Kaiko expanded its Series B funding round to $110 million with S&P Global leading a strategic investment, bringing banks, market infrastructure firms, and crypto investors into the same deal.
- S&P Global led the strategic investment
- The Series B now totals $110 million
- Big banks, Nasdaq Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and others joined
- Kaiko is pushing deeper into onchain capital markets
Kaiko, the crypto market data provider, said the new investment brings its Series B to $110 million. The company did not disclose its valuation, and it also did not say how much each investor contributed individually. In finance, that missing detail is usually where the real fireworks would be, and where the spreadsheet suddenly gets stage fright.
The round brought in a broad mix of backers: BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Broadridge, Canton Foundation, Coinbase Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, Nasdaq Ventures, Royal Bank of Canada, Stellar, and Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, along with existing shareholders Anthemis, Point Nine, and Revaia.
That is not a random logo parade. It is a clear sign that tokenized finance and blockchain-based market infrastructure are no longer being treated as a niche sideshow. Major institutions are putting money into the plumbing.
What Kaiko is building
Kaiko says the capital will support both its core market data business and its expansion into onchain capital markets. Put simply, the company wants to provide the data layer for financial activity recorded and settled on blockchain networks.
That includes things like tokenized securities, settlement infrastructure, and benchmark data. Tokenization means representing a real-world asset or financial instrument as a token on a blockchain. It sounds clean and futuristic, because it is. It also comes with the usual headaches: governance, legal enforceability, compliance, and who actually trusts the numbers when the markets get volatile.
Kaiko already covers data from more than 150 exchanges and protocols, which puts it in the infrastructure layer rather than the consumer-facing hype layer. That matters. The flashy app may get attention, but the boring market data feed is often what institutions actually pay for.
Why the investor list matters
The mix of backers tells its own story. BNP Paribas and Royal Bank of Canada bring traditional banking weight. Nasdaq Ventures and Broadridge bring market infrastructure muscle. Coinbase Ventures and Stellar bring crypto-native alignment. Canton Foundation ties the raise to tokenization infrastructure.
Kaiko’s new investors are also being brought into a Strategic Industry Working Group focused on tokenized market infrastructure. That suggests this is not just a passive financing round. It looks more like a coalition being assembled around data standards, market design, and the next generation of financial rails.
S&P Global’s involvement is especially notable because it is not acting like an observer. It is acting like a firm that expects digital asset infrastructure to matter for the long haul.
“As digital assets accelerate, S&P Global is investing for the future, and this investment underscores that conviction, ” said Cathy Clay, CEO of S&P Dow Jones Indices.
That quote is corporate, sure, but the message is plain: S&P is not just dipping a toe into crypto branding. It is helping build the data and benchmark layer that institutions will need if tokenized markets keep growing.
Kaiko and S&P are already working together
The investment builds on a deeper partnership between Kaiko: The crypto industry's leading data, analytics, and and S&P Dow Jones Indices. Earlier this month, the two companies launched the S&P Kaiko Digital Asset Indices, a co-branded suite of crypto index products.
In April, they unveiled plans to tokenize the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries index on Canton Network. That may sound abstract, but the point is straightforward: if a major benchmark can be represented and distributed onchain, it opens the door to faster, more programmable financial products built around trusted reference data.
That is the real prize here. Not a shiny token for its own sake. The prize is the underlying infrastructure that tells markets what something is worth, how it should be tracked, and how it moves from one party to another.
Why benchmarks and market data are the quiet battleground
People tend to focus on tokens, trading, and price action because those are easy to understand. But in institutional finance, the serious money often sits in the dull stuff: reference rates, indices, liquidity data, and settlement systems.
Kaiko sits right in that layer. If a bank, asset manager, or market venue wants to operate in tokenized markets, it needs trusted data. If it wants to issue a product tied to digital assets, it needs benchmarks that are reliable, auditable, and accepted by counterparties. No one wants to build a billion-dollar market on vibes and a Discord thread.
That is also why Kaiko’s compliance profile matters. The company says Kaiko Indices is authorized as a benchmark administrator under EU-BMR, the EU Benchmarks Regulation, and that it holds SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type 2 attestations. Those are independent controls and security audits that help show the company has the operational and governance standards institutions expect.
In other words, Kaiko is trying to look more like market infrastructure and less like a typical crypto startup with a good-looking deck and a lot of adjectives.
