ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, Layer1 blockchain developer Pharos has completed a $8 million seed round financing, led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC, with SNZ Capital participating as a strategic investor. Other investors include Dispersion Capital, Hash Global, Generative Ventures, MH Ventures, Zion, and Chorus One.According to RootData, Pharos is an ultra-fast, EVM-compatible internet-level blockchain that enhances payments and applications through trustlessness and decentralization.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Information, disclosed by a person who discussed financing matters with a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, the company is raising funds for three new funds, with a total amount that could reach around $7 billion.

ChainCatcher news: Web3 oracle provider Stork Network has completed a $4 million seed round financing, led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Lattice, CMS, and Wintermute.Stork Labs, the core contributor to Stork Network, is developing the Open Data Market, a tool that connects data publishers with protocols, decentralized applications, and other data consumers through composite oracle services. Stork Perps is the company's first COS product.

According to ChainCatcher news, the open AI cloud service provider Hyperbolic has completed a $7 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Chapter One, LongHash, Bankless Ventures, Republic Digital, Nomad Capital, CoinSummer Labs, and Third Earth Capital. The funds will be used to advance the development of Hyperbolic's open AI cloud platform, including hiring key engineers and creating a supportive ecosystem for developers.Hyperbolic plans to integrate global GPU computing resources and leverage blockchain technology to provide verifiable and secure AI services, addressing the industry's bottleneck issues related to the cost and allocation of computing resources. Hyperbolic's first product is an AI inference service that promises high performance at a lower cost. Its innovative approach utilizes "heterogeneous computing" technology to optimize tensor operations across various hardware, allowing developers to access powerful open-source AI models through simple API calls. Additionally, Hyperbolic is building a GPU marketplace that offers an intuitive and automated interface for users to rent and supply GPUs, supported by its decentralized orchestration layer Hyper-dOS (Hyperbolic Distributed Operating System).

ChainCatcher news, according to FORTUNE, the Web3 weather network WeatherXM Network announced the completion of a $7.7 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Protocol Labs, Borderless Capital, Arca, Alumni Ventures, Placeholder VC, Red Beard Ventures, Metaplanet, GS Futures, Consensys Mesh, Westerly Ventures, dlab, Eleftherios Diakomichalis, and Juan Benet.It is reported that the company plans to use this investment to develop its team and network, and continue research and development in supporting crypto-enabled weather hardware and decentralized infrastructure. WeatherXM has deployed over 5,000 stations in more than 80 countries/regions, producing various weather station hardware devices that collect local environmental data, collaboratively building a unique ground sensor weather network.According to the Web3 asset data platform RootData, Weather XM is a Web3 weather network that uses crypto incentives to improve the accuracy of forecasts. Weather XM's personal weather stations allow owners to become weather station operators and earn rewards by collecting and verifying data.

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, wallet developer Turnkey, co-founded by two former Coinbase employees, has completed a $15 million financing round, led by Lightspeed Faction and Galaxy Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Alchemy, Figment Capital, and Mirana Ventures.It is reported that the Turnkey product suite was publicly launched last August, with its main client being the blockchain development platform Alchemy.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, the Web3 AI project FLock.io has completed a $6 million seed round financing, led by Lightspeed Faction and Tagus Capital, with participation from DCG, OKX Ventures, and Volt Capital. The seed round financing brings the total funds raised by FLock to $8 million, and there will be no changes to FLock's board after this round of financing, as FLock is still in the future Simple Agreement for Equity (SAFE) stage.

ChainCatcher news, the decentralized synthetic social network CharacterX has completed a $2.8 million seed round financing, with the company valued at $30 million. This round of financing was co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, INCE Capital, and Spark Digital Capital, with participation from 84000LP, Mask Network, CGV, ZC Capital, Web3Port, GRI Capital, Fermion Capital, Fan Zhang, and others.It is reported that CharacterX was initiated by a team from Stanford University, combining AGI technology with blockchain. The team recently launched the CharacterX mobile applications for Android and iOS, as well as a developer website for users to create and interact with artificial intelligence.

