Ark Labs has raised $5.2 million in a seed round led by Tether to build programmable finance tools on the Bitcoin network.
The latest round brings Ark’s total backing to over $7.7 million, including a previous $2.5 million pre-seed round involving Draper Associates, Fulgur Ventures, and Axiom Capital.
In addition to Tether, Ego Death Capital, Epoch VC, Lion26, Sats Ventures, Contribution Capital, Anchorage Digital, and former PayPal executive Ralph Ho contributed to the seed round.
“Stablecoins were born on Bitcoin, and expanding access on the Bitcoin network remains a priority for us,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated. Ardoino described the infrastructure as making it easier to issue, move, and settle stablecoins directly on Bitcoin to support global liquidity.
Ark Labs plans to allocate the funds toward developer relations, product team expansion, and partner onboarding.
Ark’s tech stack, Arkade, has been operational since October 2025. Arkade enables embedded financial operations like authorization, holds, conditional terms, and escrow using bitcoin and stablecoins.
Arkade functions as an open, neutral, and scalable execution layer. The platform relies on advanced cryptographic methods and shared unspent transaction outputs to allow multiple users to leverage the same transaction. In essence, the protocol uses partially-signed bitcoin transactions to scale the network without requiring a soft fork, and developers can use it to build payments, lending, and cross-network settlement applications.
“Bitcoin is the most liquid cryptocurrency in the world,” Ark Labs CEO Marco Argentieri noted, “but it has lacked the programmable infrastructure that financial applications require.”
The technology provides instant execution and Bitcoin settlement guarantees for wallets, financial firms, and asset issuers, Ark claims. AI agents can utilize these programmable tools to execute conditional spending limits safely on behalf of users.
These technical developments could lower costs for daily transactions while maintaining Bitcoin security.
“Every fintech building digital products faces the same question: whose infrastructure do you depend on?” Ark Labs Head of Ecosystem Alex Bergeron noted.
Photo by Danielle-Claude Bélanger via Unsplash.
