Infrared Finance, a Berachain liquid staking protocol, has raised $14 million in a Series A funding round as it looks to help expand the Berachain ecosystem.
Framework Ventures led the round, with participation from Citizen X, Halo Capital, No Limit Holdings, NGC Ventures and Selini Capital, Infrared said Tuesday. The startup today also disclosed that its previous strategic funding round in June 2024, initially backed solely by Binance Labs (now YZi Labs), later saw additional investments from Hack VC and No Limit Holdings, bringing the total for that round to $2.25 million. Binance Labs contributed $1 million to that round at the time, Infrared co-founder and CEO Raito Bear told The Block.
Infrared began raising for its Series A round in November 2024 and closed it in January 2025, Raito said. The round was structured entirely as a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT), like all Infrared's previous rounds, he added.
The latest funding brings Infrared's total capital raised to $18.75 million, including a $2.5 million seed round last year. Raito declined to disclose Infrared's token valuation following the Series A round or provide a token launch timeline but said the protocol will no longer use the IRED ticker for its token as previously planned.
Infrared was incubated through the Berachain Foundation's Build-a-Bera program and has created two liquid staking tokens (LSTs): iBGT and iBERA. These correspond to Berachain's two native tokens — BGT (the governance token) and BERA (the gas token).
With over $1.7 billion in total value locked (TVL), Infrared is currently the largest protocol on Berachain, according to DeFiLlama data. The broader Berachain ecosystem has around $3 billion in TVL. Infrared's revenue model is based on collecting fees from various reward streams but does not take fees on principal, Raito said.
Berachain, an Ethereum virtual machine (EVM)-compatible Layer 1 blockchain, launched its long-awaited mainnet and BERA token last month. However, it faced criticism, with concerns about investor and insider control over BERA's supply and its long-term impact on price. BERA has dropped 57% since its February 6 launch and is currently trading at around $6.30, according to The Block's BERA price page.
"As one of the lead investors in Berachain, we believe Infrared will play a major role in simplifying and increasing access to Proof of Liquidity for users in the Berachain community," Michael Anderson, co-founder of Framework Ventures, said in a statement. "We believe Infrared's protocol will unlock significant amounts of productive capital within the wider Berachain ecosystem while maximizing efficiency and yield. This frees builders on Berachain's framework to innovate in new ways."
Infrared currently has a 15-person team, Raito said, adding that the project is hiring development and operations (DevOps) engineer and will soon begin recruiting for a head of decentralized finance (DeFi) and a head of Asia-Pacific (APAC).
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