Follow Smart Money VC Trends to Capture Potential Opportunities, Summary of $10 Million Investment and Financing from August to October | veDAO Research Institute

2023-11-16 13:58:34

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By understanding the investment directions of smart money VC in cryptocurrency, it helps you keep up with new trends and movements in investment, making it easier to capture hundredfold opportunities. This article organizes 10 projects that raised over 50 million dollars from August to October 2023.

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By understanding the investment directions of crypto smart money VCs, you can keep up with new investment trends and movements, making it easier to capture hundredfold opportunities. This article organizes 10 projects that raised over $50 million in funding from August to October 2023. From the number of large financing events, there has been a continuous decline from August to September to October. In terms of the types of investment projects, the major trends of this year, "artificial intelligence" and "infrastructure," continue to attract capital. It is encouraging that most of the projects summarized in this issue are multi-round financings, which to some extent proves the strong vitality and market fundraising ability of the projects. However, it is regrettable that there are no projects from the DeFi field included this time, and we look forward to more outstanding projects emerging and gaining market and capital recognition. Next, let's take a closer look at the 10 selected projects in this issue.

1. Crusoe

Amount: $200 million

Rounds: Debt financing

Date: 2023-10-23

Investing Institution: Investment company Upper90 committed to providing asset-backed financing to secure more GPUs.

Total Historical Financing: $710 million (completed $4.5 million seed round financing in 2019, $155 million debt financing, and $350 million Series C financing in 2022).

Project Type: Infrastructure, Mining.

Project Introduction: Crusoe is a cryptocurrency mining company based in Colorado, known for its environmentally friendly practices. Crusoe's mission is to combine the future of computing with the future of the climate by harnessing wasted energy to power cryptocurrency, cloud, and data centers. As a builder and operator of clean computing infrastructure, Crusoe reduces the costs and environmental impact of the world's expanding digital economy. Crusoe is creating a future of compute-intensive innovation that reduces emissions rather than increasing them. Currently, Crusoe is still in the Alpha stage, and this financing will enable Crusoe to continue rapidly investing in the infrastructure needed to expand its AI cloud products.

Twitter Data: 4,023 followers, actively and steadily operated.

2. BitGo

Amount: $100 million

Financing Valuation: $1.8 billion

Rounds: Series C

Date: 2023-08-16

Investing Institution: Undisclosed

Total Historical Financing: $158 million (completed $42.5 million Series B financing in December 2017, $15 million financing in October 2018).

Project Type: CeFi, Liquidity.

Project Introduction: BitGo is the first digital asset company focused on serving institutional clients since 2013 and is a leader in digital asset security, custody, and liquidity, providing operational backbone for over 1,500 institutional clients in more than 50 countries, including many regulated entities and the world's top cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms. BitGo offers market-leading trading and lending services through its primary brokerage services and acts as the custodian for the world's leading Bitcoin stablecoin, WBTC. This round of financing will be used for strategic acquisitions, with at least two transactions already in progress.

Twitter Data: 49,000 followers, +0.4% in 7 days, +1.36% in 30 days, actively and steadily operated.

3. STELSI

Amount: $100 million

Rounds: Strategic financing

Date: 2023-08-29

Investing Institution: NGC Ventures Metaverse Fund

Project Type: Metaverse Construction, Real Estate.

Project Introduction: STELSI is a Web3-based lifestyle and Build to Earn platform that covers the entire urban construction process of architectural design, construction, and management within the Metaverse ecosystem built using 3D development and production tools like Unreal Engine. Users can earn tokens by achieving various construction goals that cannot be completed due to real-life limitations. STELSI is primarily dedicated to radically transforming the construction and real estate industry, with its central goal of playing a leading role in the creative metaverse construction industry. This goal is achieved through the implementation of a decentralized token economy system that ensures creators receive continuous and transparent rewards while providing verified high-quality content to market participants.

Twitter Data: 91,400 followers, actively and steadily operated.

4. Tenstorrent

Amount: $100 million

Financing Valuation: $1 billion

Rounds: Strategic financing

Date: 2023-08-02

Investing Institution: Hyundai Motor Group ($30 million), Kia Motors ($20 million) leading, with participation from Samsung's Catalyst Fund SCF, Fidelity Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, Epiq Capital, and Maverick Capital.

Total Historical Financing: Over $350 million

Project Type: Artificial Intelligence, Chips.

Project Introduction: Tenstorrent is an AI chip company building computers for artificial intelligence, headquartered in Toronto, Canada, gathering experts in computer architecture, ASIC design, advanced systems, and neural network compilers. The company's CEO, Jim Keller, has developed chips for Apple, Tesla, and Intel. It has opened a new era of AI and deep learning with its groundbreaking processor architecture and software. This round of funding will be used to accelerate the company's product development, design, and development of AI chips, as well as its ML software roadmap.

Twitter Data: 8,700+ followers, stable operation before financing.

5. Anthropic

Amount: $100 million

Rounds: Undisclosed

Date: 2023-08-13

Investing Institution: South Korean telecom operator SK Telecom (SKT)

Total Historical Financing: $550 million (completed $450 million Series C financing in May 2023).

Project Type: Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models.

Project Introduction: Anthropic is an AI company founded by former OpenAI leaders, and Anthropic and SKT plan to collaborate on developing a multilingual large language model, Claude, specifically for global telecom companies. The core technology of Claude is "constitutional" training, where once the AI model is trained under the "constitutional" training framework, it can self-improve without human feedback, identify inappropriate behaviors, and self-adjust, avoiding the influence of human biases on the AI model, thus achieving "harmless" upgrades of the AI model. Claude AI can handle over 100,000 context tokens, while competitor OpenAI's chatbot can handle a maximum of 4K, 8K, and 32K context tokens.

