Ripple, North Island Ventures back $6M funding round for cross-chain router Squid

Cross-chain routing platform Squid has closed a $6M strategic funding round led by North Island Ventures, with Ripple joining as a notable participant. The raise brings Squid’s total capital to $13.5M, a meaningful war chest for a protocol that quietly became one of crypto’s most-used plumbing systems.

Other investors in the round include Dialectic, Borderless, Scenius Capital, Altos, and Arche Capital. The money is earmarked for building out consumer-facing products and, perhaps more importantly, introducing transaction fees as a new revenue stream alongside its existing enterprise services.

The numbers behind the raise

Since launching in January 2023, Squid has processed over $6B in volume across more than 4 million transactions. The platform serves over 1 million users and operates across more than 100 blockchains, supporting upwards of 20,000 tokens.

North Island Ventures previously led Squid’s $3.5M seed round in 2023 and has now doubled down. The firm cited Squid’s execution track record and its ability to generate actual revenue from enterprise integrations as the primary reasons for re-upping.

Squid also raised $4M in a separate round in 2024, meaning the startup has progressively scaled its fundraising in step with its growth metrics.

Why Ripple is at the table

Ripple’s participation is strategic, not accidental. Squid supports the XRP Ledger as one of its integrated chains, sitting alongside major ecosystems like Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, Stellar, and Cosmos. For Ripple, backing a cross-chain router that makes XRPL more accessible to the broader crypto ecosystem aligns with the company’s long-standing push for interoperability.

Squid’s technology is built on the Axelar network, which provides the underlying infrastructure for native-to-native cross-chain transactions. When you swap a token on Squid, you’re not dealing with wrapped versions or synthetic representations. You get the actual native asset on the destination chain.

The platform currently integrates with over 1,000 applications, including popular wallets and DeFi services.

What this means for investors

The plan to introduce transaction fees is the most significant strategic signal in the entire announcement. Squid has spent the past three years building volume and integrations. The transition from free routing to fee-based routing is always a risky moment for any platform, but doing it with $6B in historical volume and 1 million users as a foundation gives Squid more leverage than most protocols attempting the same playbook.

The risk, as always with cross-chain platforms, is security. Bridges and routers remain among the most-targeted attack surfaces in crypto, and any exploit could evaporate the trust Squid has built with its user base. The Axelar foundation provides some technical credibility on that front.

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