Privy raises $15 million round led by Ribbit Capital as investment in web3 wallet infrastructure heats up

Privy has raised a further $15 million in its latest round led by Ribbit Capital, bringing the web3 wallet infrastructure firm's total funding to more than $40 million.

Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Paradigm, BlueYard and Coinbase also participated in the round, though Privy's valuation was not disclosed.

Fortune first reported the news, including the specific $15 million figure, with the fresh capital being used to expand New York-based Privy's 25-person team to 50 within the next 18 months across its product, engineering, legal and go-to-market teams. Privy previously raised $18 million in a 2023 Series A round led by Paradigm and $8.3 million in a 2022 seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital and BlueYard.

"The Ribbit team knows financial disruption and we’ve had the pleasure of watching … the entire team at work for years as they support some of the most innovative fintech companies in the world," Privy CEO Henri Stern said in a blog post confirming the raise. "As [Ribbit] say: 'It takes money to change money,' and here we are."

Privy's wallet-enabled stack enables teams to build secure wallets fully embedded into their products — designed to help users get the benefit of multiple crypto ecosystems while abstracting away some of the complexities, including seed phrases and gas accounting.

"Over the last 2 years, we've supported the teams that have reimagined what can be built on crypto rails, serving 50M+ accounts across payments, DeFi, social and gaming and securing billions through them," Privy added.

Web3 projects using Privy include DeFi trading platform Hyperliquid, social protocol Farcaster, NFT marketplace OpenSea and crypto payments app Blackbird.

Investment in the crypto wallet infrastructure space heats up

Privy's news follows fellow crypto wallet infrastructure firm Utila, which also announced it had raised $18 million in Series A funding on Wednesday, again declining to disclose a post-round valuation.

Nyca Partners led the round, with participation from Wing VC, NFX, Haymaker Ventures, Gaingels and Cerca Partners, bringing Utila's total capital raised to $29.5 million, following an $11.5 million seed round announced last year.

Utila provides digital asset infrastructure for institutions, focusing on stablecoin payments and tokenization. The firm said a "tectonic payments shift" is currently underway, with stablecoin transfers reaching $27.6 trillion in 2024 — surpassing the combined transaction volume of Visa and Mastercard.

Another web3 wallet infrastructure company, Reown, best known as the developer of the communications protocol WalletConnect, closed a $13 million Series B funding round led by Union Square Ventures and 1kx in January, bringing its total fundraising to $38 million.

Meanwhile, Ribbit Capital has been particularly busy of late, also leading a $23.6 million funding round for enterprise blockchain platform Crossmint, announced on Tuesday.

Crossmint aims to make building web3 products easier for companies and individuals, forgoing their need to hire blockchain engineers to build out digital wallets, payments and tokenization services.