Onramp has raised its Series A at a $135M valuation, led by Early Riders, with participation from strategic angel investors. The platform custodies more than $1 billion in client assets with zero security incidents since founding. The capital will scale Onramp Finance, expand sales and partnership efforts to bring Onramp's technology to digital-native fintechs, financial institutions, and RIAs worldwide, and accelerate the buildout of the Multi-Institution Custody network through the addition of new regulated custodians globally.

The chasm

Every technology adoption curve has a chasm. The gap between the early adopters who will figure anything out and the pragmatists who need to see it working before they move. Bitcoin custody has been stuck in that gap for a decade.

The early bitcoiners solved custody on their own. Hardware wallets, multisig setups, safety deposit boxes, passphrases stamped on metal plates. It worked for the first generation of holders because they were willing to absorb the operational complexity. But as bitcoin moved from a fringe asset to a generational store of value, the pragmatists started arriving. Families. Businesses. Pension funds. Sovereigns. They do not want to manage keys. They do not want to be one lost piece of metal away from a generational loss. And they will not trust a single exchange or custodian with the most important asset they own.

For years, the pragmatist had no path. Take the single-custodian risk of an exchange or fund product, or shoulder the operational burden of self-custody. Over a decade of failures across exchange hacks, fraud, and self-custody mistakes proved the point in losses. Demand for bitcoin was never the issue. The architecture available to hold it securely was.

Onramp was built to close that gap.

The bridge

Multi-Institution Custody is the bridge across the chasm. The protocol-level integrity of bitcoin paired with the operational integrity that institutional capital requires. A 2-of-3 multisig quorum with keys distributed across Onramp, BitGo, and Coincover. The client retains full economic ownership and on-chain verifiability without carrying the key management burden of self-custody and without extending blind trust to a single custodian.

What began as an ownership structure has grown into a standard. Cartwright, the first UK pension fund to allocate to bitcoin, selected Onramp as its custodian. The Bitcoin Policy Institute endorsed Multi-Institution Custody as the preferred custody method for state Strategic Bitcoin Reserves. The MIC network has expanded alongside the standard. BitGo and Coincover have been partners since day one. Tetra Trust joined in 2025, extending the network globally and enabling multi-jurisdictional quorums for families with international structures and clients who value cross-border key distribution. Additional partners are under evaluation.

A new financial era

The bridge is being built at a moment of structural change in American finance. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established the first federal framework for payment stablecoins in the United States. The CLARITY Act is advancing through Congress. The new administration has signaled a clear direction. Traditional banks are preparing to tokenize deposits. Native financial rails are being built that will rival the legacy correspondent banking system. The financial infrastructure that will power the next decade is being rebuilt in public.

Onramp positioned for this moment early. In late 2025, the company partnered with Bridge, Stripe's stablecoin infrastructure platform, to power native financial rails inside Onramp Finance. The same infrastructure backing Visa cards in 18 countries now powers Onramp's cash account, card rails, and the connective tissue between bitcoin, dollars, and gold. While the broader market debates whether banks or fintechs will own the next stack, Onramp has already shipped the integration and is using it as the foundation for a unified financial life around sound money.

Onramp is also in active discussions with several US banks about tokenized deposit infrastructure and strategic partnerships, including conversations about participating in the custody model. Those discussions are a natural consequence of the architecture. Multi-Institution Custody was the first credible answer to a question banks have been asking for years: how do you offer bitcoin to your clients without taking on single-custodian risk yourself.

Onramp Finance

Custody alone does not close the chasm. The pragmatist does not just need a place to hold bitcoin. They need to run a financial life around it. Cash that earns. Spending that does not erode the position. Liquidity without selling. Retirement accounts. Inheritance planning. Gold for analog hard money diversification.

Onramp launched Onramp Finance in April 2026 to bring all of that under one roof. Bitcoin brokerage at the lowest cost in all 50 states. A cash account with Onramp-funded rewards up to 5%, powered by native financial rails through Bridge. A spending card with up to 1.5% cash back. A Bitcoin IRA. Direct access to gold. Bitcoin, dollars, and gold in a single account. For clients who want to hold bitcoin for decades, Multi-Institution Custody is the upgrade path.

