Tim Draper-backed Ark Labs secures $5.2 million from Tether and investors to scale Bitcoin infrastructure

Ark Labs, a Bitcoin infrastructure startup backed by Tim Draper, has secured $5.2 million in seed funding to build a programmable financial infrastructure on the world’s largest digital asset network.

According to a Thursday statement, the round included Tether, Ego Death Capital, Epoch VC, Lion26, Sats Ventures, and Contribution Capital. Anchorage Digital and Ralph Ho, a former vice president of finance at PayPal, also participated in the seed investment.

With the latest raise, the company’s total institutional funding now stands at $7.7 million, building on a pre-seed round led by Draper through Draper Associates and supported by Fulgur Ventures, Axiom Capital, and angel investor Stephen Cole.

Ark Labs plans to use the fresh capital to expand its team, onboard ecosystem partners, and build developer tools to scale its Arkade platform.

Released in October 2025, Arkade is a programmable execution layer built on the Ark protocol that aims to transform Bitcoin into a platform for financial applications. It enables developers to create wallets, payment systems, and other services with instant transactions, batching technology, and self-custodial settlement on Bitcoin.

Tether’s involvement signals a strategic bet on Bitcoin-native infrastructure from the largest stablecoin operator in the market.

USDT commands roughly 70% of the global stablecoin market, with a circulating supply exceeding $140 billion across multiple blockchains. The company has increasingly prioritized expanding its presence on Bitcoin’s base layer, backing similar infrastructure projects, including Utexo, to enable native USDT capabilities on the network.

Alongside the funding, Ark Labs introduced stablecoin and digital asset support on Arkade, allowing partners to issue, transfer, and settle tokenized assets directly on Bitcoin.

The system uses virtualized transaction outputs, known as VTXOs, which mirror Bitcoin UTXOs offchain to enable programmable functionality without changes to the underlying network.