Crypto Raised $205 Million Last Week: Payments and AI Dominated the Round Table

Venture capital kept flowing into crypto last week, with ten deals across March 9 to March 15 totaling roughly $205 million according to CoinMarketCap Research.

The money did not spread evenly – two sectors absorbed most of it, and the largest single round was nearly double everything else on the list.

KAST Leads by a Wide Margin

The week’s standout raise belonged to KAST, a payments and neobanking platform that closed an $80 million Series A backed by QED Investors and Left Lane Capital. That single round accounted for roughly 39% of all capital raised across the top ten deals. It is a significant concentration, and the investor profile says something about where institutional conviction currently sits – QED is one of the most active fintech-focused venture firms globally, not a crypto-native fund chasing narrative.

Second place went to Cryptio, a data service covering tax and accounting for crypto operations, which raised $45 million in a Series B from BlackFin Capital Partners and Sentinel Global. The round reflects a quieter but persistent theme in the industry: compliance infrastructure. As institutional adoption grows, the back-office tooling that supports it attracts serious capital even when it lacks the visibility of consumer-facing products.

Privacy and Payments Fill the Middle

Zodl, the Zcash Open Development Lab, raised $25 million in a seed round backed by Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto fund, Coinbase Ventures, and SevenX Ventures. The funding targets privacy, mobile, and wallet development – and the backer list is notable. Having Paradigm, a16z crypto, and Coinbase Ventures in the same seed round signals genuine conviction rather than speculative positioning.

MetaComp, another payments platform, raised $13 million in a Pre-Series A from Alibaba Group and Spark Venture. Unitas Labs closed $13.3 million for yield farming infrastructure, backed by Amber Group and Bixin Ventures.

Payments appeared four times across the top ten deals in various forms. That frequency is not coincidental. Cross-border payment infrastructure remains one of the few crypto use cases with demonstrable product-market fit, and capital continues to flow toward it consistently.

AI Takes Two Slots

VeryAI raised $10 million at seed stage for verification and OpenClaw agent tooling, backed by Polychain Capital. Kled AI appeared twice on the list – a $5.5 million seed round backed by Cox Exponential and K5 Global, and a separate $3.5 million round backed by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto and Bain Capital Crypto. Whether these represent two distinct tranches or a reporting distinction is not clarified in the source data.

The presence of AI-focused infrastructure in a crypto fundraising roundup reflects a convergence that has been building for several months. Verification tooling and autonomous agent frameworks are increasingly being built on-chain or with crypto-native primitives, and venture capital is following that development.

The Remaining Deals

Ark Labs raised $5.2 million at seed for payments and Layer 2 infrastructure, backed by Tether, Sats Ventures, and Anchorage Digital. OP NET closed $5 million for a smart contract platform with developer tools and Bitcoin scaling capabilities, with Further Ventures as the disclosed backer.

Total disclosed capital across the ten rounds came to approximately $205.5 million. The week’s distribution — one outsized lead deal, two mid-tier institutional rounds, and a cluster of seed-stage bets — is consistent with a market where large funds are selectively deploying while early-stage activity remains broad.

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