Ground announced it has launched out of stealth with $3.6 million in pre-seed funding to build infrastructure for embedding onchain finance into financial platforms. The funding round was led by Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi, with additional participation from Nascent, Robot Ventures, Chapter One, and Consonant Ventures.
Ground is positioning itself as a “money infrastructure company” focused on making onchain finance accessible and embeddable for financial applications, fintech companies, and asset managers. The company’s platform is designed to provide a unified interface for integrating onchain financial products without requiring teams to become experts in blockchains, protocols, or gas management.
Ground said the financial industry’s next infrastructure layer already exists through 24/7 networks, near-instant settlement, and yield-generating opportunities on idle balances. But many financial teams cannot easily access these capabilities because the interface is not designed around their operational needs or customer expectations.
The company is starting with yield as its initial use case. Ground said balances are one of the most valuable areas within financial products, but legacy sweep programs can be slow to configure, narrow in scope, and less competitive. Ground’s platform enables financial platforms to select onchain yield sources, set policies, and expose balances that can grow in real time.
Ground provisions onchain wallets, deploys pre-configured allocations, abstracts network fees, and generates ledger-ready accounting with source attribution. The goal is to let financial platforms integrate onchain yield into their products more easily and transparently.
As stablecoin and tokenization adoption increases, Ground expects demand to grow for additional onchain financial functions, including earning, borrowing, and investing. The company plans to support existing financial platforms and new venues as they build blockchain-based financial products.
Ground was co-founded by Reid Cuming and Sam Yoon. Cuming previously co-founded Superstate as COO and served as VP and General Manager of Compound Treasury, a decentralized finance product that received an S&P credit rating. Yoon previously founded Braid as CEO and led engineering and product at HIFI, where he helped build stablecoin cross-border infrastructure used across hundreds of applications.
KEY QUOTES:
“Making onchain finance accessible and embeddable is a fundamental shift in how capital will be managed. The global asset management industry oversees more than $147 trillion, and there are trillions of dollars idling in pre-funded accounts, neobanks and blockchain wallets. That is a massive untapped opportunity, and we are building the foundation that empowers any financial application or manager to easily integrate onchain yield into their platform. Ground supercharges their products and idle balances.”
Reid Cuming, CEO and Co-Founder of Ground
“Stablecoin adoption started with remittance, tokenization, and dollar-account use cases. Naturally, what fintechs and institutions are asking next is how can they further tap into onchain products, especially credit markets to give their customers higher yield and lower borrow rates. This is not at all easy to do today.”
“We invested in Ground because they’re building the infrastructure to provide fintech developers with easy, secure, and compliant access to many different credit products. So they can enable delightful financial access to their customers.”
Parth Chopra, Partner at Bain Capital Crypto
