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Crypto lead generation: 21 funded teams, 15 CEOs to pitch

By NAUT Research · · 9 min read

$774.6M Crypto lead generation raised by 18 of 21 funded teams that disclosed an amount, 1 July to 27 October 2026. Logos: Prime Intellect, Gauntlet, Spiko, EDX Markets, Venice Token, Mecka, World, USD.AI (by Permian Labs), Yellow Card, Cyclops, Noah, Vest Exchange, Axis Robotics, V12, River Markets, Pact Labs.

Crypto lead generation starts with the teams that just took money, because a funded team has a budget and a reason to spend it. This list holds the 21 funded teams across 8 sectors in NAUT's crypto funding data that raised between 1 July and 27 October 2026, $774.6M across the 18 rounds with a disclosed amount, and it names the CEO or founder to pitch at each one: 15 of the 21 pitch contacts carry CEO in their title, 18 of the 21 have a NAUT page with their title on it, and 13 of those pages carry an X handle as well.

How this list was built: on 27 October 2026 NAUT read every funding round it holds that was announced from 1 July 2026 onward. That is 251 rounds. 163 of them are new capital going into a company, once mergers, acquisitions, public listings, buybacks and treasury purchases are dropped, and 57 of those carry a NAUT sector tag. A team then had to clear 3 more bars to make this list: a sector tag, a named founder or CEO on its NAUT page, and a round that holds up against 2 outside sources. 21 teams cleared all 3. Every date here is the announcement date NAUT records for the round, and every amount is the amount the team's own NAUT page displays, so a figure in the table and a figure on the page agree.

3 rounds came off the list on the source check, and they are worth naming so nobody treats their absence as an opinion about the company. glacislabs, dtcpay and Arcus (Previously dYdX) each have a stored row the outside sources do not match: the round label at glacislabs, the round amount at dtcpay, and the person named to pitch at Arcus, whose launch announcement names a different founder and CEO. So a detail this article would have printed could not be stood behind. They stay out until the stored row is fixed. 1 more row was dropped before the check: a company row carrying a $30M strategic round announced 11 October 2026 sits on another company's slug and summary, which makes it unsafe to name at all.

2 of the 21 need a label before you read the table. NAUT's own summary for Mecka calls it a data layer for AI robotics, and its $60M Series B was led by a generalist venture firm rather than a crypto fund. Axis Robotics sits beside it, tagged AI and Intelligence on NAUT, selling training data for physical robots. Both rounds are in NAUT's funding data and both teams sit in crypto's deal flow, so they count here as funded teams, and a BD team should work them as AI infrastructure buyers rather than crypto-native companies.

2 more notes on the data. Vest Exchange has 3 contact rows on NAUT for what looks like 1 or 2 people, so this list uses the clean CEO row and nothing else. And this is NAUT's coverage of the window, not the whole market: a round nobody announced, or one NAUT has not recorded yet, is not here.

Which crypto teams just raised, and who do you pitch?

21 teams, newest sector first, with the person to write to. The most recent rounds in the set closed on 6 and 7 October 2026, and the oldest was announced on 1 July 2026.

Sector Team Round Who to pitch
DeFi Seed, $10M Founder, no page yet
DeFi Seed, $13M , CEO
DeFi Strategic, undisclosed , Founder
DeFi Strategic, undisclosed , Co-Founder & CEO
Infrastructure Series A, $130M , Co-Founder & CEO
Infrastructure Series C, $125M , Co-Founder and CEO
Infrastructure Series A, $20M , Co-founder and co-CEO
Infrastructure Seed, $8.5M Co-Founder, no page yet
AI Funding Round, $65M , Founder & CEO
AI Private Token Sale, $52.5M , Co-founder, CEO
AI Series B, $60M , CEO
AI Seed, $12M , CEO
Stablecoins Debt Financing, $40M , Founder
Stablecoins Extended Seed, $16M , Co-Founder & CEO
Stablecoins Series A, $7M Co-Founder, no page yet
Stablecoins Seed, $4.6M , Founder
Payment Strategic, $40M , Co-Founder & CEO
Money Market Series B, $90M , Co-Founder & CEO
Money Market Strategic, undisclosed , Co-Founder & CEO
CEX Series C, $76M , CEO
DEX Seed, $5M , Co-Founder & CEO

3 of the 21 rounds carry no public amount: the strategic rounds at Fluid, Concrete and Saturn. Each was announced by a backer rather than priced in public, so the amount is absent on the NAUT page and absent here.

