While one may be tempted to believe that venture capital money has exited crypto in a big way this year, that narrative is not entirely correct. To elaborate, DeFi, a category that was the poster child for massive investments just a year or two ago pulled in around $654 million over the first half of 2026, even though VC funding reached nearly $14 billion during the same stretch.
Even more interestingly, AI-related crypto projects pulled in roughly double that amount, thereby giving birth to a gap that says less about DeFi’s tech prowess and more about where investors currently see a repeatable path to users. In all of this, Oro sits squarely in the category still getting funded.
The Dubai-based startup, which converts plain-language financial instructions into multi-step DeFi transactions without ever taking custody of user funds, announced that it had completed a $3 million strategic round co-led by MH Ventures and Mapleblock Capital (alongside M2M Capital, Archer Capital, X21 Digital, Disrupt.com, and ZIG Labs), bringing its total haul to $4 million.
Examining the Numbers Behind The Successful Raise
By the company’s own account, more than 350,000 unique active users have onboarded to the platform (operating across upwards of 80 languages). Not only that, a user-education campaign run with the backing of Amazon Web Services recently registered north of 250,000 verified completions.
Lastly, a separate push with tokenization giant Ondo Finance drew more than 50,000 completions inside its first day with other live integrations spanning notable protocols such as Morpho, Kamino, Lido, Aave, Uniswap, and Raydium.
Furthermore, the $3 million capital is being earmarked for four core use cases, namely:
- Deepening the AI and natural-language execution stack, branded internally as the Shield Engine
- Scaling marketing and user acquisition
- Building out regulatory and compliance frameworks
- Expanding engineering and business-development headcount to chase enterprise integrations.
Providing his thoughts on the matter, Varun Choudhary, Oro’s co-founder and CEO, noted: “Over the past 18 months, the Web3 landscape went through a market filter where projects without genuine utility quietly disappeared. Real, sustainable product-market fit … will always attract top-tier institutional capital.”
Keira Nesdale, portfolio manager at co-lead investor MH Ventures, stated that Oro’s ability to “abstract away backend friction” while still maintaining rigorous, non-custodial security is what positions it to lead what she called the agentic finance transition.
Whether these assertions hold true will be seen over a period of six to 12-months given that Oro’s near term targets include the accrual of 10 million users, developing and releasing native iOS and Android apps, and appointing new advisory board members.
**This story was published on HackerNoon under our Business Blogging Program
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