📊 Summary of Funded Projects (May 12, 2026 – May 18, 2026)
- Duration
- In Progress
- Task
- Supported Chains
- Category
Table of Contents
We have summarized the projects that announced their funding rounds between May 12, 2026, and May 18, 2026.
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Project List
@elliptic | $120M (Series D) | May 12, 2026
@OseroHQ | $13.5M (Seed) | May 12, 2026
@charmsai | $1.5M (Pre-Seed) | May 12, 2026
@canopyxyz | M&A — Acquired by @movementlabsxyz | May 12, 2026
DACC | $10M (Strategic) | May 13, 2026
@LADT_co | Strategic (Undisclosed) | May 13, 2026
@fasset | $51M (Series B) | May 14, 2026
@turnkeyhq | $12.5M (Strategic) | May 14, 2026
@onrampbitcoin | $12.5M (Series A) | May 14, 2026
@generaltensor | $5M (Pre-Seed/Seed) | May 14, 2026
@ouinex | $3.5M (Community Equity) | May 14, 2026
@upbitglobal | $670M (Secondary/Existing Shares) | May 15, 2026
@the_nof1 | $15M (Strategic) | May 15, 2026
@AEON_Community | $8M (Pre-Seed) | May 18, 2026
@lemfi | Strategic (Undisclosed) | May 18, 2026
@ZodiaCustody | M&A — Acquired by @StanChart | May 18, 2026
Elliptic (@elliptic)
A London-based blockchain analytics and compliance firm. It tracks crypto transactions across dozens of chains, flagging wallets linked to sanctions, fraud, ransomware, and illicit funds. Banks, exchanges, and government agencies use it for AML and financial crime compliance. The new funds will be used to expand AI-driven monitoring and risk analytics. Valuation stands at $670M. This comes amid a sharp spike in hacks (~$30B since 2025) and mounting regulatory pressure.
💸 Amount: $120M (Series D)
👥 Investors: @OnePeakPartners, @Nasdaq, @DeutscheBank, @BritishBBank
📅 Date: May 12, 2026
Osero (@OseroHQ)
A stablecoin yield infrastructure incubated by Stablewatch/Soter Labs. It is designed to fix the asymmetry in the $300B+ stablecoin market, where most interest revenue is concentrated among issuers. It offers three products: the "Earn" SDK (integrating Sky Savings Rate with 10 lines of code), a consumer App, and "Foundry" for asset managers. Co-led by Sky Ecosystem and Plasma, $10M of the funds will serve as a buffer to protect the Sky protocol.
💸 Amount: $13.5M (Seed)
👥 Investors: @SkyEcosystem, @Plasma, @sparkdotfi, @maplefinance, @USDT0_to, @inkonchain, @FourPillarsFP, @therollupco, @Kairos_Res, @AccountableData, @redstone_defi
📅 Date: May 12, 2026
Charms AI (@charmsai)
An on-chain economic platform for AI characters. Anyone can create an AI character with personality, reasoning memory, voice, and visuals, assigning a unique economy to each public character (allowing creators to capture upside as popularity grows). It achieved over 6,000 users, 100k+ chats, and $1M+ in volume during its private beta. It operates on the Base ecosystem and bootstrapped via a World Foundation grant.
💸 Amount: $1.5M (Pre-Seed)
👥 Investors: @lattice_fund, @cbventures, Base Ecosystem Fund, @JME_Ventures, @worldcoinfnd
📅 Date: May 12, 2026
Canopy (@canopyxyz)
A DeFi vault layer infrastructure on the Movement Network. It has provided on-chain asset allocation and yield strategy management through independent managers, integrating with the MovePosition credit protocol. Movement Network has brought Canopy's vault infrastructure in-house, shifting to a model where Movement directly maintains the smart contracts. The move aims to deepen integration between the vault layer and credit protocols.
💸 Type: M&A — Acquired by @movementlabsxyz
📅 Date: May 12, 2026
Digital Asset Clearing Center (DACC)
A Hong Kong-based next-generation financial market infrastructure. It provides compliant clearing, settlement, and record-keeping services for tokenized assets, bridging global capital markets with the Internet of Contracts. Led by strategic investors Conflux, TTL, and Global InfoTech. The funds will be allocated toward developing FMI for tokenized assets and connecting traditional capital markets to Web3 financial systems.
💸 Amount: $10M (Strategic)
👥 Investors: Conflux, Transaction Technologies Limited (TTL), Kingdom Limited, Global InfoTech, Fosun International Limited, Blockstone, Avior Capital, Fintech World, Satoshi Ventures, BridgeTower
📅 Date: May 13, 2026
AWARP (@LADT_co)
A sovereign-grade on-chain financial infrastructure originating from Laos and ASEAN. It builds tokenization for real-world assets (minerals, renewable energy, AI data center assets), compliant stablecoin settlements, cross-border payments, digital IDs, and national public blockchain infrastructure. It enhances on-chain clearing, liquidity networks, and compliant payment flows through LADT. Funding amount and other investors remain undisclosed.
