Gauntlet Raises $125 Million in Series C Funding From SBI Holdings Unit

Gauntlet, a decentralized-finance asset management platform, has raised $125 million in new funding.

The company said July 9 that it secured the Series C investment through SBI Holdings' US unit, The Block reported.

Gauntlet plans to use the proceeds to expand stablecoin support beyond the dollar and euro to include the Mexican peso and Japanese yen. It also plans to launch new on-chain products and build an artificial intelligence-based operating system.

"On-chain vaults have become the next revolution in financial markets," Tarun Chitra, Gauntlet's co-founder and chief executive officer, said. "Just as exchange-traded funds broadened participation in the US stock market, tokenization and vaults will grow the DeFi market over the next several years at a pace faster than stablecoin growth."

SBI Holdings also highlighted the significance of the investment. "The top priority is to ensure reliability and transparency so investors can enter the digital-asset market with confidence," SBI Holdings President Yoshitaka Kitao said. As regulatory clarity improves in the US, he added, the company will work with Gauntlet to build next-generation financial infrastructure for global markets.

Gauntlet began in 2018 as a blockchain analytics company before shifting to crypto vault management. The firm now manages $1.5 billion of assets in its own vaults.

Separately, SBI Holdings recently made a sole $76 million investment in the Series C round of EDX Markets, an institutional cryptocurrency trading platform.