Gauntlet has raised $125 million in a strategic round from Japanese financial group SBI Holdings, with no other investors participating, founder and CEO Tarun Chitra told Fortune.
The capital will support Gauntlet’s shift from DeFi protocol analytics toward vault risk curation for institutional clients including Apollo, Coinbase, and Circle.

Gauntlet, a DeFi-focused risk and allocation platform, has secured $125 million from SBI Holdings in what founder and CEO Tarun Chitra described to Fortune as the company’s largest capital raise to date. The round, which closed in June, had no other participants; Chitra declined to disclose the valuation.

The new financing marks a significant step up from Gauntlet’s almost $24 million Series B in 2022, which valued the company at $1 billion and was led by Ribbit Capital. Founded in 2018, Gauntlet has now raised well over $100 million as it has evolved from DeFi protocol analytics into a broader institutional risk and allocation business.

SBI Holdings, spun out of SoftBank in 1999 and now independently listed in Tokyo with a market cap above $10 billion, is among the most active TradFi players in digital assets. It holds stakes in Morpho, Ripple, and Circle, and has signaled a plan to ramp up U.S. activity amid what it sees as clearer, more favorable crypto regulation, Fortune reported.

Gauntlet started as a stress-testing and risk analytics provider for DeFi protocols, hired by developers to identify potential exploits that could be used to drain onchain pools. Much of its early client base consisted of DAOs, but Chitra said by 2023–2024 the DAO model had proven inefficient for managing large DeFi asset bases.

The firm has since pivoted to what it calls vault curation, evaluating and monitoring the risk of yield strategies used by vault products that operate similarly to mutual funds for digital assets. Gauntlet aims to ensure that rapid market moves or protocol-level issues do not impair depositors in these vaults, effectively moving from analyzing DeFi building blocks to guiding capital allocation into them.

Gauntlet employs about 40 people and counts Apollo, Coinbase, and Circle among its current customers, according to Fortune. The SBI backing aligns the startup more directly with large institutional flows into tokenized and onchain yield strategies, as major financial firms including ICE/NYSE, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley push further into crypto infrastructure and products.

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