Twitter Data: 141,000 followers, stable operation.

Related Link: https://www.anthropic.com/

6. Prins AI

Amount: $100 million

Rounds: Series B

Date: 2023-10-01

Investing Institution: AAB VC leading

Project Type: Artificial Intelligence

Total Historical Financing: $122 million (completed $22 million Series A financing in August 2023).

Project Introduction: PRINS AI is a blockchain-based AI-driven digital human (AI Digital People) service provider. The Prins AI platform utilizes blockchain technology and smart contracts to record AI digital human training and application behaviors, and also employs a cryptocurrency reward mechanism to allow users to participate in AI digital human training programs. PRINS AI's digital human technology is now widely used in various online and offline scenarios, including broadcasting media, brand marketing, e-commerce live streaming/short videos, educational entertainment, AR/VR/AI, etc. Prins AI will use this funding to continue deep learning technology research and development, launch more accurate, natural, and efficient digital identity products, expand the team, and recruit more technical talent.

Twitter Data: 735 followers, low operational frequency.

7. Elemental Cognition

Amount: $60 million

Rounds: Undisclosed

Date: 2023-08-18

Investing Institution: Undisclosed

Project Type: Artificial Intelligence

Project Introduction: Elemental Cognition Inc is an AI startup founded in 2015 by David Ferrucci, the former head of the IBM Watson team, aiming to create AI with advanced reasoning capabilities. The company offers two enterprise chatbot solutions, Cogent and Cora, tailored for various applications such as finance, interactive travel planning, and research automation. Elemental Cognition emphasizes its unique hybrid AI platform, integrating large-scale language models with AI-based reasoning engines to enhance accuracy and controllability. Documents show that the company has completed an equity sale worth $59.95 million to 17 investors and plans to raise an additional $5.75 million.

Twitter Data: 375 followers, low operational frequency.

8. Animoca Brands

Amount: $50 million

Rounds: Strategic financing

Date: 2023-10-30

Investing Institution: NEOM Investment Fund, of which $25 million will be issued as convertible notes with a conversion cap of AUD 4.50 per share, and the remaining $25 million will be used to purchase company stock in the secondary market.

Total Historical Financing: $1.6 billion (completed $1.55 billion in four rounds of financing in 2022).

Project Type: Metaverse, NFTs, Gaming.

Project Introduction: Animoca Brands is a leader in digital entertainment, blockchain, and gamification, dedicated to advancing digital property rights and contributing to the establishment of open virtual worlds. Animoca Brands leverages blockchain to provide users with decentralized digital assets and virtual goods, increasing the interoperability of games and applications. This not only helps create a more open and free digital ecosystem but also encourages user experiences of liquidity across different platforms. The company has developed and published a wide range of products, including REVV tokens and SAND tokens; original games such as The Sandbox, Crazy Kings, and Crazy Defense Heroes; and products utilizing popular intellectual properties including Disney, WWE, Snoop Dogg, The Walking Dead, Power Rangers, MotoGP, and Formula E.

Twitter Data: 210,000 followers, actively and steadily operated.

9. Core Scientific

Amount: $53.9 million

Rounds: Undisclosed

Date: 2023-09-21

Investing Institution: Bitmain

Total Historical Financing: $151 million (completed $44 million Series A financing in 2020, $54 million financing in 2021).

Project Type: Infrastructure, Mining.

Project Introduction: Core Scientific is one of North America's largest blockchain data center providers and digital asset miners. Since 2017, they have been actively involved in the digital asset space, providing efficient digital asset custody mining and self-mining services through their facilities and intellectual property. Core Scientific has advanced AI technology to provide high-quality solutions. The company has a large amount of blockchain infrastructure to provide efficient services to clients. As of September 2023, Core Scientific operates approximately 200,000 Bitcoin mining machines for custody and self-mining, with a total hash rate of 22.0 EH/s from data center facilities located in five states in the U.S. The investor Bitmain and Core Scientific have reached a combination of equity and cash agreement to fund the purchase of new, more efficient Bitcoin mining equipment. Additionally, Bitmain has reached a new custody agreement with Core Scientific to support Bitmain's mining operations.

Twitter Data: 12,700 followers, actively and steadily operated.

10. MotherDuck

Amount: $52.5 million

Rounds: Series B

Date: 2023-09-20

Investing Institution: Felicis leading, with participation from a16z, Madrona, Amplify Partners, Altimeter, Redpoint, and Zero Prime.

Total Historical Financing: $100 million (completed $47 million financing in 2022).

Project Type: Cloud Services, Data.

Project Introduction: MotherDuck is a database startup that hosts DuckDB cloud services. DuckDB is a fully functional, free, open-source in-process OLAP database developed and maintained by the DuckDB community and DuckDB Labs. MotherDuck is an independent organization that works closely with DuckDB Labs to build DuckDB-based cloud analytics services. DuckDB includes a columnar vectorized query execution engine that still interprets queries but processes large amounts of values ("vectors") in a single operation, significantly reducing the overhead of processing each row sequentially as in traditional systems like PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite. Vectorized query execution can significantly improve the performance of OLAP queries, effectively supporting the workloads of data services and reducing the number of CPU cycles spent on each individual value.

Twitter Data: 3,961 followers, actively and steadily operated.

Follow Smart Money VC Trends to Capture Potential Opportunities, Summary of $10 Million Investment and Financing from August to October | veDAO Research Institute

1. Crusoe

2. BitGo

3. STELSI

4. Tenstorrent

5. Anthropic

6. Prins AI

7. Elemental Cognition

8. Animoca Brands

9. Core Scientific

10. MotherDuck

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