DeFi risk firm Gauntlet lands $125M from SBI Holdings

Gauntlet secured $125 million from SBI Holdings, its biggest funding round to date. The Japanese financial conglomerate was the sole investor in the raise, which closed in June. CEO Tarun Chitra declined to share the valuation.

The company's prior largest round was a $23.8 million Series B in March 2022, led by Ribbit Capital at a $1 billion valuation. The new round is about five times that size. The raise follows other large institutional infrastructure rounds, such as Databento's $97 million raise for market data across crypto and TradFi.

Gauntlet started in 2018 as a risk consultancy for DeFi protocols. It ran simulations and made governance recommendations for blue-chip platforms like Aave and Compound. The firm now manages yield vaults on platforms such as Morpho. Those vaults hold a mix of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies, including USDC and WETH. Bitcoin is also part of the portfolio. In late 2025, Gauntlet handled a $775 million supply event on Morpho. That event showed the scale of assets the firm now controls.

Morpho is a decentralized lending protocol that matches supplier and borrower rates in real time. Gauntlet's vaults deploy a portion of assets into Morpho's liquidity pools while keeping some capital liquid. The firm adjusts allocation based on market demand and risk model outputs. The $775 million move was executed over several weeks.