There’s a certain kind of elegance in solving the mess no one wants to touch. Not the loud, glossy kind that shows up in founder hoodies and “disruption” pitch decks, but the trench-level, grown-up kind. The kind that whispers across trading desks in Singapore, pings across secure servers in AWS, and lands in the inboxes of institutional players tired of dancing with broken infrastructure. That’s where BridgePort lives. And as of this week, they’ve officially stepped out of stealth with a $3.2M seed round led by Further Ventures, backed by the likes of Virtu Financial, XBTO, Blockchain Founders Fund, FunFair Ventures, and Humla Ventures.
BridgePort isn’t building another trading venue. They’re building what the venues don’t even realize they need until the lights flicker mid-trade. Their neutral, agnostic middleware acts as connective tissue between institutional trading firms, exchanges, and custodians. In a world still haunted by prefunding requirements and post-trade chaos, they’re bringing real-time credit allocation, coordinated collateral management, and the kind of plug-and-play API architecture that speaks fluent FIX, REST, and “finally someone gets it.”
What makes this announcement more than just another “fintech raises seed” headline is the team behind it. Nirup Ramalingam, who once led the crypto playbook at CME’s EBS and ran the SEF/MTF platforms for FX and IRS derivatives, knows what happens when institutional infrastructure hits the limits of its own legacy. Chris Soriano, Chief Commercial Officer, cut his teeth leading emerging markets at CME and helped invent high-frequency FX derivatives execution before most people knew what latency even was. And then there’s Mike Merold, 25 years deep in trading architecture, CLS launch contributor, and the guy with 15 patents who doesn’t need to tell you how good he is because the system already works.
BridgePort quietly launched their platform in December 2024 after stealth-building through mid-2024. And while names of counterparties remain under wraps, early integrations with regulated custodians and exchanges are already live. With SOC2 and ISO27001 in place, global AWS deployments humming, and microservices snapping like synapses in a brain built for speed, the infrastructure is doing what the market has been begging for, capital-efficient, off-exchange settlement that doesn’t require you to kiss the ring of another closed-loop empire.
And here’s the reality: institutional crypto doesn’t need more promises. It needs systems that show up, plug in, and don’t break when real money’s on the line. BridgePort isn’t just solving a tech problem, they’re addressing a structural flaw baked into the bones of digital asset markets. This raise isn’t a launchpad, it’s a signal to the rest of the market: the middleware layer has arrived, and it’s not asking for permission.
Congrats to Nirup Ramalingam, Chris Soriano, Mike Merold, and the team. The pipes behind the flash are finally getting some shine.