ChainCatcher news, the Web3 fan platform Medallion has announced the completion of a $13.7 million Series A funding round, co-led by Dragonfly and Lightspeed Faction. The platform provides an exclusive digital hub for artists to promote album releases, tour dates, and merchandise, while also selling digital collectibles and sharing exclusive content to deepen connections with fans.The funds from this round will be used to introduce new early access opportunities, such as previewing unreleased music and offering presale tickets, as well as other member benefits like "video premieres or new updates." Artists will also be able to sell new exclusive and limited edition digital collectibles/NFTs, such as poster bundles and trading cards.Recently, Medallion launched new revenue opportunities for artists in the UK, Australia, and Germany— "digital deluxe editions," allowing artists to sell digital albums that include embedded music players and downloadable audio, images, and videos. Artists can also sell physical merchandise through integration with Shopify.Currently, 20 artists are using Medallion to operate their fan communities, including Jungle, Greta Van Fleet, Illenium, Disclosure, Tiga, Mt Joy, Tycho, My Morning Jacket, Girl in Red, and Sigur Rós.The company plans to expand the platform to hundreds of artists by 2024, with widespread availability expected in 2025 or later. To date, Medallion has raised a total of $22 million in funding.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, and as reported by the crypto asset data platform RootData, Web3 tax startup Tres Finance has completed a $11 million Series A funding round. This round was led by Lightspeed's new fund Faction, with participation from New Form, Boldstart Ventures, Cyber Fund, and Ambush Capital. This funding round brings Tres's total funding amount to $18.6 million.It is reported that Tres provides accounting, auditing, reporting, and other financial services for Web3 companies. Tres raised $7.6 million in seed funding in September 2022, led by Boldstart Ventures and Alchemy Ventures.

ChainCatcher news, according to TechCrunch, Andalusia Labs, a company focused on digital asset risk infrastructure (formerly known as RiskHarbor), has completed a $48 million Series A funding round, with a valuation close to $1 billion. This round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Mubadala Capital, as well as Pantera Capital, Framework Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Digital Currency Group.While raising new funds, Andalusia Labs has also established its global headquarters in Abu Dhabi. Raouf Ben-Har, co-founder of Andalusia Labs, stated that the funding will be used for product development and team expansion. To date, the company has raised approximately $51 million.

ChainCatcher news, according to TechCrunch, the blockchain-focused venture capital firm Lightspeed Faction has announced the launch of a $285 million early-stage crypto fund, which will focus on early blockchain projects raising seed or Series A funding. The fund was initially planned to raise $250 million but ultimately exceeded its target by 14%. The average investment size is between approximately $5 million to $10 million. Before the public offering, the fund has already invested about 20% of its capital into a few projects, with a deployment period of about three years.

ChainCatcher news, the LSD protocol Puffer Finance announced the completion of a $5.5 million seed round financing, led by Lemniscap and Lightspeed Faction, with other participating institutions including Brevan Howard Digital, Bankless Ventures, Animoca Ventures, Kucoin Ventures, DACM, LBK, SNZ, Canonical Crypto, as well as community funds 33DAO, WAGMI33, and Concave. Angel investors include Anand Iyer (Lightspeed partner), Sreeram Kannan (founder of Eigen Layer), Frederick Allen (head of staking business at Coinbase), Shen Yu (co-founder of F2pool and Cobo), Mr. Block (core contributor at Curve), Ramble (president of the North American Blockchain Association), Calvin Liu (chief strategy officer of Eigen Layer), Richard Malone (chief business officer of Obol), and Ladislaus von Daniels (staking community leader).This round of financing will be used to further develop Puffer Finance's open-source project "Secure-Signer," aimed at preventing validators from potential slashing during the validation process. This project has received a $120,000 grant from the Ethereum Foundation, with core researcher Justin Drake participating as an advisor. Additionally, Puffer Finance is creating a permissionless staking pool that lowers the participation threshold for independent validators from 32 ETH to 2 ETH, enhancing capital efficiency.Puffer Finance received a preliminary seed round investment of $650,000 last June, led by Jump Crypto, with participation from Arcanum Capital and IoTeX.

