Ground raises $3.6 million to pipe on-chain yield into fintech apps

San Francisco-based Ground emerged from stealth on June 24 with $3.6 million in a pre-seed round co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi. The financing closes a fundraise that began in September 2025 and wrapped the following month under a SAFE structure with token warrants.

No investors received board seats or advisor positions. The startup builds API infrastructure that lets fintechs plug into onchain yield products without writing blockchain code themselves.

Additional investors include Nascent, Robot Ventures, Chapter One, and Consonant Ventures. Founder Reid Cuming previously co-founded the tokenization firm Superstate, which raised $82.5 million through its Series B, and served as vice president and general manager of Compound Treasury.

He remains a board member and senior advisor at Superstate but has stepped back from day-to-day operations to focus on Ground.

Co-founder and chief technology officer Sam Yoon was Technical CEO of Braid, which delivers real-world-asset yield on idle stablecoin balances, and previously led engineering at HIFI, where he built stablecoin cross-border infrastructure that powered hundreds of millions of dollars across hundreds of applications, according to Ground’s company profile.

Ground builds the API layer for onchain yield

Cuming told The Block that fintechs want access to onchain yield without standing up their own blockchain teams. The Ground API targets neobanks, wealth managers, exchanges, and asset managers, letting each pick yield strategies sized to their customers’ liquidity, duration, and risk needs.

The platform currently routes capital through lending and structured-credit protocols on Ethereum, Solana, and several Layer-2 networks. Initial integrations include Aave, Morpho, Maple, and Kamino, with liquid staking tokens lined up next, according to The Block. Together, the four protocols represent tens of billions of dollars of onchain assets.

“The global asset management industry oversees more than $147 trillion, and there are trillions of dollars idling in pre-funded accounts, neobanks, and blockchain wallets,” Cuming told The Block. “That is a massive untapped opportunity.”

Ground plans to generate revenue through usage-based platform fees, though it has not disclosed fee percentages. Comparable infrastructure providers typically charge basis-point-level fees or revenue-sharing arrangements tied to assets deposited through their integrations.

Ground is targeting a simple problem: large amounts of capital sit unused across pre-funded accounts, neobank balances, exchange wallets, and fintech platforms.

While many of these companies would like yield products, they are unwilling to build out blockchain infrastructure, manage smart-contract integrations, or form internal DeFi risk teams.

This way, the product becomes more focused on achieving optimal yields rather than maximizing it. If the API fulfills its purpose well, fintech companies will be able to provide yield solutions without putting themselves or their clients at risk of dealing with all the protocols directly.

Bain and ParaFi bet on DeFi credit infrastructure

Ground’s lead investors have spent the past year expanding their institutional digital asset positions. ParaFi raised a $125 million venture fund in March 2026 focused on stablecoins, tokenization, and institutional onchain finance.

Parth Chopra, partner at Bain Capital Crypto, told The Block that fintechs and institutions are increasingly looking beyond stablecoins and tokenization toward onchain credit markets that can offer higher yields and lower borrowing costs.

“This is not at all easy to do today,” Chopra said.

As Cryptopolitan earlier reported, Anchorage Digital has continued expanding regulated custody and institutional digital-asset infrastructure. That signals the same compliance-grade infrastructure thesis that Ground is now selling at the API layer.

Q1 2026 saw crypto startups raise nearly $5 billion in venture funding, with payments and trading infrastructure taking $1.2 billion combined and prediction markets pulling in another $1.7 billion. DeFi credit infrastructure is the next layer to hit that fundraising pace.

Compliance controls become the selling point

Ground enters a competitive space against yield aggregators, tokenization platforms, custody providers, and embedded finance firms, all chasing the same gap between traditional fintech and onchain yield.

The differentiator Cuming is pitching is institutional plumbing: compliance tooling, reporting infrastructure, liquidity management, and configurable risk parameters that crypto-native yield aggregators were not built for.

Institutional adoption of DeFi yield has been slowed by counterparty risk, smart-contract vulnerability, regulatory uncertainty, and operational gaps around know-your-customer, anti-money-laundering, and treasury oversight.

Ground currently operates with three full-time employees, plus a contractor, and plans to hire two to four more across engineering, go-to-market, and operations.

The bet is that compliant, auditable, risk-managed access matters more than raw yield.

Ground does not need to convince fintechs that onchain yield exists. It needs to convince them that the risks can be packaged, monitored, and reported in a way that fits institutional requirements.

If that works, the four protocols Ground integrates with could become the first place institutional capital lands when fintechs finally turn on DeFi yield for their users.

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