Acquisitions show a broader strategy
Kaiko has also been building by acquisition. The company said it acquired Vinter in November 2024. It also cited the acquisitions of Cometh and Amberdata.
That kind of roll-up strategy usually means the same thing in any market: consolidate capability, widen the product set, and become harder to ignore. For Kaiko, it looks like a push to become a fuller institutional platform for crypto data, indices, and related infrastructure.
There is a practical logic to that. If you want to serve banks and market operators, you need more than raw pricing feeds. You need the surrounding data machinery, the benchmarks, the integrations, and the trust framework that makes the numbers usable in regulated environments.
What this says about tokenized markets
Tokenization is still one of the most overused and under-delivered words in finance. The pitch is easy: put assets on blockchain rails, make settlement faster, improve access, and automate more of the back office. The reality is more annoying, because legal rights, custody, permissions, and governance do not disappear just because an asset gets a blockchain wrapper.
That is the part worth watching with Kaiko and S&P. This is less about speculative crypto trading and more about whether traditional benchmarks and market data can be moved into blockchain-based environments without losing the trust institutions depend on.
Canton Network is part of that effort. It is one of the blockchain networks being used in institutional finance experiments and tokenization work. The planned tokenization of the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries index on Canton suggests the industry is moving from talk to infrastructure design. That is still early. It is also more serious than the usual tokenization theater.
At the same time, a dose of skepticism is healthy. Institutions love “future rails” projects until the pilot budget runs out or the compliance team decides the juice is not worth the regulatory squeeze. Plenty of blockchain initiatives never make it out of the sandbox. Some remain very expensive PowerPoint slides with a chain attached.
Even so, the presence of S&P Global, BNP Paribas, Nasdaq Ventures, Royal Bank of Canada, and other heavyweight names suggests this is more than casual experimentation. It does not prove broad adoption. It does show the market infrastructure crowd is preparing for a world where tokenized assets need trusted data just as much as traditional ones do.
Key takeaways
-
What happened?
Kaiko expanded its Series B funding round to $110 million after S&P Global led a strategic investment. -
Who joined the round?
A wide mix of banks, market infrastructure firms, crypto investors, and existing shareholders, including BNP Paribas, Nasdaq Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Royal Bank of Canada. -
What does Kaiko do?
Kaiko provides market data, liquidity data, and benchmark infrastructure for digital assets and tokenized markets. -
Why does S&P’s involvement matter?
It shows a major financial benchmarks firm is investing in the data and infrastructure layer that could support tokenized finance at scale. -
Does this prove tokenized markets are ready for prime time?
No. It shows serious institutional interest and real product development, but broad adoption is still unproven. -
Why should bitcoin and crypto investors care?
Because the market infrastructure around digital assets is getting more professional, more regulated, and more institutionally backed. That can help adoption, but it can also mean more control, more permissions, and fewer of crypto’s original Wild West freedoms.
There is a certain irony in all this. Crypto spent years mocking traditional finance, and now some of traditional finance’s biggest names are helping build the rails. That is not a betrayal of decentralization; it is a sign that blockchain-based market infrastructure has forced its way into serious financial planning.
Whether that leads to freer markets or merely more efficient control is still the open question. For now, Kaiko’s expanded Series B says the people who run financial infrastructure are funding the next generation of market data and benchmark rails before tokenized markets fully arrive. That is a fairly sober bet, which, in crypto, is almost radical.
For a broader policy lens, the IMF Warns Tokenized Finance Could Trigger Rapid Financial warning and the follow-up IMF Flags Tokenized Finance Risks While Bitcoin ETFs Soar piece show just how split the conversation remains between institutional enthusiasm and systemic-risk paranoia.
That split is already showing up in real-world adoption too, from benchmark experiments to public-market issuance like Hong Kong Sets $1.5B Digital Bond Record as Tokenized, where tokenization is moving from buzzword to balance sheet.
And while Kaiko is pushing deeper into the institutional stack, firms like Bitwise Launches Canton ETP for Institutional Blockchain are betting that packaged exposure and infrastructure products will be the next bridge between TradFi and blockchain rails.
For the full corporate framing behind the raise, Kaiko Secures Strategic Investment to Expand Onchain Data and S&P Global Leads Strategic Investment in Kaiko, Extending spell out the strategic rationale from the company’s side without the usual crypto moonboy smoke machine.
