seed led by Lightspeed as it applies for a national trust bank charter

Zaria Systems has raised $5.2 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The money goes to scaling its existing services and to its application, recently filed with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, for Zaria National Trust Bank, a special-purpose national bank limited to trust activities.

Led by co-founder and CEO Emily Barron, Zaria provides real-time infrastructure for mark-to-market credit and structured finance: loan servicing, backup servicing, collateral management and agency services for lenders, banks and asset managers, including those lending against digital asset collateral.

The pitch is that structured finance still runs on periodic, batch reviews of collateral, while lending backed by securities, digital assets and tokenised instruments needs continuous monitoring and automated margin calls. If the OCC approves the charter, Zaria intends to put those services under one federally regulated trustee, so deal parties face a single counterparty instead of several providers.

Lightspeed partner Aaron Frank said the team has already built traction with structured finance and digital asset-backed lenders.