Crypto market data provider Kaiko has expanded its latest funding round to $110 million, with S&P Global coming in as lead investor, according to Bloomberg. The round also drew DRW Holdings, Susquehanna, Royal Bank of Canada, Nasdaq, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Broadridge, Canton Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Stellar, a backer list that reads less like a crypto venture syndicate and more like a who’s who of traditional market infrastructure.
Kaiko supplies digital asset market data, analytics and indexing infrastructure to institutional clients. Its products cover pricing, order book data, trade data and reference data across exchanges and chains, the unglamorous plumbing that banks and asset managers need before they can build crypto desks. The company has positioned itself as the equivalent of a Bloomberg or LSEG feed, but for a market where data quality is fragmented across hundreds of venues.
Why traditional finance is buying in
The composition of the round is the story. S&P Global, Nasdaq, RBC, BNP Paribas and Broadridge are all either rating agencies, exchanges, banks or market infrastructure firms that have spent the past three years building regulated digital asset capabilities. Each of them needs reliable crypto market data for pricing, risk management, valuation and reporting. Investing in the vendor that supplies it is both a commercial bet and a supply chain move.
It also reflects where institutional crypto participation has landed. After the 2024 and 2025 waves of spot ETF approvals and bank custody rules, the binding constraint on further institutional growth has not been access but data: consistent pricing across venues, auditable histories, and analytics that satisfy risk committees. Vendors like Kaiko sit directly in that gap, which is why the round attracted market infrastructure names rather than purely crypto-native funds.
What the money is for
Kaiko has not detailed its post-round plans publicly, but the company has been expanding from raw market data into derivatives analytics, indexed products and compliance tooling. Its data underpins a growing set of crypto indices used by asset managers, and the firm has pushed into providing reference rates and settlement prices that regulated products require. Scaling that product line across more venues and asset classes is the likely use of capital.
The raise also lands in a crowded field. Coin Metrics, Amberdata, CryptoCompare and Nansen compete for overlapping institutional budgets, and exchanges themselves sell data directly. Differentiation has come down to coverage depth, auditability and regulatory-grade methodology, areas where traditional finance buyers set a high bar. A balance sheet backed by S&P Global and Nasdaq is, at minimum, a signal to those buyers that Kaiko intends to meet it.
The broader signal
Crypto funding has been selective through 2026, with capital concentrating in infrastructure rather than consumer applications. Data, custody, tokenization rails and compliance have taken the largest shares, reflecting a market where institutions, not retail, are the marginal buyer. Kaiko’s round fits that pattern exactly, and the investor list suggests traditional finance firms see crypto data as a market they need exposure to rather than a speculative bet.
For the wider market, the practical effect is incremental: better data lowers the cost for the next wave of institutions to enter. It is not a price story, and nothing in the round changes what happens to bitcoin this week. But infrastructure rounds like this one are how an asset class stops being an experiment and starts being a market, and the names on the cap table are the tell.
Kaiko was founded in Paris in 2014 and has grown from an aggregator of exchange feeds into a full institutional data platform. The firm maintains historical tick-level data going back more than a decade, which matters for backtesting and audit trails, two things regulators and risk teams increasingly demand. It also runs the Kaiko Data Cloud, a hosted environment where clients can query raw and normalized data without building their own pipelines.
The company’s reach has widened through acquisitions and partnerships. It acquired the derivatives data business of Cloudwall and has partnered with index providers and custodians to embed its pricing in third-party products. In Europe, Kaiko’s data supports several crypto ETP issuers, and its reference rates are used in structured products sold to retail investors through banks. Each of those use cases raises the cost of switching vendors, which is part of why the sector rewards scale.
The funding context
Details of the earlier tranches of the round were not fully disclosed, but the expansion to $110 million with S&P Global as lead puts Kaiko among the better-capitalized crypto data firms. Previous funding included a Series B led by Eight Roads, the investment arm of Fidelity’s parent, which itself signaled early that traditional finance would be the company’s core market. The progression from crypto-native investors to market infrastructure giants traces the industry’s own path over the decade.
For competitors, the bar has moved. Matching a $110 million war chest will be difficult for smaller vendors, and the S&P Global brand carries weight in bank procurement processes that pure crypto firms cannot replicate. Expect consolidation pressure on the mid-tier of the data market as institutions standardize on a small number of accredited providers.
What institutional clients actually buy
The product that banks and asset managers purchase is less a data feed than a set of guarantees. Prices must be derived from defined methodologies, so two desks computing the same reference rate get the same number. Historical data must be complete enough to reconstruct any past trading day for audit purposes. Delivery must meet uptime commitments, because a pricing gap during a volatility spike can trigger real losses. Kaiko’s pitch is that it meets those standards for a market that was built without them.
The company has also benefited from regulation rather than being hurt by it. MiCA in Europe and the growing reporting duties on US crypto entities both create demand for standardized, defensible data. Every new compliance requirement converts a nice-to-have data subscription into a necessity, which is the position every infrastructure vendor wants to occupy.
One open question is how far exchanges will go in competing with their own data customers. Coinbase, Binance and Kraken all sell market data directly, and an exchange-owned feed is always a tempting default for a cost-conscious institution. Kaiko’s answer has been neutrality: it aggregates across venues and applies consistent normalization, which no single exchange can credibly promise about its own book. The investor list, notably excluding the big exchanges from the lead positions, supports that positioning.