Gauntlet Raises $125 Million to Power Institutional Crypto Vaults

Gauntlet Networks, a digital asset risk and optimization firm, raised $125 million in a Series C funding round to support its continued development into a global organization.

The company is a cryptocurrency industry yield curator that helps capital allocators, FinTechs, financial institutions and stablecoin issuers put capital to work onchain, it said in a Thursday (July 9) press release.

Gauntlet has been in decentralized finance (DeFi) since 2018 and currently integrates with more than 150 FinTechs and institutions and curates over $1.5 billion in supplied assets across its vaults, according to the release.

With the new funding, the company will scale the infrastructure that broadens its role across traditional capital markets, grow its global team, and bootstrap and accelerate new onchain offerings, per the release.

“Vaults have proven themselves to be the next major revolution in financial markets,” Gauntlet Co-Founder and CEO Tarun Chitra said in the release. “Much like ETFs [exchange-traded funds] increased equity participation in the U.S. equities market, we believe tokenization and vaults to increase the size of the DeFi market faster than overall stablecoin growth in the next few years. And we’ve raised these funds to help further our mission to make that happen globally as the world moves on-chain.”

Gauntlet’s latest funding round was led by SBI Holdings through its U.S. subsidiary, SBI Holdings USA. In addition, SBI’s international reach will help Gauntlet scale its coverage, according to the release.

“The advanced risk management and optimization technologies possessed by Gauntlet will be indispensable functions in our goal to popularize digital assets,” Yoshitaka Kitao, representative director, chairman and president of SBI Holdings said in the release. “As regulatory clarity progresses in the U.S. with the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, we look forward to working with Gauntlet to build next-generation financial infrastructure that spans Japan, Asia and the world.”

Gauntlet’s Series C came about four and a half years after a March 2022 funding round in which the company raised $23.8 million and was valued at $1 billion.

The company announced in June that it made its risk-tiered curated vaults on Morpho accessible through Elwood, an institutional operating system for 24/7 markets.