Franklin Templeton, Polychain back Cambrian’s $6M seed for verifiable onchain data oracle

Cambrian, a U.S.-based startup building blockchain data infrastructure for institutions and AI agents, has raised $6 million in a seed round structured as a SAFE with token warrants. Franklin Templeton and Polychain Capital co-led the financing, with participation from Flow Traders, Selini Capital, Paper Ventures, Nomad Capital, Nomad Capital and other investors, alongside angels including Jason Mo, Avi Felman, and TrueNorth co-founders Alex Lee and Willy Chuang, according to founder and CEO Sam Green speaking to The Block. Franklin Templeton and Polychain took board observer seats as part of the round, which closed last month and brings Cambrian’s total funding to $11.9 million following a $5.9 million pre-seed led by a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX) in 2023.

Founded in 2024, Cambrian currently offers an API that delivers real-time and historical blockchain data on yield, risk, lending rates, trading activity, liquidity positions, and market sentiment. The company plans to evolve this into a “verifiable” oracle network aimed at institutional finance users and AI agents that need reliable inputs to allocate capital onchain. “We are the only data provider designed from the outset to support both centralized and verifiable network modes,” Green said. “This enables us to serve institutional finance customers who are early adopters of crypto and DeFi, as well as agent builders and protocols that require verifiability to safely control capital within their products.”

Unlike traditional oracle networks that focus on price feeds, Cambrian aggregates lending protocol data, DEX liquidity, social sentiment, developer activity, and historical market data into a single platform. The startup said it has already processed millions of API calls, indexes $4.5 billion in lending TVL across the four largest lending protocols, tracks 1,789 vaults across 895 curators, and monitors more than 320,000 DEX pools across Base and Solana. “We cover a broad range of financial data, both onchain and offchain, and are preparing to expand our trading support by adding Hyperliquid and extensive perp data,” Green said.

Cambrian remains in private beta, with TrueNorth, an agentic brokerage, as its closest design partner for trading data and already using the platform in production. According to Green, institutions and AI agents are using the API to compare lending markets and supply rates across protocols and chains, while also tracking social media sentiment around onchain assets and its correlation with subsequent price movements. The platform currently supports Base and Solana, with Ethereum mainnet next on the roadmap and more chains to follow. Green said the alpha version of Cambrian’s oracle network has been completed in collaboration with researchers from a16z crypto, and integrations with blockchain and DeFi partners are planned in the coming months.

The new capital will fund expanded chain and protocol coverage and accelerate the rollout of the oracle network, while Cambrian builds out a SaaS and enterprise revenue model and experiments with agent-native payment rails such as x402. The 10-person team draws heavily from alumni of Edge & Node, the group behind The Graph, and Semiotic Labs, a core development team for The Graph, underscoring its focus on data infrastructure. For onchain funds, market makers, and agentic trading projects, Cambrian’s move from an institutional data API to a verifiable oracle network positions it as another specialized entrant in the competition to feed capital-allocation algorithms, alongside price-feed incumbents and newer data-rich oracles.