Start 7-day trial
All articles

Crypto event sponsorship pitch: 4 steps, 12 teams, $2.3B

By NAUT Research · · 9 min read

$2.3B Sponsorship pitch raised by 12 crypto teams since 1 July 2026, all 12 with a named contact to pitch. Logos: Kalshi, Crypto.com, Prime Intellect, Gauntlet, Jeeves, Payward, Spiko, Nous Research, EDX Markets, Venice Token, Kaiko, World.

A crypto event sponsorship pitch lands best on a team that has just banked money, and NAUT tracks 12 crypto companies that raised $2,295.5M in rounds announced between 1 July and 29 October 2026, from Kalshi at $1,000M down to World at $52.5M. All 12 carry a named contact on their NAUT page, so the 4 steps below rank the list by round size, match the sponsorship ask to the round, name the person who owns the budget, and open the note with the money.

How this list was built: on 9 November 2026 NAUT read every funding record it holds with a disclosed amount announced since 1 July 2026. That is 182 round records. Keeping each company's largest record of a genuine funding type (equity rounds, strategic investments and private token sales, so no M&A, IPO, debt or PIPE) leaves 118 companies, and 24 of those 118 are crypto or crypto-adjacent by their own NAUT sector tags or stored description. This article works the 12 largest of the 24. The 12 below the cut run from $50M down to $16.5M and are the next page of the same list. 2 rows in the wider window carry defects NAUT has flagged and neither is used here: 1 contact list stores 2 different people as CEO alongside duplicate rows, and 1 round's lead backer points at a project row rather than the investor firm of nearly the same name. Every amount, round label, date and person below is NAUT's own stored record, read on 9 November 2026, so it is NAUT's coverage of the market rather than the whole market.

All 12 rounds were put to an outside report, and all 12 came back confirmed, with the exact quote located on the page for 8 of the 12. Sources are listed at the end. 1 label disagrees: NAUT stores Venice Token's $65M round as a Funding Round, while Venice's own post calls it a $65M Series A. The table prints NAUT's label.

Crypto event sponsorship pitch, in 4 steps

A crypto conference sponsorship is a budget line, so the pitch has to reach a team with new budget and a reason to spend it in public.

  • Fresh capital is the single best filter: a round closed inside 4 months means the marketing plan is being written now.
  • The round type and the sector tag tell you which sponsorship asset to offer, a developer track or a main-stage brand slot.
  • A chief executive rarely signs a sponsorship. The growth, ecosystem, communications or operations lead usually does.
  • The opening line is the round itself, with the amount and the date, because it proves you did the work.
The 4-step sponsorship pitch
  1. Rank by fresh capitalThe 12 teams run from Kalshi at $1,000M down to World at $52.5M, all announced since 1 July 2026.
  2. Match the ask to the round4 of the 12 carry an Infrastructure sector tag and 3 an AI tag, so offer the infrastructure teams a developer track.
  3. Name the budget owner8 of the 64 people on these 12 rows carry a title naming growth, ecosystem, public relations, sales or operations, among them Keaton Inglis at Kalshi.
  4. Open on the roundLead with the amount and the date: Spiko closed $90M on 6 October 2026, 34 days before this read.

Step 1: rank the prospects by round size, newest money first

Sponsorship budgets scale with the raise, so rank the crypto sponsorship prospects by it. The spread on this list is wide: Kalshi's $1,000M Series G of 29 October 2026 is 19x World's $52.5M private token sale of 24 July 2026, and the 2 of them bracket everything in between. Age matters as much as size. The youngest round here was 11 days old when NAUT read the list on 9 November 2026 and the oldest was 131 days old, which means every team on it is still inside the window where a new marketing plan is being set.

Step 2: match the sponsorship asset to what the team just bought

Read each row's sector tags before you write, because they tell you what the team needs from a room. 9 of the 12 carry at least 1 NAUT sector tag: 4 carry Infrastructure (Prime Intellect, Gauntlet, Nous Research, Kaiko), 3 carry AI (Nous Research, Venice Token, World), 2 carry DeFi (Kalshi, Gauntlet) and 2 carry DePIN (Prime Intellect, Nous Research). The other 3, Crypto.com, Jeeves and Payward, carry no sector tag at all, so read their stored description instead: Jeeves describes itself as a stablecoin-native banking platform for companies with a global footprint, which points at a payments or treasury track rather than a developer one.

