Onramp, a bitcoin financial services company based in Austin, has secured $12.5 million in Series A funding led by Early Riders, giving the firm a reported valuation of $135 million. The raise marks another sign that institutional bitcoin infrastructure remains an active investment theme, especially in areas tied to custody, regulated access, and operational risk reduction.
According to comments the company gave to Bitcoin Magazine, Onramp now holds more than $1 billion in assets under custody. It also said that since its founding in 2023, it has recorded zero security incidents. That claim is central to its market positioning, because institutional allocators typically judge custody providers not only by product breadth, but also by operational resilience, auditability, and a clean security track record.
The firm said the fresh capital will be used to scale Onramp Finance, its recently launched platform that combines bitcoin custody, brokerage, and cash management into a single service layer. In parallel, the company plans to deepen partnerships with banks, registered investment advisors, and fintech firms, signaling a strategy that leans heavily on distribution through established financial channels rather than only direct user acquisition.
At the core of Onramp’s strategy is its Multi-Institution Custody model, or MIC. Instead of placing key control with one centralized custodian, or requiring clients to assume the full complexity of self-custody, MIC distributes control across multiple regulated custodians. Onramp presents this as a more balanced design for institutions that want security and compliance without concentrating too much trust in a single counterparty.
The system is built with partners including BitGo, Coincover, and Tetra Trust. By working across several institutions, Onramp says it can implement shared-control structures that may also span jurisdictions. This matters because many institutional investors operate under legal, geographic, and internal governance constraints that make simple one-provider custody arrangements less attractive than they may appear on paper.
More broadly, the company is targeting a long-standing dilemma in digital asset custody. Historically, investors have often had to choose between centralized platforms that are easier to use but expose them to counterparty risk, and self-custody setups that offer greater direct control but demand technical expertise, process discipline, and ongoing operational oversight. Onramp’s MIC model is being positioned as a middle path between those two extremes.
In practical terms, the pitch is straightforward: remove single points of failure while keeping assets verifiable on-chain. For institutions entering bitcoin for the first time, that combination may be appealing. It reduces dependence on one custodian, one signer, or one internal team, while still preserving the transparency and auditability that many allocators increasingly expect from digital asset infrastructure.
There are already signs of institutional traction. UK pension fund Cartwright has selected Onramp as custodian for its bitcoin allocation, which gives the company an early reference point in the pension space. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Policy Institute has endorsed multi-party custody frameworks in the context of possible state-level bitcoin reserve structures, adding a policy dimension to what might otherwise be viewed as a purely commercial infrastructure discussion.
Building a full bitcoin financial stack through Onramp Finance
Chief executive Michael Tanguma said the company’s ambition goes well beyond custody. His stated goal is to build a full financial stack around bitcoin, including lending, retirement accounts, and treasury management tools. That suggests Onramp wants to become an integrated platform for institutions and wealth-focused clients rather than a specialized backend custody vendor alone.
Onramp took a visible step in that direction in April with the launch of Onramp Finance. The platform offers brokerage services across all 50 U.S. states, cash accounts with rewards, a payments card, bitcoin IRAs, and access to gold, all through a single interface. By grouping these functions together, the company is trying to make bitcoin exposure look more like a familiar financial product suite and less like a fragmented collection of crypto-native tools.
Early Riders partner Liam Nelson framed the investment thesis around standard-setting. In his view, the firm backed Onramp not just because it provides custody, but because it may help establish MIC as an industry standard. That is a notable claim, because standards in custody architecture often shape market trust, regulatory comfort, and the speed at which new institutional capital becomes willing to participate.
The company plans to divide the new funding between product development and distribution. On the engineering side, it will continue expanding its platform and preparing its custody infrastructure to be licensed to other regulated custodians. If successful, that could turn Onramp from a direct provider into a technology and infrastructure layer for a broader custody ecosystem.
On the commercial side, the company intends to expand sales efforts and develop white-label offerings for financial institutions that want to integrate bitcoin services into their own client-facing products. That model could be especially relevant for banks, RIAs, and fintechs that want to offer bitcoin exposure but do not want to build full custody and compliance architecture from scratch.
Onramp also announced that former Blackstone partner David Thayer has joined as a strategic advisor. The addition brings infrastructure investing experience from traditional finance, which aligns with Onramp’s stated goal of engaging more deeply with established financial institutions. In practice, that could help the company refine how it presents custody not merely as a crypto function, but as a serious piece of investable financial infrastructure.
The broader bet behind all of this is that custody will become one of the defining issues of bitcoin’s next institutional growth phase. As bitcoin enters larger and more diversified portfolios, institutions may become less focused on basic access and more focused on concentration risk, governance, insurance structures, legal jurisdiction, and operational control. Custody design, in that environment, stops being a back-office detail and becomes a front-line allocation concern.
Onramp is positioning its architecture as a foundation for that shift. Rather than asking institutions to choose between convenience and sovereignty, it is arguing that a multi-party, regulated, and verifiable custody stack can offer a workable compromise. Whether MIC becomes a true standard remains to be seen, but this funding round makes clear that investors believe custody infrastructure will play a major role in how institutional bitcoin adoption develops from here.