Payments Gobble Up $2.87B in Fundraising Feast – BVNK Swallows the Biggest Slice

Crypto fundraising staged a heroic, liquidity-soaked comeback last week, vacuuming up a cool $2.87 billion across the ten fattest deals, per CoinMarketCap. The capital river flowed overwhelmingly toward payments, a clear signal that big money is betting on crypto’s boring-but-profitable future as the new plumbing.

Top 10 raises

1. BVNK – $1.8 B – This crypto-native neobank and payments platform, letting businesses juggle fiat and digital assets, just secured a war chest that makes it one of the best-capitalized entities in the space. Someone’s building a fortress.
2. Kalshi – $1.0 B – A regulated prediction-market arena where degens can bet on everything from inflation numbers to political drama, proving there’s always a market for gambling on reality.
3. Ironlight – $21 M – Focused on the noble quest of tokenizing real-world assets like real estate and treasuries, because sometimes you just want a blockchain IOU for a building.
4. Stripe – $14.6 M – The legacy payments behemoth dipped a toe back in, raising a crypto-specific round to double down on stablecoin payouts and on-chain acceptance. The old guard is back for seconds.
5. TransFi – $14.2 M – Building bridges for cross-border fiat-to-crypto movement, targeting emerging markets where the traditional banking system is more of a suggestion.
6. dtcpay – $10 M – Provides merchant-friendly crypto payment services, trying to make spending your digital gains as easy as swiping a card, a concept still foreign to many HODLers.
7. Derivio – $6 M – A trading platform that marries derivatives with AI agents for automated strategies, for those who’d rather let a robot lose their money for them.
8. Capital B (formerly The Blockchain Group) – $3.5 M – Operating as a Decentralized Autonomous Treasury, it offers structured on-chain capital allocation. Fancy words for a smart wallet with a budget.
9. SwarmBase – $3 M – Supplies infrastructure for creating and coordinating autonomous AI agents within crypto, because what could go wrong with letting bots talk to each other on-chain?
10. Watt2Trade – $1.6 M – A DEX focused on synthetic assets, letting you trade tokenized commodities without the hassle of, you know, storing barrels of oil in your garage.

Sector breakdown

• Payments & neobanking: $1.85 B (64% of total) across BVNK, Stripe, TransFi and dtcpay. The clear alpha chad of the week.
• Prediction markets: $1.0 B (35% of total) from Kalshi. A billion-dollar vote of confidence in our collective desire to bet on everything.
• RWA tokenization: $21 M (Ironlight). Bringing boomer assets to the chain, one slow step at a time.
• AI & AI agents: $9 M combined (Derivio, SwarmBase). The narrative lives, even if the funding is comparatively modest.
• Trading & synthetic assets: $1.6 M (Watt2Trade). A smaller slice of the pie for synthetic degeneracy.
• Treasury/DAT: $3.5 M (Capital B). DAO treasury management: because someone has to be the responsible one.

Key takeaways The big money is placing its chips on crypto as the