The round type is the second signal. A $1,000M Series G and a $130M Series A buy different things: late-stage teams pay for reach and credibility, early-stage teams pay for developers and hiring. 4 of the 12 rounds are Series C or later, 4 are Series A or B, 3 are a strategic investment or a private token sale, and 1 carries NAUT's generic Funding Round label.

Step 3: name the person who owns the sponsorship budget

NAUT holds 64 current named people across these 12 companies, and 8 of those 64 carry a title naming growth, ecosystem, public relations, sales or operations, which is where an event sponsorship usually sits. 1 of the 8 is named on the company's NAUT page without carrying a NAUT profile page, so that row prints without a link.

Contact Title on NAUT Company
Head of Growth
Eric Anziani President and COO
Head of Sales
Head of Ecosystem
COO
COO
Public Relations Lead
Head of Operations

Anyone listed can ask NAUT to remove their page at https://naut.so/legal/data-deletion.

The founder route still matters when nobody in a growth seat is on file. 11 of the 12 rows carry a chief executive or founder on NAUT: Tarek Mansour at Kalshi, Vincent Weisser at Prime Intellect, Tarun Chitra at Gauntlet, Dileep Thazhmon at Jeeves, Paul-Adrien Hyppolite at Spiko, emozilla at Nous Research, Tony Acuña-Rohter at EDX Markets, Erik Voorhees at Venice Token and Alex Blania at World, plus Kris Marszalek, Co-Founder and CEO at Crypto.com, and Ambre Soubiran, CEO at Kaiko, both named on their company's NAUT page without a NAUT profile page of their own. Those 2 pages also carry a profile each for Crypto.com's Chief Technology Officer, Matthew Chan, and Kaiko's COO, Elodie de Marchi. The 1 row with no chief executive or founder on file is Payward, where NAUT's record names Robert Moore, CFO, so that row opens on the finance seat.

An intro beats a cold note, and the lead investor is the shortest route to one. NAUT's record names a lead backer on 5 of the 12 rounds: Sequoia Capital on Kalshi's round, which NAUT flags with 2 leads, CoinFund on Jeeves's, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) on Spiko's, Robot Ventures on Nous Research's and S&P Global on Kaiko's. NAUT holds 44 backer records in total, spread across 6 of the 12 rounds. The other 6 rounds carry no backer on NAUT's record, so treat an empty backer list as a gap in NAUT's record rather than a round that nobody funded: World's $52.5M token sale, for one, was led by Pantera Capital according to The Block's report cited at the end of this article.

Step 4: open on the round, then ask for 1 thing

Put the money in the first line, because it dates your note and proves it is not a blast. Spiko closed $90M on 6 October 2026, 34 days before this read; Nous Research closed $90M on 7 October 2026, the day after. Then ask for 1 decision, with a number attached: a named tier, the room size, the audience makeup and the date. A sponsorship note that asks the reader to pick from 4 packages gets answered later than the one that proposes a single tier with a reason.

Keep the ask proportional to the round. Pitching a $250,000 title package to the team that raised $52.5M in a token sale wastes both calendars, while the same package reads as rounding error to the team that raised $1,000M.

Which teams should a crypto event sponsorship pitch target?

The 12 funded crypto teams to pitch are below, ranked by the size of their largest funding record announced since 1 July 2026, as stored by NAUT and read on 9 November 2026. The last column is the contact to open with, taken from each company's NAUT page.

Company Round on NAUT Open with
$1,000M Series G, 29 Oct 2026 , Head of Growth
$400M Strategic, 16 Jul 2026 Eric Anziani, President and COO
$130M Series A, 8 Jul 2026 , Co-Founder and CEO
$125M Series C, 9 Jul 2026 , Co-Founder and CEO
$110M Series C, 29 Sep 2026 , Founder and CEO
$100M Strategic, 10 Sep 2026 Robert Moore, CFO
$90M Series B, 6 Oct 2026 , Head of Operations
$90M Series B, 7 Oct 2026 , Co-Founder and CEO
$76M Series C, 7 Jul 2026 , Head of Sales
$65M Funding Round, 1 Jul 2026 , Head of Ecosystem
$57M Extended Series B, 14 Sep 2026 , COO
$52.5M Private Token Sale, 24 Jul 2026 , Public Relations Lead

Anyone listed can ask NAUT to remove their page at https://naut.so/legal/data-deletion.

