Veda locks $18m to push vault-based DeFi beyond the crypto bubble

DeFi’s complexity has long been a barrier to mainstream adoption. Veda, which hit $3.5 billion in TVL within eight months by abstracting that complexity, just raised $18 million to scale its vault system across a broader class of financial platforms.

On June 23, DeFi infrastructure firm Veda announced an $18 million funding round led by CoinFund, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Animoca Ventures, GSR, Mantle EcoFund, BitGo, Draper Dragon, and other heavyweight investors.

The capital injection comes as Veda sharpens its focus beyond crypto-native ecosystems, aiming to embed its vault-based infrastructure into a wider range of financial platforms.

Since its early 2024 launch, the infrastructure provider’s modular vault system has gained traction, processing deposits from over 100,000 users and integrating with dozens of protocols. Its vault framework, which abstracts the complexity of DeFi yield generation, is now being positioned as core infrastructure for wallets, fintech apps, and exchanges.

Rewriting DeFi’s playbook for mainstream finance

Veda’s rapid ascent to $3.5 billion in total value locked reveals a fundamental truth about DeFi’s next phase: the winning protocols won’t be those that shout the loudest, but those that mask complexity the most effectively.

The startup’s vault system operates like a financial API layer, handling cross-chain yield strategies, risk management, and execution while allowing integrated platforms, such as DeFi protocols and traditional fintech apps, to present users with a familiar interface. The idea is simple: let the app control the user experience, while Veda handles the backend complexity that DeFi typically exposes.

At its core, Veda’s technology standardizes yield-bearing activities, such as staking, restaking, and liquidity provisioning, into modular smart contracts that apps can plug into without rebuilding the wheel. This explains why protocols like Ether.fi and Mantle have adopted its vaults as foundational components rather than competitive products.

The vaults’ interoperability has turned them into a shared primitive, similar to how AWS became the invisible backbone for web applications. Veda’s goal isn’t to make DeFi more visible. It’s to render it invisible.

For developers, that means fewer maintenance and composability headaches. For platforms, it means scalable, yield-generating features that don’t require educating users on the risks of DeFi or bridging across chains. And for users, it could mean earning yield or staking rewards through the same interfaces they already trust.