ChainCatcher news, according to Techcrunch, French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI has completed a €105 million ($113 million) seed round financing, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Xavier Niel, JCDecaux Holding, Rodolphe Saadé, Motier Ventures, La Famiglia, Headline, Exor Ventures, Sofina, First Minute Capital, and LocalGlobe. Sources indicate that this financing values the company at €240 million ($260 million).It is reported that the company is a new venture formed by former researchers from DeepMind and Meta, aiming to compete with OpenAI and Google in the construction, training, and application of large language models and generative AI, developing generative artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company plans to release its first text-based generative AI model in 2024. (Source link）

ChainCatcher news, Web3 instant payment company Helio announced the completion of a $3.3 million seed round financing, led by Peak and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from RockawayX, Solana Labs, and a number of angel investors.It is reported that Helio helps merchants, dApps, and creators easily accept cross-chain instant crypto payments, currently supporting Solana, Polygon, and Ethereum blockchains. Its service scope includes e-commerce, NFT sales, SaaS subscriptions, content paywalls, and other payments. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, Aptos ecosystem DeFi infrastructure protocol Econia Labs has completed a $6.5 million seed round financing, led by Dragonfly, with participation from Lightspeed Faction, Wintermute Ventures, Hudson River Trading, Aptos Labs, and Flow Traders.It is reported that Econia Labs aims to develop a backend protocol that provides order book trading and supports integration with DeFi applications offering a range of trading options, such as spot trading or leveraged derivatives. The protocol is being developed in collaboration with the Aptos team. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, according to TechCrunch, game startup Believer, founded by former Riot executives Michael Chow and Steven Snow, has completed a $55 million funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Bitkraft Ventures, Riot Games, 1Up Ventures, Don Thompson's Cleveland Avenue, and Michael D.Believer will initially develop original IP, narrative, and technology games. The founders of Believer stated that it is unlikely to launch any products within the next 3-5 years. Steven Snow mentioned that the company hopes to leverage generative AI to do more. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, according to TheBlock, the Web3 observability platform Sentio has completed a $6 million seed round financing at a valuation of $32 million, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Hashkey Capital, Canonical Crypto, Essence VC, and GSR Ventures.The company will use the funds from this round to operate its established infrastructure and expand its team. Observability measures the current state of a system based on data generated by that system. In cryptocurrency, applications are built on top of smart contracts, and there is currently no unified process for doing this, which means many either develop an internal solution to integrate disparate third-party tools or operate without such monitoring.With Sentio's software development kit, users can collect metrics and event logs based on smart contract events, transactions, tracking, and status across blockchains, including Ethereum, Aptos, Polygon, and Avalanche. Sentio handles the indexing process of this information, but users can then build dashboards to visualize such data. This enables them to monitor potential violations or issues and receive alerts for certain activities on the blockchain. (Source link)

ChainCatcher news, zkSync developer Matter Labs has completed a $200 million Series C funding round, led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly, with participation from LightSpeed Venture Partners, Variant, and a16z.It is reported that Matter Labs did not disclose its valuation, and the total funding amount has reached $458 million. In addition, Matter Labs has committed to submitting its core software under the MIT open-source license by the end of 2022, which means third parties will be allowed to view, use, and enhance the zkSync code. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, MPC wallet Fordefi has completed a $18 million seed round financing, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Electric Capital, Alameda Research, JumpCrypto, Castle Island, Pantera Capital, Illuminate Financial, PayPal Alumni Fund, Nima Capital, Digital Currency Group, Defiance Capital, and StarkWare.It is reported that Fordefi's MPC wallet platform and Web3 gateway enable institutions to seamlessly connect to dApps across various chains while keeping digital assets secure. Fordefi is the first institutional MPC wallet and security platform built for decentralized finance (DeFi), offering MPC key management, self-service DeFi strategy control, trade-time smart contract insights, trade simulation, and risk alerts.