Lombard Systems raises $4M pre-seed and seed from Ethereal Ventures

Lombard Systems raises $4 million in pre-seed and seed funding led by Ethereal Ventures. The Dubai- and New York-based company, previously known as SemiLiquid/PCP, announced the raise on 5 November 2026. Additional participants include Alps Capital, First Commit Capital, Veris Ventures, Atka and others. The capital will support institutional adoption of its Delivery-versus-Lock (DvL) standard. DvL is a framework for financing tokenized and digital assets. It lets institutions use those assets as collateral without transferring them from existing securities accounts. Assets remain locked in the holder’s name at a custodian, broker-dealer or transfer agent. The lender receives a legally enforceable security interest evidenced by a cryptographically signed Credit Receipt. The company creates and maintains the standard. The full standard is expected to be published in the first quarter of 2027. First institutional deployments are planned by the end of 2026, with further integrations involving banks, broker-dealers and transfer agents to follow. Funds will go toward completing legal opinions in the United States, England, Wales and five further jurisdictions, adoption by additional Control Locations, expansion of institutional integrations and growth of the team. Co-founder and CEO Rico van der Veen said tokenized stocks and funds are scaling and that origination and enforcement of loans against tokenized collateral need to be as fast as the assets can move while staying grounded in existing securities law. Eeshaan Sachatheva, co-CIO at Ethereal Ventures, said tokenization is creating opportunities for financial institutions in trading and settlement, with potential to extend those benefits into financing, and that Lombard is building a critical piece of that infrastructure with DvL. For banks, custodians, broker-dealers and transfer agents in the UAE and elsewhere the practical change is that a standardized way now exists to create enforceable security interests over tokenized assets without moving the assets themselves. The value of that change depends on whether the legal opinions hold in the jurisdictions where institutions operate, whether Control Locations adopt the standard at scale, and whether the Credit Receipt mechanism is accepted by lenders as equivalent to traditional collateral control. The announcement describes the standard, the intended use of funds and the planned deployment timeline; it does not publish the split between pre-seed and seed amounts, the valuation, or the number of institutions already in active integration discussions. If subsequent updates from Lombard Systems or Ethereal Ventures name a first live Control Location or publish the completed legal opinions, the raise has a measurable next step. If later statements only confirm that the standard remains under development, the change for the market remains the same as the 5 November announcement. The figures missing from the current disclosure are the precise equity percentages taken by each investor and any binding commitments from named institutions for 2026 deployments. The raise is one step in efforts to make tokenized securities usable as collateral inside existing securities-account structures; operational adoption will be clearer only from later institutional usage data.