Tangible secures $4.3M seed to help hardtech startups replace equity with structured debt

Hardtech startups are building the physical backbone of the modern economy. From energy systems and transport networks to data centers and industrial hardware, these companies need real assets long before they reach traditional scale. The problem is how those assets get funded.

Today, London-based fintech startup Tangible announced it has raised a $4.3 million seed round to address a gap many founders know too well. The round was led by Pale Blue Dot, with participation from MMC, Future Positive Capital, Unruly, SDAC, Prototype Capital, and Aperture.

The timing reflects a growing tension in hardtech. BlackRock estimates that $68 trillion in new infrastructure investment will be required by 2040 across energy, transport, compute, and telecom. Yet many early-stage hardtech companies still fund capital expenditures with equity long after it no longer makes sense. Institutional debt often stays out of reach until companies appear “ready,” forcing founders to accept dilution that slows deployment and raises existential risk.

Private credit, now a $3.5 trillion market, is widely seen as the missing piece. The challenge lies with execution. Asset-backed lending remains slow, fragmented, and heavy on bespoke paperwork. Lenders struggle to deploy capital at speed, while founders face long cycles and unclear requirements.

Tangible’s pitch is to fix the plumbing behind those deals. The company is building a software platform supported by structured finance experts that standardises the data, documentation, and ongoing reporting lenders need to underwrite and manage debt facilities. For lenders, that shortens underwriting time and reduces cost. For founders, it opens access to structured debt without building an internal finance team from scratch.

“It is clear that most of the innovations shaping the future – from vehicles and data centres to robotics – are fundamentally physical. And, to enable efficient innovation, they should not be financed by venture equity alone,” said Hampus Jakobson, General Partner at Pale Blue Dot. “Tangible’s solution opens up financing options for hard tech businesses, and we believe strongly in Will, Seb, and Ash’s vision to accelerate growth by bridging this financing gap.”

The platform focuses on making hard assets easier for institutional credit to evaluate. Instead of one-off documents and manual coordination across counterparties, Tangible aims to create repeatable workflows around diligence, collaboration, and reporting. That structure is meant to support facilities that grow alongside the business, rather than one-time financings that quickly become outdated.

“Reindustrialisation, energy security, and the race for technological sovereignty in compute are driving unprecedented demand for physical assets. As hardtech companies scale at speed, investors need modern infrastructure to deploy capital just as fast. And legacy processes that are reliant on bespoke documentation and manual coordination no longer cut it,” said William Godfrey, Co-Founder & CEO, Tangible. “This is the exact problem we’re trying to solve with Tangible – we provide the financial infrastructure that makes hardtech easy to diligence for institutional credit to allow companies to raise asset-backed financing faster, and with less friction.”

The new funding will be used to grow the team and deepen automation across the platform, with a focus on lowering transaction costs and shortening time-to-close for both borrowers and lenders.

For hardtech founders caught between dilution and delay, Tangible is betting that structured debt need not be reserved for the final stages of growth. In a market racing to rebuild physical infrastructure at scale, access to capital may matter as much as the technology itself.