Huma Finance raises $8.3 million to enable DeFi borrowing against future income

DeFi startup Huma Finance secured $8.3 million in a seed round to build an income-backed lending protocol.

Huma’s first product is an on-chain factoring market, which enables individuals or businesses to borrow against their future income rather than existing token holdings.

Race Capital and Distributed Global co-led the seed round. ParaFi, Circle Ventures and Robot Ventures are also among the investors who participated in the round.

The protocol allows borrowing based on cash flow rather than tokens. Borrowing can be made against receivables such as pay stubs or invoices.

“Income is the most critical input in traditional lending, but there is no decentralized finance lending protocol today that understands income portfolios of businesses or people,” said Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, in a release. “Huma Finance will start with the global factoring services market, which alone was valued at $3.5 trillion in 2022.”

Initial launch partners include stablecoin issuer Circle and blockchain payment networks Request Network and Superfluid.

“Our mission at Request is to bring interoperability to invoicing and have apps interact with each other in a permissionless way,” said Christophe Lassuyt, president at Request Foundation. “For example, a user could issue an invoice in Request Finance and secure immediate financing through Huma.”

Last year, Huma won the DeFi hackathon track at ETHDenver. Huma was founded by tech industry veterans who have worked at organizations such as Meta and Google. Three of the co-founders were executives at Earnin, a leading fintech in the U.S.