Harvard alumni have secured $20 million in funding for Ostium, a service concentrating on a financial instrument favored by cryptocurrency investors.

Ostium enables individuals to wager on tangible assets such as equities, precious metals, crude oil, and select digital currencies. Participants have the option to assume greater exposure via perpetual futures contracts. In contrast to conventional futures, these financial instruments do not have a predetermined expiration date, provided that traders uphold the requisite margin levels.

Among the other contributors to the fundraising were Coinbase Ventures, alongside the cryptocurrency trading companies Wintermute and GSR. The funding round placed the company's valuation at approximately $250 million, as reported by an individual privy to the situation, who requested confidentiality when discussing confidential corporate transactions. Prior to this, Ostium had secured a cumulative sum of roughly $8 million.

“We live in a world where traditional financial institutions and financial products still have a lot of relevance, but at the same time, there’s this growing group of consumers and this growing asset class in crypto,” Marc Bhargava, managing director at General Catalyst, told Coins2Day. “How do we fuse the two?”

Perpetuals party 

Ostium, with its team of 15 individuals, represents the newest venture to enter a highly competitive arena of decentralized platforms enabling users to exchange perpetuals, or “perps.”. Despite years of efforts by cryptocurrency entrepreneurs to establish “perps” exchanges, interest in these derivatives surged significantly following the trading protocol Hyperliquid's expansion in 2025, positioning it as a contender against major global crypto trading services, including Binance. Subsequently, startups focused on perpetuals, such as Lighter, supported by Peter Thiel, and Aster, linked with Binance, emerged to compete with Hyperliquid. 

Ostium, a name derived from the ancient Roman port of Ostia, is not intended to rival these trading systems, which Kiernan-Linn likened to conventional stock markets. “We want to compete with the Robinhoods, the eToros, the IGs of the world,” she commented, alluding to digital brokerage firms.

And Kiernan-Linn believes her background as a classical ballet dancer gives her a leg up. “Ballet is really tough,” she said. “Old school, like Soviet teachers, very exacting. French women who grew up under a very different environment.”

As a young woman, she secured a position with The Royal Danish Ballet. She performed there for four years before completing her studies at Harvard University, where she encountered her business partner Marco Antonio Ribeiro, a past participant in the International Olympiads for physics, biology, and chemistry.

The pair maintained contact, and by 2022, they established Ostium. Unlike Hyperliquid or Lighter, which initially concentrated on enabling users to exchange perpetual contracts for digital currencies, Ostium has directed its attention toward physical commodities such as metals and energy. Although the trading platform has thus far aimed at users familiar with cryptocurrency who wish to engage in traditional financial markets, Kiernan-Linn and her partner Ribeiro intend to leverage their startup's recently secured $20 million in funding to attract individuals unfamiliar with cryptocurrency beyond the United States.

“Where we are actually going after is the offshore broker market,” she said. In other words, she plans to target non-U.S. Investors who want access to U.S markets. These traders have to wade through an opaque system of brokers and slow technology, which she believes Ostium can disrupt. “There’s really very, very few people building in the space at all, or certainly not talking about it in crypto,” she said. “And it is a textbook use case for blockchain.”