Morpho Association has raised $175 million in a round co-led by Paradigm, a16z Crypto, and Ribbit Capital, with Apollo Funds and VanEck among the strategic participants. The round, which values Morpho at $2 billion, is among the largest fundraises in DeFi history.
Morpho Association has raised $175 million in a funding round co-led by Paradigm, a16z Crypto, and Ribbit Capital, the protocol announced on X Tuesday morning. The financing comes at a $2 billion valuation and ranks among the largest fundraises in decentralized finance to date, according to Morpho’s own press release.
Strategic participants include Apollo Funds, VanEck, Circle Ventures, Ledger, and Cathay Innovation. The round also drew Variant, Wintermute Ventures, Prelude, IOSG Ventures, HashKey Capital, SBI Group, Bpifrance, Mirana, NJJ Capital, and more than ten additional partners.
Co-founder Paul Frambot framed the raise as “the largest raise DeFi has ever seen.” Morpho’s official blog post described the round as “one of the largest ever decentralized finance rounds.”
Morpho now holds $6.49 billion in total value locked, per DefiLlama, making it one of the larger lending protocols by deposits. The MORPHO governance token trades at $1.86, giving the protocol a market capitalization of $1.20 billion and a fully diluted valuation of $1.85 billion, per CoinGecko.
The capital will go toward what Morpho describes as “the open credit network for the world,” targeting the $200 trillion global credit market. Morpho already counts more than $11 billion in lifetime deposits and works with Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Fireblocks, Bitwise, and Anchorage Digital, among other institutional counterparties.
Apollo Funds’ inclusion is the most notable departure from the standard crypto venture syndicate. Apollo manages more than $700 billion in assets and stands among the world’s largest alternative-credit firms. Its presence alongside Paradigm and a16z Crypto signals that large asset managers are now willing to take direct equity exposure to open-source lending infrastructure.
VanEck’s participation reinforces the same theme. The asset manager already offers crypto ETFs and tokenization products. Backing Morpho at the infrastructure layer extends that strategy into the protocol stack.
“The true value of finance has always been held back by dated infrastructure, fragmented systems, and extractive intermediaries,” Frambot said in the press release. “We’re building the open credit network for the world, connecting those with excess capital to those who need financing, globally.”
Quotes from the lead investors framed the bet in broad structural terms. “In the years to come, every bank, asset manager, and pension fund will want exposure to onchain credit markets,” said Frankie, General Partner at Paradigm. “Morpho’s open infrastructure is laying the foundation for global finance to move onchain by transforming siloed lending products into a single connected market.”
A16z Crypto General Partner Guy Wuollet described the round as a continuation of a long-running thesis: “The simplicity and security of its technology continue to push borrowing and lending forward for some of the world’s leading financial institutions.”
Ribbit Capital’s Gabe Mennesson called lending “the largest profit pool in financial services” and described Morpho as “the most ambitious effort we’ve seen to rebuild the credit stack from first principles. Some of the world’s leading institutions are already using Morpho to launch tokenized credit products, and we’re still in the early innings.”
The round is Morpho Association’s fourth institutional fundraise since 2021. Previous backers include a16z Crypto, Ribbit, Coinbase Ventures, Variant, Pantera Capital, and Nascent. The protocol launched in 2022 and built its current TVL base over four years.
What Morpho has not yet detailed: specific deployment timelines for the capital, which new institutional integrations are planned, or how it intends to compete with rivals including Aave and Compound as each pursues the same institutional-DeFi market.
