DeFi Earning Aggregator Turtle Raises $5.5 Million

On-chain liquidity distribution protocol Turtle has raised $5.5 million in new capital, bringing its total funding to $11.7 million. The project will use the fresh funding to expand its engineering team, develop its DeFi yield-earning product infrastructure, and deepen its integrations across multiple blockchain ecosystems, according to a press release shared with The Defiant.

The funding round saw participation from institutional investors including GSR, FalconX, Anchorage VC, as well as founders from Polygon, 1inch, and Gnosis.

Turtle describes itself as an infrastructure hub that moves liquidity across decentralized finance, connecting capital providers and protocols through a “coordination layer” that matches liquidity with earning opportunities, while tracking wallet and vault activity on-chain.

“Liquidity is the infrastructure everything else runs on. It’s long been opaque, fragmented, and expensive. We’re making liquidity programmable – transparent, efficient, and coordinated – so protocols can attract capital sustainably, and capital providers can deploy it with confidence,” Essi Lagevardi, the CEO of Turtle, said in the release.

DeFi earning opportunities on Turtle. Source: Turtle

Turtle’s total value locked (TVL) across its earning vaults has climbed above $726 million, according to its website, though The Defiant was unable to independently verify the data. As of press time, the platform’s highest earning opportunity comes from Yearn AUSD on the Katana network, offering over 45% APR through a mix of KAT tokens and AUSD-based assets.

The company says more than 360,000 wallets have connected to its protocol, routing over $5.5 billion in liquidity across web3.

In mid-April, Layer 1 blockchain TAC teamed up with Turtle to being $150 million in Ethereum-based liquidity to the TON blockchain. The goal was to help attract decentralized applications to build on TAC, which allows Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based DApps to gain access to the TON ecosystem.

Since its launch in 2024, Turtle has partnered with networks such as Avalanche and Linea and introduced vaults that help liquidity providers earn passive rewards. The company says it has made more than $6 million in revenue in the 18 months since it launched.