Cambrian, a blockchain data infrastructure startup backed by a16z CSX, closed a $6 million seed round on June 24, 2026, co-led by Franklin Templeton and Polychain Capital. The round was structured as a SAFE with token warrants.
Flow Traders, Selini Capital, Paper Ventures, and Nomad Capital joined as additional investors, alongside angel backers Jason Mo, Avi Felman, Alex Lee, and Willy Chuang. The seed brings Cambrian's total funding to $11.9 million, following a $5.9 million pre-seed led by Andreessen Horowitz's Crypto Startup Accelerator in early 2025.
Cambrian builds APIs for institutions and AI agents allocating capital across DeFi protocols, aggregating on-chain and off-chain financial data: yield rates, lending markets, DEX liquidity, wallet activity, and market sentiment. The product targets a gap distinct from price-feed oracles: where Chainlink and Pyth deliver asset prices, Cambrian focuses on verifiable, queryable financial state across chains. The network currently indexes $4.5 billion in lending TVL across the four largest lending protocols, tracks 1,789 vaults across 895 curators, and monitors more than 320,000 DEX pools on Base and Solana.
Franklin Templeton's participation carries more than capital. The firm, which manages more than $1.5 trillion in assets and already issues a tokenized money-market fund on-chain, has a direct institutional need for reliable on-chain data infrastructure. Polychain Capital, one of the earliest dedicated crypto venture funds, co-led the round. "We are the only data provider designed from the outset to support both centralized and verifiable network modes," Cambrian said in announcing the round, describing its approach as covering both a traditional API layer and a decentralized validator network.
The company said it will use the capital to broaden blockchain and protocol coverage and accelerate development of its verifiable oracle network, including adding Ethereum mainnet support.
