Gauntlet raises $125 million from SBI Holdings to move on-chain finance toward institutions
Gauntlet, a firm that helps institutions and crypto companies allocate digital assets, has raised $125 million in a Series C funded entirely by Japan's SBI Holdings. The round, which closed in June 2026, is the largest capital infusion since the company was founded in 2018 and dwarfs its 2022 Series B, when it raised roughly $24 million at a $1 billion valuation. The current valuation was not disclosed. With about 40 employees, Gauntlet has evolved from a DeFi analytics shop into what it calls a vault curator, and the size and structure of this financing, a single strategic backer writing the entire check, signal a deliberate push from crypto-native markets toward traditional finance.
The deal reads as a bet on a specific thesis: that the machinery of decentralized finance is maturing into infrastructure that regulated institutions can actually use. Gauntlet spent years modeling the risk of DeFi protocols, and it is now applying that expertise to manage capital on behalf of others. SBI's willingness to fund the entire round alone tells you the Japanese conglomerate sees Gauntlet as a strategic vehicle for its own on-chain ambitions rather than a passive portfolio bet. For an enterprise audience watching whether tokenized finance graduates from experiment to operating reality, a check of this size from an established financial group is a data point worth marking.
From DeFi analytics to vault curation
Gauntlet began as an analytics company serving DeFi protocols, a corner of crypto known for high yields and high risk in equal measure. Chief executive Tarun Chitra described the evolution candidly. Over time, especially by 2023 and 2024, it became more clear that DAOs were kind of inefficient for managing a lot of DeFi assets, he said, describing the gap the company moved to fill. That gap led to vault curation, the business Gauntlet now leads with. Its vaults function like on-chain mutual funds: investors deposit assets, Gauntlet takes no custody, and its models decide how the pooled capital is deployed across protocols to generate yield.
The shift is a classic move up the value chain. We spent all this time analyzing these protocols, and now we're helping people use them, Chitra said, capturing the logic of turning research into an operating product. Analytics is a thin business that informs decisions, while curation puts the firm's models to work directing real capital and earning on the outcome. The non-custodial design is the crucial detail for institutional appeal, since it lets Gauntlet manage strategy without holding client assets, sidestepping some of the custody and counterparty risks that have burned participants in past crypto cycles. That structure is likely part of why a conservative backer grew comfortable enough to fund the round outright.
A customer list that signals institutional pull
The names using Gauntlet carry more weight than any pitch. Its customers include Apollo Global Management, one of the largest alternative asset managers in the world, alongside the crypto exchange Coinbase and the stablecoin issuer Circle. Apollo's presence in particular is a meaningful signal, because a traditional asset-management giant deploying capital through on-chain vaults suggests the infrastructure has crossed a threshold of reliability and risk management that institutions require. For years the promise of institutional DeFi ran ahead of the reality. A client roster like this indicates that real capital from serious allocators is beginning to flow through these systems rather than merely studying them.
The mix of customers also maps the ecosystem Gauntlet is wiring together. Circle supplies the dollar-backed tokens, Coinbase provides exchange and custody infrastructure, and Apollo represents the institutional capital seeking yield, with Gauntlet sitting in the middle as the risk and allocation engine. That position is valuable and defensible if the models perform, because becoming the trusted curator between issuers, exchanges, and allocators is the kind of connective role that compounds. The risk is inherent to the domain. Gauntlet's models are steering capital across protocols whose smart contracts and market dynamics can fail in sudden and correlated ways, and past DeFi stress events have shown how quickly on-chain risk can cascade.
Why a Japanese financial giant wrote the whole check
SBI Holdings funding the entire round is the most revealing element of the deal. Kefei Lin, a general manager at SBI, tied the move to a changing regulatory climate. 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 a pro-crypto, pro-innovation, pro-competition environment, he said. That framing positions the Gauntlet investment as part of a broader American expansion, with regulatory clarity in the United States acting as the trigger. For a large Japanese financial group, backing a risk-management layer for on-chain finance is a way to buy exposure to the infrastructure of tokenized markets.
Sole-investor rounds of this size are unusual and carry both advantages and risks for the company. Gauntlet gains a deep-pocketed strategic partner with distribution across Asian financial markets and the credibility that an established institution confers. The concentration also creates dependence, since a single backer holds outsized influence over strategy and future financing. We read SBI's conviction as a strong signal about where patient institutional money sees tokenized finance heading, tempered by the reality that one investor's enthusiasm is a narrower validation than a broad syndicate. The alignment is clear enough: SBI wants operational footholds in on-chain markets, and Gauntlet offers a proven risk engine to build on.
The expansion beyond dollar stablecoins
The fresh capital funds a specific and telling expansion. Gauntlet plans to broaden its stablecoin coverage beyond the US dollar and euro to include the Mexican peso, the Japanese yen, and other fiat-backed tokens, extending its curation and risk models across a wider set of currencies. That roadmap reflects where on-chain finance is heading as stablecoins proliferate in multiple denominations and cross-border use cases multiply. A risk engine that can price and allocate across many stablecoin currencies becomes more valuable as the market fragments beyond the dollar, and the yen expansion aligns neatly with SBI's home market and its ambitions to bridge Asian and American on-chain activity.
Multi-currency coverage also deepens Gauntlet's potential moat. Managing risk across a single dollar-denominated ecosystem is one problem, while doing it across currencies with different liquidity, regulation, and volatility profiles is considerably harder, and expertise there is scarce. If Gauntlet builds a credible cross-currency risk platform, it earns a defensible position as the market globalizes. The execution challenge scales with the ambition, because each new currency and corridor introduces fresh regulatory and liquidity risk that the models must capture accurately. We think this expansion is the right strategic direction, and it is also where the technical and operational difficulty of the business concentrates most heavily.
What enterprise and asset-management leaders should note
For leaders in asset management, treasury, and financial infrastructure, the Gauntlet round is a marker of tokenized finance maturing toward institutional use. When Apollo allocates through on-chain vaults and a major Japanese group funds the risk layer beneath them, the signal is that the plumbing is becoming robust enough for serious capital, at least among early movers. Leaders exploring digital-asset yield or tokenized strategies should watch curators like Gauntlet closely, since the risk-management layer is where institutional adoption will either take hold or break. The non-custodial model is the feature that makes this palatable, and it is the design pattern worth understanding before evaluating any on-chain allocation.
Sober risk assessment remains essential. On-chain finance still carries smart-contract vulnerabilities, liquidity shocks, and regulatory uncertainty that traditional instruments do not, and no amount of sophisticated modeling eliminates those exposures. Gauntlet's track record and customer roster are genuinely reassuring, though its concentration on a single strategic backer and its expansion into new currencies add variables leaders should weigh. We view this financing as strong evidence that institutional interest in on-chain yield is real and growing, and as a reminder that the infrastructure enabling it is still young. Enterprises engaging with tokenized finance should demand transparency into models, governance, and failure handling before committing capital of any size.
