There’s something ironic about calling it “decentralized finance” when most people still need a PhD, a YouTube tutorial, and a prayer just to earn yield on their crypto. But YieldClub isn’t playing that game, they’re rewriting it, one tap at a time.
Founded in 2025 and now stepping out of stealth with a $2.5M pre-seed round, YieldClub is dead set on making high-yield crypto savings a mainstream affair, without the mental gymnastics. Think 12% APY on stablecoins, no custodial surrender, and no friction, just clean, consumer-grade simplicity on top of audited DeFi protocols like Morpho. (That’s $2.4B on Ethereum and $500M+ on Base, if you’re counting.)
At the core of this? CEO Mahesh Vellanki and CTO Michael Li. Two heavyweights who didn’t show up to play house, they came to build a damn fortress. Vellanki cut his teeth at Redpoint Ventures (DraftKings, Nubank, Guild Education), then co-founded Rally and RLY Network, moving $100M+ in creator transactions before co-launching SuperLayer to build Web3 products for the masses. Michael Li, on the other hand, is the builder’s builder, 20+ years in engineering, including a decade at Zazzle and co-founding Certree. Don’t confuse him with the Kabam Michael Li, common name, uncommon talent.
The investor bench reads like a fintech Hall of Fame draft list. Pharsalus, Flex Capital, The House Fund, and SuperLayer lead the round. Kevin Chou (Kabam), Sam Shank (HotelTonight), Charlie Songhurst (ex-Microsoft), and Auren Hoffman (SafeGraph, Flex Capital) brought the angels. Auren didn’t mince words: “YieldClub has cracked the code on making DeFi truly consumer-friendly.” When someone who maps the real-world graph says that, you listen.
Now let’s talk geography, because YieldClub isn’t just flexing domestically. Brazil is the big play, where stablecoins move the rails of commerce. Over 90% of crypto activity there flows through stablecoins, if you’re trying to onboard the next billion users, that’s not a statistic. That’s a roadmap. And YieldClub’s already on it. The app drops June 23rd across iOS and Android. For now, it’s available for preorder. Tomorrow, it’s live.
The strategy? Stay non-custodial. Scale globally. Grow the product like it’s breathing fire, debit cards, tokenized stocks, streamlined cash-to-crypto conversions in international markets hungry for yield and starving for trust. The $2.5M will stretch across engineering, user acquisition, and product expansion. It’s chess, not checkers.
