Nine deals, 180 million USD: the week crypto VC money chased pipes, not punts
Crypto and blockchain companies announced at least 180.25 million USD in disclosed financing across nine deals in the week from Sept. 12 to Sept. 18, according to data from Crypto Fundraising and company announcements. The headline number is modest by boom-year standards, but the composition tells a clearer story: the money went to market data, stablecoin payments, tokenized credit and institutional plumbing — not consumer speculation.
Market-data provider Kaiko anchored the week with a 110 million USD round led by S&P Global, with BNP Paribas, Nasdaq, Royal Bank of Canada, Bpifrance and Susquehanna participating — a deal examined in depth in prior coverage. Beyond that anchor transaction, the remaining deals sketch the shape of what venture capitalists currently consider durable value in crypto.
Payments infrastructure keeps collecting
Fin.com raised a 20 million USD seed round backed by Expa, Coinbase Ventures, Tenet Fund and Second Sight Ventures, with Expa founder and Uber co-founder Garrett Camp participating. The company combines stablecoin infrastructure with local banking networks for cross-border business payments, offering multi-currency accounts, fiat and stablecoin wallets, foreign-exchange services and embedded compliance through a single API. Its network connects businesses to regulated payment systems in more than 30 countries and supports over 40 currencies — targeting fintechs, payroll providers and marketplaces that would otherwise need separate banking relationships in each market.
Singapore-based dtcpay added 15 million USD to its Series A from SBI Holdings and Genedant Capital, bringing the round’s cumulative total to 25 million USD after an earlier 10 million USD close in March. The regulated payments platform lets businesses accept, exchange and settle fiat and stablecoin payments, with checkout tools, point-of-sale payments, Visa card services and multi-currency swaps in its product set.
Velocity secured 10 million USD in additional Series A financing at a reported 200 million USD valuation, with Haun Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Circle Ventures, Ripple, Visa and Translink Capital participating. The company builds stablecoin treasury and settlement services for businesses, payment providers and financial institutions — another bet that corporate back offices, not retail traders, are the natural customers for dollar-pegged rails.
Tokenized credit gets its own stack
One of the week’s more strategically interesting deals was Tare, which raised 13.25 million USD in seed financing led by Blockchain Capital, with Janus Henderson Investors, Strobe Ventures, The Venture Dept, Neoclassic Capital and the Avalanche Foundation participating. Aave founder Stani Kulechov and Privy co-founder Henri Stern also joined.
Tare is building infrastructure for loan origination, servicing, portfolio monitoring, securitization and structured finance, using Avalanche-based settlement and smart contracts while keeping most blockchain machinery out of the user interface. Its target market — loan originators and institutional investors seeking a shared record for private-credit transactions — sits squarely inside the tokenized real-world-asset thesis that has dominated institutional crypto roadmaps this year.
Further down the stack, London-based Tenka completed a 2 million USD pre-seed led by Maven 11 Capital for asset-backed finance infrastructure: standardized deal vaults, independent valuations, onchain reporting and a secondary matching system, with a platform launch planned later in 2026.
Wealth management and the undisclosed tail
Hong Kong-based Finloop raised 10 million USD in Series A financing from HSBC and People’s Capital for AI-supported wealth management covering funds, bonds, structured products, digital assets and tokenized real-world assets — a signal that private-banking toolchains are being rebuilt around digital-asset inclusion rather than around exclusion.
The week’s undisclosed rounds rounded out the picture. PonyGo received an unspecified investment from Pantera Capital for a Web3 financial platform spanning asset management, yield products, RWAs, token launches and travel services, while Rep closed an undisclosed angel round backed by Amber Group to build a portable reputation network linking verified onchain activity, social accounts and achievements to user-controlled profiles. Both were excluded from the disclosed weekly total.
What the allocation says about the cycle
Strip out Kaiko and the week still tilts heavily toward infrastructure: five of the nine disclosed deals involve payments, treasury or credit plumbing. That allocation mirrors what the broader institutional buildout demands — custody-grade data, settlement rails, and compliant issuance machinery — rather than bets on the next viral token.
