[Funding alert] Stader Labs raises $12.5M at a valuation of $450M

Cryptocurrency staking management platform, Stader Labs on Thursday raised $12.5 million in a strategic private sale that values the company up to $450 million.

The sale was led by Three Arrows Capital with additional participation from Blockchain.com, Accomplice, DACM, GoldenTree Asset Management, Accel, Amber, 4RC, Figment and select angels, including Prabhakar Reddy, Co-founder of FalconX; and Matt Cantieri, GM at Anchor Protocol.

Founded in April 2021 by Amitej Gajjala, Sidhartha Doddipalli and Dheeraj Borra, Stader is a non-custodial, smart contract-based staking platform that helps retail and institutions conveniently discover and access staking solutions.

Its two core products are Stake Pools, where users can safely and easily stake in pre-defined baskets of validators grouped by performance, and Liquid Staking, where users receive a liquid token (LunaX) when staking to participate in yield-boosting DeFi strategies.

According to the press statement, the staking infrastructure platform will expand to other L1s to bring convenient, safe staking solutions to retail and institutional funds

Speaking on the fundraise, Amitej Gajjala, Co-founder and CEO, Stader Labs stated,

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“This capital will be strategically deployed to accelerate our cross-chain expansion, as well as to nurture our growing ecosystem of third-parties developing staking applications with decentralised Stader infrastructure.”

Thanks to its staking infrastructure that claims to make it easy for delegators to stake with a basket of validators, Stader has a core role in helping PoS networks decentralise.

“Since launching in November 2021, there are over 15,000 unique wallets staking over 5.9 million LUNA with a total value locked of around $500 million. These numbers underscore both Stader’s early traction and the broader market opportunity in staking infrastructure,” added Kyle Davies of Three Arrows Capital.

Stader previously raised $4 million from Pantera, Coinbase Ventures, Jump Capital, True Ventures, Hypersphere, Proof, Ledger Prime, Huobi Ventures, Solidity Ventures, and Double Peak.