Gauntlet, a DeFi infrastructure firm, raised $125 million from Japanese financial conglomerate SBI Holdings in a round that closed in June with no other participants -- the largest single capital infusion the company has taken since its 2018 founding, dwarfing its 2022 Series B of roughly $24 million at a $1 billion valuation led by Ribbit Capital.
Gauntlet started life as a risk consultancy advising DeFi protocols on economic parameters and exposure limits. Around 2023 and 2024, the company shifted its core business toward what it calls "vault curation": building yield-bearing vehicles that function similarly to a mutual fund -- investors deposit digital assets and are promised a yield -- without Gauntlet itself custodying the underlying assets. Instead, Gauntlet's vaults deploy defined investment strategies designed to deliver the promised interest rate while managing downside risk.
The client roster underlines how far the business has moved from its consultancy roots: Gauntlet's roughly 40-person team already counts asset-management giant Apollo, crypto exchange Coinbase, and stablecoin issuer Circle among its customers -- a mix of traditional finance and crypto-native names that reflects the broader institutionalization theme running through crypto markets this year. With the new capital, Gauntlet plans to expand stablecoin coverage beyond the US dollar and euro into the Mexican peso, Japanese yen and other fiat-backed stablecoins, alongside new onchain product offerings and an AI-supported operations buildout.
“Gauntlet started life as a risk consultancy advising DeFi protocols on economic parameters and exposure limits.”
SBI Holdings' decision to be the sole investor in a $125 million round -- rather than syndicating it across multiple funds -- is itself a signal of conviction; the same firm led EDX Markets' $76 million Series C just days earlier, positioning SBI as one of the most active traditional-finance investors backing the infrastructure layer of institutional crypto adoption specifically, rather than speculative trading products or token launches.
For founders building crypto infrastructure aimed at institutional clients, Gauntlet's trajectory -- from a niche risk consultancy to a $125 million-backed vault-curation platform serving Apollo and Circle -- is a template for how technical, unglamorous DeFi expertise can convert into durable enterprise relationships as institutions actually deploy capital on-chain. For investors, SBI's pattern of writing large single-investor checks into crypto infrastructure (Gauntlet and EDX Markets both in the same window) is worth tracking as a leading indicator of where institutional crypto capital is concentrating.
The bear case: vault-curation strategies are ultimately underwritten by DeFi yield opportunities that can compress quickly in a rising-rate or risk-off environment, and Gauntlet's expansion into new fiat-backed stablecoin currencies carries real regulatory complexity across jurisdictions. What to watch next: Gauntlet's stablecoin expansion timeline into new currencies, and whether SBI Holdings' investment pattern across Gauntlet and EDX Markets evolves into a broader institutional crypto-infrastructure portfolio strategy.