Acquisition of core competitors, obtaining regulatory licenses, partnering with S&P and integrating with Bloomberg, Kaiko’s twelve-year turnaround has hit the anxiety point on Wall Street that urgently needs compliance and pricing embedded in smart contracts.

Written by: Sanqing, Foresight News

On September 14, cryptocurrency market data provider Kaiko announced that it has secured a Series B extension financing led by S&P Global, increasing the total amount to $110 million. The investors span traditional finance and crypto-native institutions, including BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Broadridge, Canton Foundation, Coinbase Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, Nasdaq Ventures, RBC, Stellar, and Susquehanna Private Equity Investments; existing shareholders Anthemis, Point Nine, and Revaia also participated in the follow-on investment.

This is Kaiko's second round of financing in four years after completing a $53 million Series B in June 2022. S&P Global invested through its subsidiary S&P Global Ventures, positioning it as deepening existing strategic cooperation rather than purely financial allocation. Accompanying the financing announcement was the establishment of the “Strategic Industry Working Group,” hosted by Kaiko and participated in by all strategic investors, aimed at developing the necessary data standards and infrastructure specifications for the tokenized market.

From the Mariana Trench to Wall Street Trading Desks

The founding story of Kaiko begins with a nautical metaphor.

In 2014, French serial entrepreneur Pascal Gauthier founded the company in Paris, initially named Challenger Deep, taken from the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. Cryptocurrency market data was scattered everywhere, and institutions needed it but couldn’t access it; this company aimed to be the deep-sea submersible that salvages data to shore. The brand was later changed to Kaiko, derived from the Japanese word for "trench," and is also the name of the JAMSTEC submersible that first reached Challenger Deep in 1995. The company is still legally registered as Challenger Deep SAS.

However, this company initially had almost no market. In 2017, Gauthier shifted his focus to Ledger, handing over the operational control of Kaiko to current CEO and Chair Ambre Soubiran.

Soubiran graduated from Paris 9 University with a degree in applied mathematics and computer science, working from 2008 to 2016 at HSBC Global Markets in equity derivatives and structuring. In 2012, she bought her first BTC at a Bitcoin meetup in London, later becoming known internally at the bank as “the Bitcoin person.”

Upon leaving HSBC to take over Kaiko, she faced only two engineers and a sparsely populated database lacking institutional clients. With her experience promoting crypto assets within traditional investment banks, she quickly rebuilt the product line from scratch, advanced EU-BMR certification, and expanded the business into New York, London, and Singapore.

Other core management at Kaiko also shares traditional finance backgrounds. Chief Product Officer Karamvir Singh has accumulated over a decade of trading and system experience at TP ICAP and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation; Chief Operating Officer Elodie de Marchi-Chouard is multilingual and was selected as a Bloomberg New Voice; Chief Revenue Officer Bediss Cherif shifted towards global commercialization after leading product efforts since 2020.

Why Did S&P Lead This Round?

On March 31, S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI) and Kaiko linked the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries Index to the Canton Network, encapsulating it as an NFT, embedding distribution and licensing rights, with both sides calling it “the first large index provider to transform mainstream financial benchmarks into on-chain native digital assets.”

On September 1, they launched a co-branded suite, S&P Kaiko Digital Asset Indices, covering over 4,000 interest rates and indices.

Two weeks later, the business synergy naturally materialized into equity binding, with S&P officially becoming a shareholder of Kaiko.

S&P DJI CEO Cathy Clay stated, “Kaiko transforms complex trades and on-chain activities into reliable, decision-ready intelligence, bridging traditional finance and decentralized finance, allowing institutions to gain the trust needed to deploy capital on-chain credibly.”

The Strategic Industry Working Group further amplified the depth of this investment round. Nasdaq and BofA laid the foundation for exchanges and banking, DRW and Susquehanna represented market makers, Broadridge controlled the securities clearing channels, the Canton Foundation is backed by institutions like Goldman Sachs supporting compliance privacy blockchain networks, and Coinbase Ventures and Stellar provided crypto-native support.

This group of institutions, as working group members, collaboratively established data rules, directly locking down core conversations around 24/7 pricing, on-chain valuation, and oracle price feeds, signifying that leaders in global financial infrastructure are proactively capitalizing on on-chain data.

A Twelve-Year Data Business, From Near Bankruptcy to Acquiring Competitors

Kaiko’s journey to today has not been smooth.

In the first few years after its establishment in 2014, the company had nearly no revenue. Series A financing in 2021 raised about $24 million, and Series B in 2022 raised $53 million, totaling approximately $77 million, supporting Kaiko in completing EU-BMR certification, ESMA registration, and SOC 1/2 Type 2 audit.

In the institutional-level crypto data market, the real competitors have never been retail-oriented CoinGecko but rather similar players competing for institutional clientele. Among them, Coin Metrics in the U.S. and CCData in the U.K. directly compete with Kaiko in traditional exchange market data.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco company Amberdata, focused on on-chain data and DeFi analysis, initially formed a complementary relationship with Kaiko on the sidelines. However, as Wall Street's demand for on-chain data penetration exploded, the client networks of the two companies quickly became highly overlapping, and Amberdata soon transformed into the most significant direct challenger to Kaiko in the on-chain arena.

Facing intensifying competition, Kaiko hit the accelerator in 2026.

In February, Kaiko, dubbed by the French mainstream financial newspaper “Les Échos” as the "Bloomberg of the future in the crypto field," actually joined forces with the real Bloomberg. Bloomberg and Kaiko collaborated to integrate Data License data on-chain to address reconciliation loss caused by inconsistent source standards and timestamp misalignments in the tokenization workflow; in May, Kaiko acquired the French DeFi infrastructure company Cometh, completing the MiCA CASP compliance license and enhancing on-chain operational qualifications within the EU framework; in June, Kaiko directly acquired Amberdata, fully encompassing its technical accumulation in DeFi protocol data, on-chain wallet tracking, and MEV monitoring dimensions while opening up networks to North American institutional clients.

By the time this financing round was officially announced, Kaiko revealed that it had covered over 150 exchanges and protocols, serving over 250 financial institutions and regulatory bodies. This company transformed from a nearly bankrupt startup in Paris to an on-chain financial data infrastructure provider supported simultaneously by Standard & Poor’s, Nasdaq, BNP Paribas, and Bloomberg over twelve years.