Veda, the infrastructure startup building cross-chain vault protocols for on‑chain yield, has raised $18 million in seed funding to scale its platform. Led by CoinFund with participation from Coinbase Ventures, GSR, BitGo, and Animoca Ventures, the round positions Veda as a foundational layer in the evolving DeFi economy.

The company, founded by Sunand Raghupathi, Joe Terrigno, and Stephanie Vaughan, already boasts over $3.7 billion in total value locked (TVL) and 100,000+ users on its BoringVault infrastructure, making it one of the most quickly adopted backend systems for yield-bearing products across Ethereum, L2s, and beyond.

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The Infrastructure Beneath the Yield Layer

At its core, Veda is building invisible infrastructure. Its vault protocol allows fintechs, wallets, centralized exchanges, and DAOs to deploy compliant, composable, secure vaults - without having to touch a single smart contract.

As CEO Sunand Raghupathi puts it, “The best infrastructure is invisible - it just works. We enable platforms to offer DeFi-native yield without exposing users to complexity, while still preserving what makes crypto powerful: transparency, self-custody, and control.”

Already integrated into systems like ether.fi, Binance Wallet, Plasma, and Lombard Vaults, Veda has become the go-to backend for on‑chain savings, staking, and structured yield strategies.

According to co-founder Stephanie Vaughan, “Veda’s BoringVault framework is already the definitive standard in DeFi, and the only one operating at this scale with a flawless security record.”

But its most powerful move may not be what it built - but how it built it.

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A Strategic Play Founders Should Study

Veda didn’t chase users. It didn’t build a consumer-facing vault aggregator or try to dominate the DeFi dashboard. What it built instead was the abstraction: a universal interface between capital and composable yield strategies.

That decision - to not prove a narrow use case, but to architect the layer others rely on - may be its most important move. While others were optimizing for demo traction or yield innovation, Veda built the interface and let the market build the use cases.

In doing so, Veda pulled a classic move from the Stripe/AWS playbook - but applied it to decentralized finance. Stripe didn’t invent online checkout, AWS didn’t invent server hosting. They each built a clean, invisible layer that empowered others to scale. Veda is doing the same for on‑chain yield.

This is the type of product design clarity that smart investors look for: when your tech becomes the natural interface others want to plug into, you stop chasing product-market fit and instead become the surface area where others find their fit. You become the infrastructure the ecosystem builds around.

And that clarity is exactly what won over Veda’s investors. As one described it, “Veda didn’t ask us to change our process. It just started making our process better - until we couldn’t imagine working without it.” That’s not just product traction - that’s infrastructural inevitability.

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Built to Bridge Retail and Institutional Demand

While DeFi protocols often optimize for one audience, Veda’s architecture accommodates both sides of the market. Developers can deploy new vault strategies using its SDK, while institutions get the controls, auditability, and compliance tooling needed for real capital flows.

Veda is currently in the final stages of an integration with a top-5 centralized exchange, which will bring its backend vault infrastructure to a vastly wider user base. The move is part of its larger push to support not just Ethereum-based vaults but Bitcoin-native strategies, RWA-backed yield products, and more.

With enterprise-ready APIs, KYC layers, and customizable governance, the company enables others to launch compliant vault products at scale - without rebuilding core infrastructure.

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Backed by Builders of the Future

Investors like CoinFund, Coinbase Ventures, BitGo, and Animoca Ventures saw more than traction - they saw category creation. As David Pakman of CoinFund put it, “As more wealth moves on-chain, infrastructure for the on‑chain equivalent of traditional ‘funds’ must exist. Veda is becoming that layer.”

With a syndicate that includes custody platforms, liquidity providers, and protocol operators, Veda isn’t just building in isolation. It’s engineering a future where vault-based finance becomes a standard, composable primitive across applications, wallets, and exchanges.

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What Comes Next

Veda is focused on:

• Launching its BoringVault SDK for developers
  
• Expanding chain integrations and BTC support
  
• Rolling out audit and compliance enhancements for institutional use
  
• Growing its engineering and integrations team to meet global demand
  

The company is also working with ecosystem partners to create pre-built vault templates for savings apps, automated treasuries, and RWA-backed yield products - enabling rapid deployment at scale.

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Why This Matters

As DeFi matures, the backend matters more than the brand. Winners won’t be the flashiest frontend; they’ll be the quiet infrastructure under it. Veda’s bet is clear: the vault layer is the new substrate for programmable finance. And if you're powering the primitives, you’re not just building a product - you’re shaping the rails of a future financial stack.