Cambrian raises $11.9M to build the financial intelligence layer for the convergence of AI, crypto, and finance

Today we're announcing $11.9M in total funding, having completed a $6M seed round co-led by Polychain and Franklin Templeton, with participation from Flow Traders, Selini Capital, Paper Ventures, Proxima, GS Futures, Alumni Ventures, Daedalus, and Nomad Capital – alongside angels including Jason Mo and Avi Felman. Our previous round was led by a16z crypto, with participation from Blockchain Builders and angels from The Graph.

This funding will accelerate our work serving institutional-grade use cases. With investors like Franklin Templeton, a global leader in asset management, and Polychain, a crypto-native powerhouse, it is clear that traditional finance and blockchains are converging, and recent regulatory clarity is speeding that shift. Daily announcements from well-known institutions detail new onchain initiatives. Crypto is programmable money, and the design space is broad, nuanced, and fast-moving. Regulated institutions participating in onchain markets need low-latency, comprehensive, and verifiable data. Likewise, crypto-native protocols and agentic companies desperately need high-quality financial intelligence.

Our mission is to serve these needs and become the leading financial data provider for evolving markets. With the backing of our diversely talented group of investors, we’re confident we’ll realize that mission.

Our cap table covers the full gamut of finance and tech literacy. Polychain, founded in 2016 by Olaf Carlson-Wee (Coinbase's first employee) is about as crypto-native as a firm can be, with its own list of notable investors: a16z, Sequoia, Union Square Ventures, and Founders Fund. Franklin Templeton sits on the finance-native end of the spectrum, having managed money since 1947, with over $1.7 trillion in AUM today. They’re keen on crypto too, having built the Benji, the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to run onchain. Every layer of the emerging financial stack, from execution to allocation, now has a seat at our table:

This group of investors, with widely varied backgrounds, shares conviction in Cambrian’s financial intelligence. They understand that startups can iterate at the frontier in ways risk-averse institutions cannot, and that backing one is a way to gain exposure to a future they know is coming. A future of finance orchestrated increasingly by agents.

Co-leading Cambrian's seed round was a natural fit for Polychain. We have had strong conviction that agents will increasingly make economic decisions on behalf of people, and Cambrian has been an early advocate for agentic finance, a thesis we have supported across our portfolio for over a year. As DeFi matures and institutions engage with onchain markets, it is clear to us that Cambrian is building foundational data infrastructure for the next era of finance.

— Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder and CEO, Polychain Capital. 

When we founded Cambrian at the end of 2024, we believed AI and decentralized finance were converging. We were convinced that this shift was inevitable: AI performance was improving month after month, and LLMs were beginning to power agentic AI workflows. Simultaneously, there was renewed attention to the broader crypto space, then in the early stages of a bull market, with Bitcoin soon to reach all-time highs.

Afterwards, a wave of talented startups entered the space, launching impressive AgentFi products that engaged every segment of the market, including DeFi Copilots, Traditional Finance Copilots, Yield Agents, and Informational Agents. To track these companies and better characterize this emerging sector’s growth and diversification, we created the industry’s first comprehensive landscape report for AgentFi. The report is updated regularly, and the latest is our most informative yet.

The convictions we formed through early experiments, including dynamic-pricing agents and natural language interfaces for onchain data, were only strengthened as AgentFi matured and new companies entered the space in 2025. However, the core problem remained the same: human and agentic financial decision-making requires fast, comprehensive, and verifiable data simultaneously. Previous approaches have failed to deliver all three at once. We call this issue the Data Trilemma.

We deliver fast data through a proprietary blockchain indexing system that eliminates the third-party dependencies other providers rely on. Financial decision-making increasingly depends on AI, which requires both qualitative context, such as news and financial statements, and historical data at scale. In addition, deploying capital onchain requires a deep understanding of DeFi protocols and their current state. Cambrian provides that comprehensive context.

And because trading and investment decisions demand verifiable accuracy, we do not rely on unreliable third-party feeds or on self-reporting, as other systems do. Instead, Cambrian measures onchain financial activity directly, curates and decodes the relevant data, and verifies the results using our verifiable data network, developed in collaboration with researchers at a16z.

The services described above are delivered through a unified API. This mode of delivery was chosen as the default because it is straightforward to deploy in agentic development workflows. Today, Cambrian powers leading AgentFi products with historical and real-time prices, trade volume, lending rates, vault activity, curator performance, onchain order book details, perpetual futures liquidation risk, social sentiment, and more. We support both EVM chains and Solana, and will add support for all blockchains and DeFi protocols with significant financial activity.

The biggest change in the financial landscape over the last year has been the rapid convergence of traditional finance and crypto. Since our a16z pre-seed raise, the GENIUS Act became law, stablecoins grew to a $300B market cap, the SEC approved Nasdaq to tokenize stocks and ETFs, and tokenized cash, money market funds, and Treasuries moved onchain, with Treasuries alone reaching $10B market size. Circle, the issuer of USDC, also went public in a $1B IPO and reached a $32B FDV.

Traditional financial firms have moved to capitalize on these developments. Franklin Templeton, an investment management company with $1.7T AUM and a co-lead in this round, created a dedicated cryptocurrency division in April. The company’s Head of Digital Assets & Innovation, Sandy Kaul, recently opined on the convergence I’m describing, and the need for the layer Cambrian is building: "The innovation that the crypto natives bring needs to be paired with the understanding of consumer protections, institutional-quality due diligence, and institutional-quality controls. All of that needs to be in place for these trillions of dollars to shift." We believe the acceleration in institutional adoption, with clear requirements like those Sandy outlined, signals growing demand for Cambrian’s financial intelligence.

As staunch proponents of the convergence of traditional finance and digital assets, we’re intimately aware of the need for a new financial data layer, designed for institutional scale. Cambrian is building that infrastructure, and this investment reflects Franklin Crypto’s conviction that the data layer enabling institutions, DeFi, and AI to operate together is where the market is heading. 

— Louis Mohn, Managing Principal, Franklin Crypto.

With this additional funding, we’ll have the resources to expand our engineering team and accelerate the breadth and depth of our blockchain and protocol coverage. In addition, we have finished developing the alpha version of our verifiable data network, and we’ll soon begin working on integrations with chains and DeFi protocol partners.

Finally, my PhD was focused on reinforcement learning, a branch of AI focused on self-improving agents. This is a topic of increasing importance, considering the fact that financial institutions are starting to implement reinforcement learning for financial decision-making. To support them, we are running pilot experiments using our data to train specialized financial agents and hiring to move those R&D results into production.

If you would like to learn more, you can try our API for free. It’s straightforward to set up a coding agent using the Cambrian documentation. If you are a financial institution exploring onchain yield opportunities, a DeFi protocol interested in next-generation oracles, or you’re building an AgentFi product, feel free to message me on X here or LinkedIn here.

Cambrian is the financial intelligence layer for agents and institutions. Our API delivers real-time and historical blockchain data, covering yield, liquidity positions, risk, trading activity, and market sentiment, for agentic and institutional DeFi applications. Founded in 2024, Cambrian is backed by Polychain Capital, Franklin Templeton, a16z crypto, Flow Traders, Selini Capital and others.