Ledger, best known for its Nano series of cryptocurrency hardware wallets, raises $380M Series C at a valuation of $1.5B
French crypto hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has raised $380 million in a Series C fundraising round led by Dan Tapiero's 10T Holdings.
Context & Ripple Effects
Ledger's $380M Series C is nearly five times its 2018 $75M Series B, and it marks the moment the French wallet maker stopped being a USB-dongle vendor and started building a platform — the trajectory that later produced the Tony Fadell-designed Ledger Stax with an E Ink touchscreen built by Foxconn. The round was led by Dan Tapiero's 10T Holdings, putting traditional finance money behind a self-custody company.
First-order effects
- Ledger gets the balance sheet to expand past the Nano line into premium hardware like the Stax and into software services such as the Lockbox brokerage partnership with Blockchain.com, which already turned its wallet into an on-ramp for crypto-to-crypto trading.
Second-order effects
- Software wallet rivals are raising on parallel terms — Phantom's $150M Series C at a $3B valuation co-led by Sequoia and Paradigm more than doubled its prior valuation — forcing competition to shift from device sales to who owns the user's full wallet experience, including swaps and purchases inside apps like Ledger Live.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward custody consolidating into a handful of venture-scale platforms: by 2026 Ledger was reportedly working with banks on a US IPO at more than $4B, up from the $1.5B set in this round — meaning hardware wallets become publicly traded infrastructure rather than niche accessories.
The trend: Crypto self-custody is consolidating from hobbyist gadget makers into institutionally backed platforms racing toward the public markets.