Conduit, which offers APIs for DeFi services, raises a $17M seed led by Portage Ventures
Anita Ramaswamy / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
When Conduit took its seed round here in January 2022, it was selling the plumbing layer of the DeFi boom — APIs that let services plug into decentralized finance without building protocol integrations themselves. That put it in the same infrastructure tier as Tenderly, which months later raised a $40M Series B for DeFi dev tools built around its dashboard and API.
The seed also landed mid-wave: Portal's BTC-based cross-chain exchange raised a $34M seed in early 2024 and Exponential's DeFi risk-assessment tool took a $14M seed in late 2022, showing investors were repeatedly funding the picks-and-shovels side of DeFi rather than consumer apps alone. What makes Conduit's seed worth revisiting is where it led — the company's later Series A repositioned it as a cross-border payments network integrating stablecoins and local currencies, a materially different business than the DeFi APIs this round funded.
First-order effects
- Portage Ventures gets an early position in DeFi API infrastructure, and Conduit gains capital to build out integrations that let DeFi services connect without in-house protocol engineering.
Second-order effects
- Conduit's funded API layer puts pressure on adjacent DeFi tooling players like Tenderly to differentiate beyond developer dashboards, while the string of large seeds (Portal's $34M, Exponential's $14M) raises the capital bar for new DeFi-infrastructure entrants.
Third-order effects
- Conduit's own trajectory — from DeFi APIs to a stablecoin-based cross-border payments network by its Series A — suggests API infrastructure startups treat DeFi integrations as a wedge into broader payments rails, with the payments business as the durable end state.
The trend: DeFi infrastructure funding is migrating from protocol-connection APIs toward stablecoin-based cross-border payments, with seed-stage API layers serving as entry points to payments networks.