Where the capital goes

The $12.5M round funds two priorities.

The first is engineering and product. Continued buildout of Onramp Finance. Stronger corporate treasury solutions. Enhanced security through Onramp Guardian. The infrastructure required to extend Multi-Institution Custody to other regulated custodians globally.

The second is sales, marketing, business development, and partnerships. White-label deployments that let RIAs and financial institutions offer Multi-Institution Custody to their own clients. New custodian partners joining the network across digital-native fintechs, exchanges, and traditional finance.

The goal is to make Multi-Institution Custody the default custody standard for bitcoin and to give every firm building on bitcoin a way to plug into the architecture rather than rebuilding the stack themselves.

How the company operates

Onramp has been lean by design from day one. Deflationary technology and AI tooling let a small team move at a pace legacy custodians cannot match, with operational efficiency on assets under custody per employee that exceeds incumbent institutions by a wide margin. The same conservatism that protects clients’ bitcoin shapes the company itself. It is how Onramp reached over $1 billion in assets under custody with zero security incidents.

David Thayer joins as strategic advisor

Onramp also announced that David Thayer, former Partner at Blackstone, has joined the company as a strategic advisor. David spent two decades evaluating infrastructure businesses at Blackstone. His experience strengthens Onramp's path into traditional finance and the licensing of MIC to regulated custodians worldwide. Additional strategic advisors will be announced in the coming weeks.

I spent the last twenty years of my career on a team carefully and successfully evaluating infrastructure businesses. The ones that endure are built to thrive under the conditions they were designed for, while adapting to those they weren't designed for. As institutional capital moves into bitcoin, the custody question becomes practically the only question that matters. The simpler approach is always better: hold bitcoin, and hold it tight and right. Onramp built the architecture that makes this approach accessible to serious capital at any scale.

— David Thayer, strategic advisor; former Partner at Blackstone

From the founders

Bitcoin's first generation of holders was always going to be the early adopters who built their own solutions. The next generation is everyone else. Families, businesses, institutions, sovereigns. The people who measure outcomes in decades and need infrastructure that matches. The legislative tailwinds, the banking system tokenizing on-chain, the maturation of native financial rails. These are not separate stories. They are the new financial era taking shape. Onramp built the bridge from bitcoin to that era, and Onramp Finance is what sits on top of it. Cash that earns, bitcoin held the right way, gold ownership, retirement accounts, inheritance planning, all under one roof. Custody is the starting point. The financial life built around it is the work ahead.

— Michael Tanguma, Founder and CEO of Onramp

Bitcoin's long-term success hinges on solving custody in a way that eliminates the single points of failure that have hindered the industry to date. Onramp's Multi-Institution Custody model is the most credible answer we've seen, and the clearest path to a category-defining business. We've backed the company to turn proven demand into the industry standard, and to give every firm building in bitcoin a way to plug in and offer their clients the same caliber of security and service.

— Liam Nelson, Partner at Early Riders

Where this is headed

Onramp's ambition is to be the comprehensive money platform built on the architectural integrity of Multi-Institution Custody. For the family planning across three generations. For the individual securing an initial allocation. For the business managing treasury and reserves. For the institution deploying meaningful capital. For the sovereign holding national reserves.

The bitcoin protocol eliminates trust at the monetary layer. Multi-Institution Custody eliminates it at the ownership layer. Native financial rails eliminate the friction of moving between the two. The combination is what makes bitcoin operable at the scale the next decade of adoption requires. Risk-distributed. Independently verified. Operationally offloaded from the client.

The chasm is closing. Onramp is the bridge.

Onramp is a financial platform for people who think about wealth in decades. Onramp Finance unifies cash accounts with Onramp-funded rewards up to 5% through a partnership with Bridge, a spending card with up to 1.5% cash back, low-cost bitcoin brokerage in all 50 states, bitcoin IRAs, and direct gold access in a single account. Onramp pioneered Multi-Institution Custody, a model that eliminates reliance on any single custodian by distributing security across independent institutions including Onramp, BitGo, Coincover, and Tetra Trust.