How much did each team raise?

$774.6M across the 18 teams that disclosed an amount. The median of those 18 rounds is $30M, the largest is the $130M Series A at Prime Intellect, and the smallest is the $4.6M seed at Walapay.

Raised per round, the 18 teams that disclosed an amount
  1. Prime Intellect$130M
  2. Gauntlet$125M
  3. Spiko$90M
  4. EDX Markets$76M
  5. Venice Token$65M
  6. Mecka$60M
  7. World$52.5M
  8. USD.AI (by Permian Labs)$40M
  9. Yellow Card$40M
  10. Cyclops$20M
  11. Noah$16M
  12. Vest Exchange$13M
  13. Axis Robotics$12M
  14. V12$10M
  15. River Markets$8.5M
  16. Pact Labs$7M
  17. PERPTools$5M
  18. Walapay$4.6M

Read the bar as the round, not the budget line you are chasing. A $40M debt facility at USD.AI (by Permian Labs) is capital to lend out, and a $52.5M private token sale at World is a treasury event, so the same bar height means different spending power.

Crypto lead generation for a BD team, in 4 steps

Newly funded crypto startups are the warmest crypto BD leads you can work, and the best list in crypto sales prospecting, because they stay warm for about a quarter. The steps below turn these 21 rows, the 19 crypto-native teams and the 2 AI infrastructure ones, into a sequence of sends.

  • Sector first, size second. A payments team and a perps venue buy nothing alike, however similar the round looks.
  • The round label tells you which budget just opened. A seed round pays for 1 or 2 tools, a Series B pays for a department.
  • The contact is a person, with a page and a title, and in 13 of these 18 cases a handle too. A company page alone is a dead end for an opener.
  • Recency decides the order of your sends. The teams that closed in October 2026 are still spending the money.
How a BD team works these 21 rows
  1. Pick the sector4 teams each in DeFi, Infrastructure, AI and Stablecoins, 2 in Money Market, and 1 each in Payment, CEX and DEX.
  2. Size the spend18 teams disclosed an amount, from $4.6M at Walapay to $130M at Prime Intellect, median $30M.
  3. Open the person's page18 of the 21 pitch contacts have a NAUT page with their title, and 13 of those also show an X handle.
  4. Send the newest firstSpiko on 6 October 2026, then Vest Exchange, Mecka and Noah on 7 October 2026.

Crypto lead generation by sector: where the 21 teams sit

8 sectors, and the weight is at the top. DeFi, Infrastructure, AI and Stablecoins hold 4 teams each, 16 of the 21 between them. Spiko and Saturn make up Money Market, and Yellow Card, EDX Markets and PERPTools are the only teams in Payment, CEX (centralized exchange) and DEX (decentralized exchange).

The round labels say as much as the sectors do. 6 of the 21 are seed rounds, at V12, Vest Exchange, River Markets, Axis Robotics, Walapay and PERPTools. 4 are strategic rounds, at Fluid, Concrete, Yellow Card and Saturn, which usually means a corporate or protocol backer rather than a fund. 3 are Series A, at Prime Intellect, Cyclops and Pact Labs. 2 are Series B, at Mecka and Spiko, and 2 are Series C, at Gauntlet and EDX Markets. The remaining 4 sit outside the ladder: an extended seed at Noah, which lifted its seed to $38M in total, a $40M debt facility at USD.AI (by Permian Labs), the $65M round at Venice Token, and the $52.5M private token sale at World.

