The Briefing Memo from The Venture Dept. — May 2026

May 2026: Squid announced a $6M funding round led by North Island Ventures and Ripple for its cross-chain swap and transaction routing API. Stable Sea entered a strategic relationship with WisdomTree, enabling SMBs to invest idle cash into WisdomTree's tokenized money market fund, a significant opportunity given the estimated $9.5 trillion in retail and small business bank deposits.

Multiliquid launched Carry, a turnkey liquidity management platform for institutional capital allocators, now live with Metalayer for pricing and risk management via a single dashboard. Predicate shipped allow/deny lists that instantly update onchain enforcement systems with law enforcement flags and human-in-the-loop alerts, and became Centrifuge's official compliance partner for RWA issuers.

Rhythmic co-founder Aaron Marks was featured in Tech:NYC's Companies to Watch list of fintech founders shaping the future of finance. Superstate founder Robert Leshner appeared on the 51 Insights and Crypto in America podcasts discussing tokenized securities, and Coinbase Asset Management announced CUSHY, an institutional stablecoin credit fund offering a tokenized share class built on Superstate's FundOS infrastructure. Portfolio company alfred also published a piece on USD demand in LatAm driven by inflation and volatility.

Read the full memo here: https://theventuredept.beehiiv.com/p/may-2026