Building the Yield Engine for the Crypto Economy
We’re excited to announce our $10 million Series A round led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Scribble Ventures, and Launchpad Capital.
This raise will help YO Protocol to expand its risk-adjusted yield platform to new chains and enhance its infrastructure to power yield optimization for the entire crypto economy.
From Exponential to YO
From day one, we imagined a system that could continuously move capital toward the best risk-adjusted opportunities across DeFi, an engine that understands risk, sources yield across chains, and automatically manages your allocations on your behalf.
To build this responsibly, we knew we had to start from first principles. Before you can make any investment decision—let alone automate it—you need a clear picture of the risks behind each position. That’s why our first product was Exponential.
With Exponential, we built an institutional-grade risk rating system for DeFi. We mapped liquidity pools to the protocols, assets, and chains they each depend on, and turned that into an understandable risk framework that is accessible to both retail and institutions.
Once we had a robust risk graph in place, we could finally build what we had in mind from the beginning, YO.
The Yield Optimization Engine
YO is our answer to the fragmentation and complexity of DeFi yield.
On the surface, YO is intentionally simple: you deposit into a vault and immediately start earning. Under the surface, YO is a constantly running engine. It scans opportunities across chains and protocols, uses the Exponential risk framework to evaluate them, and allocates capital where it believes the best risk-adjusted yield lives at any given time. As markets move and strategies evolve, YO adjusts.
And over the past year, that engine has been battle-tested in the real world.
YO has already managed over $80 million in total value locked across its vaults, generated more than $2.67 million in yield for users, and today secures over $60 million in assets. None of the vaults have been impacted by any hacks or exploits, with nearly 15,000 unique depositors trusting YO with their assets.
We’ve also taken YO beyond our own app and integrated it into the core pieces of DeFi and crypto infrastructure. YO vaults are now available through multiple wallet providers, including Tuyo, the Base app, and Binance. They’re wired into routers and aggregators like Enso, CowSwap, Odos, and Velora, so users can route into YO as part of their existing flows.
These milestones matter because they show that YO is no longer an idea but a live, growing yield engine at the heart of how real users and partners interact with DeFi.
The Yield Engine for the Crypto Economy
As we started building YO, it became clear that the engine we were building shouldn’t just power our own product.
Wallets want to offer yield without building a full DeFi team. Fintech apps want to give users access to crypto yield without exposing them to the complexity of DeFi. Institutions want programmatic access to risk-aware yield strategies without maintaining their own multichain infrastructure.
So we took the core of YO and expanded it to become the unified yield infrastructure for crypto.
YO Protocol is the unified yield layer that lets crypto and fintech companies plug into optimized, risk-aware yield through a single integration. Instead of each team reinventing the wheel, from sourcing strategies, assessing risk, assessing chains and protocols, they can just integrate with YO and focus on their product, brand, and user experience.
For some partners, that means embedding simple “earn” experiences directly inside their app. For others, it means creating custom vaults with specific risk and allocation parameters that match their users or mandates. In every case, the principle is the same: YO powers the yield and our partners own the relationship with their users.
Where We’re Going
DeFi has matured in important ways over the past few years. The ecosystem is more robust. The tools are better. The set of serious builders is larger. But the way people access yield still feels stuck in an earlier era that is manual, fragmented, and opaque.
We believe that’s about to change.
As more capital comes onchain, the demand for yield won’t just come from early adopters. It will come from apps, institutions, and users who expect things to “just work”, the way modern fintech already does in the Web2 world.
To support that shift, the ecosystem needs core infrastructure that is:
- Multichain by default
- Risk-aware by design
- Built for both individual users and large partners
That’s what we’re using this round to accelerate.
The new funding will allow us to deepen our risk models, expand YO’s reach to more chains and more assets, harden the infrastructure that powers YO Protocol for partners, and grow the team working on these problems every day.
Build With Us
If you’re already part of our community from the Exponential days, thank you. Your feedback from risk transparency to product design has directly shaped Exponential and YO.
If you’re a user who wants a simpler, more transparent way to earn on your assets, you can learn more and get started at app.yo.xyz.
If you’re building a product and want to power it with yield, we’d love to talk. You can reach us through yo.xyz/build to explore YO Protocol and how it can fit into what you’re building.
We’re just getting started, and we’re excited to build this next chapter of YO with you.