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Kaiko Extends Series B to $110 Million as S&P Global Leads Crypto Data Round
The investor list reads like a roll call of traditional finance, which is the point: Wall Street is buying the plumbing for tokenized markets before the markets arrive.
Kaiko has extended its Series B to $110 million in a strategic round led by S&P Global, capping a stretch in which the Paris-based crypto data firm has been quietly acquiring its way into the infrastructure layer of digital asset markets.
The investor list is the story as much as the number: BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Broadridge, the Canton Foundation, Coinbase Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, Nasdaq Ventures, Royal Bank of Canada, Stellar and Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, alongside existing backers Anthemis, Point Nine and Revaia. The company last raised $53 million in June 2022, in a round led by Eight Roads.
What Kaiko sells
Kaiko provides pricing and liquidity data for digital assets across more than 150 exchanges and protocols — the reference data that lets an institution mark a position, calculate risk, settle a contract or benchmark a fund.
It is unglamorous work and it is the precondition for everything else. A bank cannot hold an asset it cannot price defensibly, and an index cannot exist without a methodology for what the constituents are worth at a given moment. Crypto's long-running institutional problem has been less about conviction than about whether the measurement layer met the standards that regulated balance sheets require.
Why S&P Global wrote the check
S&P Dow Jones Indices and Kaiko already co-launched the S&P Kaiko Digital Asset Indices, which makes this less a bet on a startup than an investment in a supplier the buyer has already integrated.
"As digital assets accelerate, S&P Global is investing for the future, and this investment underscores that conviction," said Cathy Clay, chief executive of S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Read alongside the rest of the cap table — an exchange operator, three banks, two trading firms — the round looks less like venture financing and more like an industry consortium making sure the data layer it depends on stays independent and well capitalized.
Buying the map
Kaiko has been consolidating. It acquired Cometh, a DeFi infrastructure provider, and Amberdata, a U.S. digital asset data firm — moves that extend its coverage from centralized exchange pricing into onchain activity, where the next generation of tokenized instruments will actually settle.
The capital funds core market data operations and further build-out of that onchain infrastructure.
The timing question
The thesis running underneath all of this is that traditional capital markets are heading onchain and will need continuous, 24/7 reference data to function there. That thesis has been argued for years without resolving.
What is different is who is now funding it. When the entities that would have to adopt tokenized settlement are the ones capitalizing the data provider, the bet has shifted from whether the market arrives to who owns the plumbing when it does.