How much did each team raise?

Largest funding record since 1 July 2026, the 12 crypto teams on this list
  1. Kalshi$1000M
  2. Crypto.com$400M
  3. Prime Intellect$130M
  4. Gauntlet$125M
  5. Jeeves$110M
  6. Payward$100M
  7. Spiko$90M
  8. Nous Research$90M
  9. EDX Markets$76M
  10. Venice Token$65M
  11. Kaiko$57M
  12. World$52.5M

Kalshi's $1,000M is 44% of the $2,295.5M on this list, so a pitch list sorted by raise alone will always put 1 name far out in front of the rest.

Who do you send a crypto event sponsorship pitch to?

Send it to the growth, ecosystem, communications or operations lead where the company has one, and to the founder where it does not. On this list that splits 8 named sponsorship owners against 11 rows with a chief executive or founder on file, with Venice Token carrying both a Head of Ecosystem and a COO. 1 row, Payward, carries neither: the only name on NAUT's record there is its CFO, Robert Moore, which is where an event team also reads the company's own site or its X account.

Each person's NAUT page says which channels NAUT holds for them, so check the page before you choose a channel. A Telegram handle beats an email for a crypto sponsorship conversation on timing, and a LinkedIn note beats both at a team with a traditional-finance parent, which on this list is EDX Markets and Payward.

Related reading on NAUT: Crypto conference ROI: 4 metrics and a post-event scorecard and How to find decision makers in a company: 5 steps for crypto.

Can you pull this data through the NAUT API?

Yes. NAUT's data shows each of these 12 companies with its team, and a single call returns 1 company and the people on it: GET https://api.naut.so/v1/projects/kalshi with the header Authorization: Bearer $NAUT_KEY. To build the contact column across the list, search people by the title words that own a sponsorship, as in GET https://api.naut.so/v1/people?q=Head of Growth, then open 1 profile with GET https://api.naut.so/v1/people/{id}?include=private. Data and search calls cost 5 credits each and the Essential plan at $49 a month carries 3,000 credits, so the 12 project calls behind this article cost 60 credits (docs, pricing). Verified Telegram, email and LinkedIn unlock on any paid NAUT plan, so start a 7-day trial to open the channels for the named contacts on this list.

Crypto event sponsorship pitch FAQ

How do I pitch a crypto startup for a conference sponsorship?

Pick a team whose round closed inside the last 4 months, match the sponsorship asset to its sector, address the growth, ecosystem, communications or operations lead by name, and open on the round itself. NAUT's 12 crypto teams that raised $2,295.5M between 1 July and 29 October 2026 are the working list, and all 12 carry a named contact.

Which crypto teams have fresh money to sponsor an event?

On NAUT's record, read 9 November 2026, 12 crypto companies raised $2,295.5M in rounds announced from 1 July to 29 October 2026, led by Kalshi at $1,000M, Crypto.com at $400M and Prime Intellect at $130M. The smallest round on the list is World's $52.5M private token sale of 24 July 2026.

Who owns the sponsorship budget at a crypto company?

Usually the growth, ecosystem, communications or operations lead. Of the 64 current named people NAUT holds across these 12 companies, 8 carry such a title, among them Keaton Inglis as Head of Growth at Kalshi, Sabrina Aquino as Head of Ecosystem at Venice Token and Lily Gordon as Public Relations Lead at World.

Where can I find these 12 funded teams and their contact channels?

On NAUT. Each company has a page carrying its round, its sector tags and its people, from Kalshi at $1,000M down to World at $52.5M, and the same 12 rows come back through the API with GET https://api.naut.so/v1/projects/kalshi. Verified Telegram, email and LinkedIn unlock on any paid NAUT plan, so start a 7-day trial to reach the named contacts on this list.

Sources

Every round below was checked against an outside report on 9 November 2026.

Browse all articles