Another startup focusing on popular derivatives popular among cryptocurrency traders has attracted a lot of cash. Ostium, a decentralized exchange founded by two Harvard graduates, has raised $20 million in Series A funding, led by venture capital firm General Catalyst and the crypto arm of quantitative trading firm Jump Trading, co-founder and CEO Kaledora Kiernan-Linn said. wealth.
Ostium allows users to bet on real-world assets such as stocks, metals, oil, and some cryptocurrencies. Traders can take on higher risks with perpetual futures. Unlike traditional futures, these derivatives do not expire on a set date – assuming traders maintain the necessary margin requirements.
Other fundraising participants include Coin library Venture capital firms and cryptocurrency market-making firms Wintermute and GSR. The round values the startup at about $250 million, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. Ostium has previously raised about $8 million in total.
Marc Bhargava, managing director at General Catalyst, said: “We live in a world where traditional financial institutions and financial products are still very relevant, but at the same time, the consumer base is growing and the crypto asset class is growing.” wealth. “How do we blend the two?”
permanent party
Ostium, which has 15 employees, is the latest startup to join the increasingly crowded field of decentralized exchanges that allow users to trade perpetual contracts, or “perpetual contracts.” While crypto founders have been trying to build “perps” exchanges for years, enthusiasm for derivatives reached new highs after trading protocol Hyperliquid grew in 2025 and challenged some of the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading platforms, including even Binance. Soon, sustainable startups like those backed by Peter Thiel will emerge lighter Binance-related Aster rises to challenge Hyperliquid.
Ostium, a reference to the ancient Roman port city of Ostia, has no intention of competing with these trading protocols, which Kiernan-Lynn compared to traditional stock exchanges. “We want to compete with the Robinhoods, eToros and IGs of the world,” she said, referring to online brokerages.
Kiernan-Linn believes her background as a classical ballet dancer gives her a big advantage. “Ballet is really hard,” she said. “The old schools, like Soviet teachers, were very strict. French women grew up in a very different environment.”
When she was a teenager, she won a place with the Royal Danish Ballet. She danced there for four years before completing her degree at Harvard University, where she met her co-founder Marco Antonio Ribeiro, a former competitor in the International Olympiad in Physics, Biology and Chemistry.
The two kept in touch and founded Ostium in 2022. Unlike Hyperliquid or Lighter, which initially focused on letting users trade cryptocurrencies with perpetual contracts, Ostium focuses on physical assets like metals and energy. While the trading protocol has so far targeted local crypto users who want to play in traditional markets, Kiernan-Linn and her co-founder Ribeiro plan to use the $20 million their startup recently raised to target non-crypto users outside the United States.
“What we are really pursuing is the offshore brokerage market,” she said. In other words, she plans to target non-U.S. investors who want to enter the U.S. market. These traders must navigate opaque broker systems and slow technology, which she believes Ostium could disrupt. “There’s actually very few people building in this space, or certainly no one talking about it in the crypto space,” she said. “This is a textbook use case for blockchain.”