💸 Amount: Strategic (Undisclosed)
👥 Investors: @animocabrands
📅 Date: May 13, 2026
Fasset (@fasset)
A Los Angeles-based stablecoin neobank. It moves funds across 50+ payment corridors in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, processing over $32B annualized for 1,000+ SMEs across 125 countries. The funds will be used for entering new markets, building lending and trade finance products, and expanding its proprietary "Own Network" infrastructure. According to Dealroom, this is one of the largest payment Series A/B deals in 2026.
💸 Amount: $51M (Series B)
👥 Investors: SBI Group, Arz Portfoy, Investcorp
📅 Date: May 14, 2026
Turnkey (@turnkeyhq)
A key management and wallet infrastructure for crypto wallets. It offers non-custodial wallets, automated on-chain transactions, and policy-controlled signing. Customers include Flutterwave, Tools for Humanity's World App, Polymarket, and Anchorage Digital. The funds will be deployed to develop and prepare the general availability of Turnkey Verifiable Cloud (executing confidential operations in isolated, verifiable secure enclaves). Total funding exceeds $65M.
💸 Amount: $12.5M (Strategic)
👥 Investors: Archetype, Circle Ventures, Bain Capital Crypto, Lightspeed Faction, Galaxy Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Variant
📅 Date: May 14, 2026
Onramp (@onrampbitcoin)
An Austin-based Bitcoin financial services firm. Utilizing a Multi-Institution Custody (MIC) model, it distributes key management across multiple regulated custodians, maintaining over $1B in assets under custody and 0 security incidents since its 2023 founding. The capital will fuel the expansion of Onramp Finance, which integrates custody, brokerage, and cash management, alongside forging new partnerships with banks, RIAs, and fintechs. Valuation hits $135M. Already adopted by UK pension fund Cartwright.
💸 Amount: $12.5M (Series A)
👥 Investors: Early Riders
📅 Date: May 14, 2026
General Tensor (@generaltensor)
A DeFi infrastructure company built on Bittensor. Having raised $5M across pre-seed and seed rounds, it acquired Backprop Finance—one of Bittensor's largest decentralized trading platforms—from Tensorplex Labs. Backprop is an all-in-one trading terminal for Dynamic TAO (dTAO) subnet alpha tokens (featuring swaps, screeners, leaderboards, PNL, and whale alerts). Through this acquisition, it captures roughly 1/3 of the Bittensor network's trading volume and aims for cross-chain expansion.
💸 Amount: $5M (Pre-Seed/Seed)
👥 Investors: Digital Currency Group (DCG), Lvna Capital, Good Morning Holdings
📅 Date: May 14, 2026
🔗 https://www.generaltensor.com
Ouinex (@ouinex)
A Paris- and Dubai-based crypto-TradFi multi-asset exchange. Its proprietary No-CLOB (Non-Centralized Order Book) execution model hides the order book from market makers to provide front-running and stop-hunt resistance. It allows users to trade spot crypto, perpetuals, FX, equities, and commodity derivatives from a single account using crypto collateral. It reached a cumulative $9M through a pure community equity raise without VC participation. Concurrently, it launched the Ouinex Launchpad.
💸 Amount: $3.5M (Community Equity)
👥 Investors: Individual and professional trader community (No VCs)
📅 Date: May 14, 2026
Dunamu (@upbitglobal)
Dunamu operates Upbit, South Korea's largest crypto exchange. Hana Bank acquired a 6.55% existing stake (228 million shares) previously held by Kakao Investment for 1 trillion KRW (~$670M), becoming the 4th largest shareholder. Board approval was granted on 5/14, with completion slated for 6/15. Hana and Dunamu plan to co-develop KRW-pegged stablecoins, blockchain remittances, tokenized securities, and digital asset management, marking the largest-ever investment by a traditional Korean bank into the crypto industry.
💸 Amount: $670M (Secondary/Existing Shares)
👥 Investors: @HanaBank_KR
📅 Date: May 15, 2026
Nof1 (@the_nof1)
An AI trading lab. Its flagship experiment, Alpha Arena, is a public test pitting frontier AI models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, etc.) against each other in autonomous trading with real capital. Season 2 will introduce in-house model development, web browsing capabilities, extended reasoning time, and multi-step execution. Plans are underway to expand into a consumer platform (coding agents for markets). SUI Group invested $3M each into Nof1 and Recursive Superintelligence.
💸 Amount: $15M (Strategic)
👥 Investors: SUI Group Holdings Limited
📅 Date: May 15, 2026
AEON (@AEON_Community)
Payment infrastructure built for the agent economy (an ecosystem where autonomous AIs directly transact, coordinate, and settle value). It already processes over 2 million users and 30 million monthly transactions. As an early official partner of the Coinbase x402 protocol, it launched an AI payment product in May, enabling agents to execute on-chain transactions and connect with over 50 million merchants. Led by YZi Labs ($10B+ AUM), with participation from IDG, HashKey, and others.
