Ground emerged from stealth this week with $3.6 million in pre-seed funding co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi Capital. The startup, founded by Superstate co-founder Rieth Nakamura, is building infrastructure for fintech platforms to access onchain yield products.
The core pitch is straightforward: many regulated financial platforms want to offer tokenized assets and yield strategies to their customers but lack the onchain expertise or operational headroom to build that plumbing themselves. Ground aims to become the abstraction layer, letting fintechs integrate yield products through an API rather than engineering the whole stack.
Nakamura spent time at Superstate, which tokenizes U.S. Treasury bonds and money market funds on Ethereum. That background gives Ground's team familiarity with both the regulatory and technical surfaces fintech firms must navigate. The funding round included participation from Khosla Ventures, Initialized Capital, and others, according to the Block.
The timing aligns with growing interest from traditional finance in onchain yield strategies. Platforms holding customer assets increasingly face pressure from institutional clients to offer exposure to higher-yield products, and some see tokenized treasuries and money market funds as a way to compete on returns without taking illiquidity risk.
Ground's model offloads compliance and operational work to its platform. Fintechs get a simplified integration path instead of hiring specialized teams or building custody and settlement layers from scratch. That abstraction can lower friction for firms deciding whether onchain yield is worth the complexity.