Gauntlet raises $125M Series C from Japan's SBI Holdings
What's the deal? Gauntlet, a DeFi startup that helps institutions and crypto firms allocate digital assets, has raised $125 million in a Series C round led by Japanese financial conglomerate SBI Holdings. The round closed in June with no other participants, founder and chief executive officer Tarun Chitra told Fortune, declining to name a valuation.
The context: The raise is the largest since Gauntlet's founding in 2018. It dwarfs the startup's 2022 Series B, which brought in almost $24 million at a $1 billion valuation in a round led by Ribbit Capital.
How big is it? The round sits in the 95th percentile for all-time Series C rounds among US big data companies — larger than roughly 95% of 713 comparable deals.
What's the endgame? Founded in 2018 as an analytics firm stress-testing DeFi protocols for exploits, Gauntlet has shifted to "vault curation." Vaults work like mutual funds: investors deposit digital assets and are promised yield, and Gauntlet evaluates the risks of those strategies. "We spent all this time analyzing these protocols, and now we're helping people use them," Chitra said.
Who's backing it? SBI, spun off from SoftBankDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → in 1999, is one of the most active institutional investors in digital assets. Worth more than $10 billion on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, it has taken stakes in crypto lender Morpho, blockchain firm Ripple, and stablecoin issuer Circle.
Why now? "I really think this year SBI will increase our investment activities and even operational activities in the U.S., because of the clarity on regulation and pro-crypto, pro-innovation, pro-competition environment," said Kefei Lin, general manager at SBI.
The signal: SBI's outlay lands as traditional finance titans pile into crypto despite soft token prices. In June, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange formed a joint venture with exchange OKX, Citigroup launched tokenized deposits, and Morgan Stanley has integrated crypto trading into its online brokerage.
Read more: fortune.com
Image credit: Gauntlet Network