💸 Amount: $8M (Pre-Seed)
👥 Investors: @yzilabs, @IDGCapital, @HashKey_Capital, @theBBFund, @OakGroveVC, @SevenXVentures, @Alchemy, @DraperDragon, @ContributionCap, @UpHonestCapital
📅 Date: May 18, 2026
LemFi (@lemfi)
A London-based remittance platform tailored for emerging markets. It received a strategic investment (amount undisclosed) from Tether to integrate USD₮ as a settlement layer for major corridors, replacing the slow SWIFT chains in Africa and Asia with near-instant, low-cost settlements. In parallel, a €30M Series B extension raise was reported (on 2026-05-14, adding to the existing Series B led by Highland Europe).
💸 Amount: Strategic (Undisclosed)
👥 Investors: @Tether
📅 Date: May 18, 2026
Zodia Custody (@ZodiaCustody)
An institutional crypto custodian. Shareholders and noteholders accepted a non-binding offer from Standard Chartered (which holds ~70% via SC Ventures) to absorb Zodia's custody operations into its own business. The infrastructure platform business will spin off independently as Zodia Solutions under SC Ventures, continuing to provide bank-grade digital asset infrastructure to financial institutions. Remaining shareholders include Northern Trust, Emirates NBD, National Australia Bank, and SBI Holdings.
💸 Type: M&A — Acquired by @StanChart
📅 Date: May 18, 2026
This week saw a flurry of activity with a total of 16 projects announcing developments. Pure net new investments into emerging startups alone surpassed $250M (approx. ¥39B), while the total money in motion neared $1B when factoring in secondary share acquisitions and M&A, making it an incredibly packed week.
The primary highlight was the massive capital poured into "infrastructure" and "trust assurance" for the industry. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic (@elliptic) announced a $120M Series D featuring participation from Nasdaq and Deutsche Bank. This proves that compliance and regulatory tooling have become indispensable infrastructure for institutional players.
The main trends this week can be distilled into three key themes:
- The Surge of Utility-Driven "Payment and Yield" Infrastructure: Alongside neobank Fasset (@fasset) raising $51M to handle massive remittance volumes across Asia and Africa, projects like LemFi (@lemfi)—which secured a strategic investment from Tether—are driving the expansion of real-world payments using stablecoins. Furthermore, initiatives optimizing decentralized stablecoin yield distribution are gaining traction, as seen with Osero (@OseroHQ), led by the Sky (formerly MakerDAO) ecosystem.
- The Awakening of the "AI Agent Economy": Anticipating a future where autonomous AIs directly settle value, AEON (@AEON_Community) secured $8M, backed by integration with Coinbase's new payment protocol. Combined with Nof1 (@the_nof1) pitting AI models against each other using real capital, and Charms AI (@charmsai) launching on Base, the transition of "AI × Web3" into a practical implementation phase is becoming unmistakable.
- Mega-Scale Consolidation by Traditional Finance (TradFi): Beyond funding, this week was marked by major capital alliances and M&A. In South Korea, Hana Bank acquired a stake in Upbit's operator Dunamu for roughly $670M, setting a milestone as one of the largest investments by a commercial bank into the crypto space. This, along with Standard Chartered's acquisition of Zodia Custody and Movement Network absorbing Canopy (@canopyxyz), indicates that industry restructuring via ecosystem and product absorption is accelerating.
Including Turnkey (@turnkeyhq) securing $12.5M for its developer-focused key management infrastructure (with backing from Sequoia and Bain Capital), capital this week clearly gravitated toward the "foundational bedrock" that will support the next bull cycle, rather than fleeting trends. The ecosystem's progress toward real-world utility will be highly anticipated moving forward.
Disclaimer
- ・This article is created for informational purposes only and should not be used to solicit the sale, purchase, or underwriting of cryptocurrencies, securities, or other financial products, nor should it be considered an invitation to engage in such transactions, or constitute financial or investment advice.
- ・The information and opinions in this article are obtained from sources that we believe to be reliable, but we do not guarantee their accuracy, completeness, suitability, timeliness, or truthfulness.
- ・We, the authors, and all related parties are not responsible for any damage or loss caused by or related to the information published in this article. Cryptocurrencies involve hacking and other risks, so please conduct thorough research before using them.
Supervised by
Shingo Arai
CEO, Rokubunnoni Inc.
After completing a Master's degree in Management Engineering at Tokyo University of Science in 2013, Shingo Arai worked as an engineer, data scientist, and data analyst at multiple companies in the web, app, and advertising industries. He entered the cryptocurrency and blockchain space around 2017, founded Rokubunnoni Inc. in January 2018, and launched Crypto Times — a blockchain-focused media outlet — in February 2018. With approximately 9 years in the industry, his expertise spans DeFi, L1/L2 protocols, tokenomics, ZKP, and domestic/international regulatory trends. He actively conducts on-chain asset management and research. He has authored and supervised hundreds of articles, spoken at conferences in Japan and abroad, served as a DeFi investment seminar instructor, and operated KOL ambassador programs.
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