Tangible, a fintech platform enabling hardtech companies to access and manage debt financing, has raised $4.3 million in seed funding led by Pale Blue Dot. The round also saw participation from MMC, Future Positive Capital, Unruly, SDAC, Prototype Capital, and Aperture.
The company is tackling a structural financing gap facing hardtech startups — businesses building in areas such as energy transition, compute infrastructure, transport, robotics, and reindustrialisation. While these sectors are central to addressing some of the defining macroeconomic challenges of this generation, their capital needs often fall outside the traditional venture capital playbook.
BlackRock estimates that $68 trillion in new infrastructure investment will be required by 2040 to meet global demand. At the same time, private credit has grown into a $3.5 trillion market, positioning it as a key funding source for asset-heavy businesses. However, deploying capital into hardtech remains operationally complex and inefficient for many lenders.
Hard asset companies typically require significant upfront capital expenditure but struggle to secure scalable debt financing until they are considered “institutional-ready.” As a result, many early-stage firms rely heavily on expensive equity to fund capex — slowing deployment, increasing dilution, and in some cases jeopardising long-term viability. In contrast, the strongest operators are increasingly using capital intensity as a strategic growth lever, pairing equity with well-structured debt facilities.
Tangible was founded to address this friction. Its AI-powered platform, combined with in-house finance expertise, standardises the data, documentation and ongoing reporting required by lenders. By reducing underwriting time and transaction costs, Tangible enables founders to access and manage structured credit facilities without building a dedicated in-house finance team.
“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.”
“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 capital will be used to expand Tangible’s team and deepen automation across collaboration, diligence and reporting workflows — further reducing time-to-close for both founders and lenders.
For hardtech companies navigating capital constraints, Tangible is positioning debt not as a last resort, but as a scalable alternative to dilution — and, in some cases, dissolution.
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