Kelp DAO, one of the largest liquid restaking protocols, has secured $9 million in a private sale round to scale up its infrastructure as the decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape is getting bigger and bigger every day.
The fresh capital injection comes amid growing interest in liquid restaking, with the total value locked across leading platforms surpassing $4 billion.
The latest round was led by SCB Limited, a proprietary trading firm based in the Bahamas, and Laser Digital, the digital asset arm of Nomura Global, who collectively invested $3.5 million.
Other participants in the round included Bankless Ventures, Hypersphere, Draper Dragon, DACM, Cypher Capital, ArkStream, Cluster Capital, GSR, Longhash, Side Door Ventures, NOIA Capital, HTX Ventures, Avid3, ViaBTC Capital, DWF Ventures, Coinseeker, and many others.
Dheeraj Borra, Co-founder of Kelp DAO, comments: “This fundraise propels our expansion in the market and sharpens our focus on building customer-centric solutions. It's truly thrilling to have our investors share that vision.”
Both Kelp DAO founders, Amitej Gajjala and Dheeraj Borra, voiced their gratitude for the investor support, which will drive Kelp DAO towards scaling new heights in restaking solutions.
Kelp DAO plans to use the funds to upgrade its platform’s capabilities, expand to other ecosystems like Solana and Bitcoin, and further restaking solutions. This comes on top of the platform already boasting over $850 million in Total Value Locked (TVL) and more than 40,000 active restakers.
The funding round includes support from notable angel investors in the crypto community, such as Scott, Cofounder of Gitcoin; Alex, CEO of Nansen; Sam K, Cofounder of Frax; Marc Zeller, from Aave Chan Initiative; Saurabh Sharma, from Jump Crypto; Amrit, COO of Altlayer; Anthony, Cofounder of Swissborg; and Winslow Strong from Mr. Block.
Laser Digital CEO Jez Mohideen stated: “We are very excited to support Kelp DAO and the passionate team in its journey towards building innovative restaking infrastructure solutions.”
Jack Platts, Co-founder of Hypersphere Ventures, added, “We’re excited by the prospect of restaking enabling more developer experimentation and use cases. Kelp’s proven team and focus on user experience is playing a key role in restaking’s early success. We look forward to the team executing on its vision of enhancing yields and optionality for ETH stakers.”
The idea behind liquid restaking offered by Kelp and others is to allow ETH holders—whether holding native ETH or LST tokens—to invest and restake without losing access to the underlying capital. This is why it's called "liquid" restaking.
Kelp DAO’s liquid restaked token (LRT) was the first to hit the Ethereum mainnet, and currently offers service for native ETH and LSTs across Ethereum mainnet and eight L2 networks.