There are two kinds of crypto stories out there. The ones where fortunes are made, and the ones where they vanish into the digital abyss because someone lost a key, a password, or a hard drive took an unplanned swim in the Atlantic. The $500 billion problem no one wanted to touch just met the one startup that was crazy enough, and smart enough, to solve it: Circuit.
Harry Donnelly didn’t wake up one day and say, “I want to fix asset loss.” No, he was building a DeFi operating system for the big players, something clean, scalable, institutional-grade. But when you’re talking to market makers, fund managers, and crypto insurers, you start to hear the same story on loop: loss, loss, loss. Assets gone. Locked forever. Poof. That’s when the pivot happened, not out of failure, but because reality came knocking. Now Circuit’s building the fire escape for a burning building most folks pretend isn’t on fire.
This week, Circuit announced a $4.5 million seed round to eliminate permanent asset loss from the digital asset world for good. Led by the sharp crew at Nyca Partners and backed by heavy-hitters including Soma Capital, New Form Capital, The Venture Dept., Silicon Badia, Druid Ventures, and Belvedere Strategic Capital, this round isn’t about momentum, it’s about inevitability. Add in advisors and angels from Fireblocks, Galaxy, Ripple, and names like Charlie Songhurst, Garrett Koehn, Leon Marshall, John Horner, and Bill King, and you’ve got a cap table that doesn’t just understand crypto, they’ve survived its worst days.
The heart of the tech? Circuit’s Automatic Asset Extraction (AAE). It’s programmable recovery embedded directly into wallets, multisig, MPC, HSM, doesn’t matter. Private keys? Not required. It’s recovery that waits in silence, then springs into action when things go south. A failsafe built for institutional scale, designed by someone who’s been inside the engine room, Harry Donnelly, ex-J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley, MIT FinTech brain with the kind of CV that doesn’t need embellishment. Alongside him is Tom Gillingham, who led new biz at CoinCover and knows this space like a veteran knows battle scars.
Clients like Tungsten in the UAE and Palisade in the custody space already trust Circuit to watch their backs. Because this isn’t a flashy app. This is infrastructure. Invisible until it matters, and then it’s the only thing that matters.
Crypto didn’t need another shiny layer. It needed a recovery layer. Circuit built one. And now, the $500 billion problem has a serious counterpunch.