Match the label to what you sell. The 6 seed teams buy a first vendor and decide in days. The 4 Series B and Series C teams already have a stack and a procurement habit, and the 4 strategic rounds come with a backer whose own portfolio is a second route in.

What does this list give a founder who is raising?

It gives a founder the 21 most recent proof points in their own sector, with the round label and the amount attached. Pricing a seed in DeFi is easier when the 2 disclosed DeFi seeds on record are $10M at V12 and $13M at Vest Exchange, and pricing a Series B is easier beside the $60M at Mecka and the $90M at Spiko.

How a founder raising uses the same 21 rows
  1. Find your sector's rounds16 of the 21 teams sit in DeFi, Infrastructure, AI or Stablecoins, 4 in each.
  2. Price against the labelThe 18 disclosed rounds run from $4.6M to $130M, with a median of $30M.
  3. Read who backed the neighboursA strategic round at Fluid, Concrete, Yellow Card or Saturn names a backer already buying in your sector.
  4. Ask for the intro by nameEach team's NAUT page lists its people, so the ask is a person, not a firm.

How do you reach these decision makers?

Open the person's NAUT page, take the title and the X handle it displays, and write to that account. 18 of the 21 pitch contacts here have a page, and 13 of those pages carry both a title and an X handle: Tarun Chitra at Gauntlet, Vincent Weisser at Prime Intellect, Paul-Adrien Hyppolite at Spiko, Erik Voorhees at Venice Token, and 9 more in the table above. The other 5 pages carry a title and no X handle yet: Justin Ma at Vest Exchange, Josh Gao at Mecka, Chris Maurice at Yellow Card, Tony Acuña-Rohter at EDX Markets and Evgen Tokarev at PERPTools, so take the handle from the company page for those.

3 teams need a different route. V12, River Markets and Pact Labs have a founder named on the company page with no page of their own yet, so start on the company page, take the handle from there, and keep the company as your reply address. The same order works for any team outside this list: company page, people on it, the title that decides, then the handle.

Crypto lead generation FAQ

Which crypto teams just raised and are worth pitching?

21 funded teams across 8 sectors in NAUT's crypto funding data raised between 1 July and 27 October 2026 with a named founder or CEO on NAUT, 19 of them crypto-native and 2 of them AI infrastructure teams. Among them are Prime Intellect at $130M, Gauntlet at $125M, Spiko at $90M and EDX Markets at $76M. Together the 18 that disclosed an amount raised $774.6M.

How do you do crypto lead generation from funding rounds?

Take the rounds announced in the last quarter, keep the ones with a sector tag and a named decision maker, then sort them by sector and round label before you sort them by size. For the window from 1 July to 27 October 2026 that leaves 21 teams out of the 251 rounds NAUT recorded, with a median disclosed round of $30M.

Who is the right person to pitch at a newly funded crypto startup?

The founder or CEO, until the team is past Series B. 15 of these 21 pitch contacts carry CEO in their NAUT title, including Justin Ma at Vest Exchange, Chris Maurice at Yellow Card and Tony Acuña-Rohter at EDX Markets.

Which sectors had the most newly funded crypto startups since 1 July 2026?

DeFi, Infrastructure, AI and Stablecoins tie at 4 teams each, 16 of the 21 in this list, with Money Market on 2 and Payment, CEX and DEX on 1 each. The AI 4 include Mecka and Axis Robotics, which sell AI and robotics data infrastructure, so 2 of that sector's 4 are adjacent rather than crypto-native. That counts only the rounds announced from 1 July to 27 October 2026 that carry a NAUT sector tag and a named founder or CEO.

How many crypto rounds closed in this window in total?

NAUT recorded 251 rounds announced from 1 July 2026 to 27 October 2026. 163 of those are new capital into a company rather than a merger, listing, buyback or treasury purchase, 57 carry a sector tag, and 21 cleared the source check and had a named person to pitch.

Sources