The week’s total also excludes acquisitions announced during the period, including S&P Global’s purchase of blockchain-security platform OpenZeppelin and Independent Research Forum’s deal for Nomina. Notably, S&P Global appears on both sides of the ledger — leading Kaiko’s round while absorbing one of crypto’s most trusted security brands — a striking illustration of how traditional finance is now buying its way into the stack rather than waiting for it to mature.
Market backdrop
The funding snapshot arrives with bitcoin trading around 81,238 USD, ether near 2,634 USD and solana around 111 USD at the time of writing, with sentiment recovering after a choppy week that included a Federal Reserve rate hike and the Senate’s failure to advance the CLARITY Act. Venture allocation, however, continues to decouple from spot-market noise: the consistent theme across recent weeks is capital targeting businesses that monetize transaction volume, data and institutional adoption regardless of token-price direction.
For an industry periodically accused of building nothing but leverage, a week in which the money flowed into market data, cross-border payments, private-credit infrastructure and reputation protocols is quietly contrarian — and, for long-horizon investors, arguably the most bullish signal of all.
tokenized credit quietly in the mix too. everyone argues about memecoins while the boring tranche people get checks
Bpifrance and Susquehanna sitting in the same cap table as Nasdaq. that mix was unthinkable in 2021 when every check went to p2e clones
kaiko taking 110 million from S&P Global, BNP, nasdaq and RBC says everything about where the mature money thinks this market is. market data beats another dex
nine deals and basically all pipes. dtcpay doing pos and visa cards, fin.com wiring 30 countries of banking into one api. zero punts in the whole list
Kaiko taking 110M from S&P Global, BNP, Nasdaq and RBC is the whole story. tradfi is not dabbling anymore, they are buying the data pipes
and the remaining 70M is the same trade. Fin.com seed with Garrett Camp, dtcpay from SBI, Velocity at a 200M valuation. boring is the new moat
110M from S&P Global is basically an acquisition audition. half the time when a data giant leads a round that size it ends up buying the whole shop within 18 months
audition is the word. kaiko data already feeds half the index products out there, owning it outright gets cheaper than licensing forever
audition is generous imo. looks more like S&P paying 110M to make sure Bloomberg or LSEG can never have Kaiko
if S&P ends up buying Kaiko outright like you predict, every exchange that competes with them loses their market data supplier overnight. that consolidation angle gets underrated
counterpoint, exchanges just sign new data deals the same week. market data is a subscription business, kaiko cant cut clients off without cutting its own revenue
kaiko cutting a client off cuts revenue, sure. but subscription pricing bends the moment the owner also runs an index business, soft power beats a cutoff every time
nine deals zero consumer apps and the biggest check went to market data. kaiko alone is 61% of the week, the other eight deals are rounding error
nine deals and basically zero consumer apps. every check went to stablecoin plumbing and institutional back offices. not complaining, just noting
consumer apps burn VC money on incentives, pipes just invoice. nine deals of plumbing in a slow week says funds finally learned the lesson
dtcpay getting SBI money while velocity counts visa and ripple in its cap table. the whole payments stack got funded this week and nobody even launched a token for it lol
Kaiko with S&P, BNP and Nasdaq in the cap table while consumer apps get nothing. data pipes are the only crypto trade tradfi actually understands, hence the checks
garrett camp personally in the fin.com seed, the uber founder effect is strong this cycle. 20 million for stablecoin rails plus local banking networks is a big swing
uber founder money in a 20M seed for stablecoin rails across 30 countries. the ex-uber network quietly owns half of fintech at this point
200M valuation for a Velocity series A is spicy but when Visa AND Ripple are both in the cap table you can kinda justify it
180m into plumbing, 0 into jpeg casinos. healthy week
strip out kaiko and the other eight deals barely clear 70M combined. one anchor round makes the week look deeper than it really was
true but thats the point of an anchor round. the s&p-led deal pulls six tradfi names off the bench and the other eight deals get built around it
70M across eight deals is still around 8M average per real infrastructure company. thin week next to the kaiko anchor but not nothing either
70M across eight deals is still real money for pre-token infrastructure. the week was thinner than the headline, not empty