Morpho Raises $175M in One of DeFi's Largest-Ever Funding Rounds - "The Defiant"

Morpho Association has raised $175 million in a funding round co-led by Paradigm, a16z Crypto, and Ribbit Capital, the protocol announced on X Tuesday morning. The financing comes at a $2 billion valuation and ranks among the largest fundraises in decentralized finance to date, according to Morpho's own press release.

Strategic participants include Apollo Funds, VanEck, Circle Ventures, Ledger, and Cathay Innovation. The round also drew Variant, Wintermute Ventures, Prelude, IOSG Ventures, HashKey Capital, SBI Group, Bpifrance, Mirana, NJJ Capital, and more than ten additional partners.

Co-founder Paul Frambot framed the raise as "the largest raise DeFi has ever seen." Morpho's official blog post described the round as "one of the largest ever decentralized finance rounds." The $175 million figure surpasses Uniswap Labs' $165 million equity raise in October 2022, the prior widely cited benchmark for a pure DeFi protocol round. The claim has not been independently verified against a comprehensive DeFi fundraising database; the characterization in Morpho's own communications is "among the largest," not definitively first.

Morpho now holds $6.49 billion in total value locked, per DefiLlama, making it one of the larger lending protocols by deposits. The MORPHO governance token trades at $1.86, giving the protocol a market capitalization of $1.20 billion and a fully diluted valuation of $1.85 billion, per CoinGecko.