lightspeed

According to Reuters, the artificial intelligence startup Temporal announced the completion of a $550 million late-stage financing, with its valuation more than doubling to $12.55 billion within seven months. This round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Wellington Management, Goldman Sachs Alternatives' Growth Equity, and Tiger Global participating as co-leads. SV Angel and T. Rowe Price Associates' advisory accounts also participated, while existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Sequoia Capital, and GIC continued to invest.The funds will be used to expand global operations and deepen platform research and development. Founded in 2019, Temporal develops open-source software that helps applications, including AI agents, recover from failures, reducing the need for engineers to write custom recovery code. Its clients include OpenAI, Snap, Nvidia, Netflix, and JPMorgan Chase.The company has 570 employees and an annualized revenue run rate exceeding $250 million, more than doubling year-over-year. In February of this year, the company completed a $300 million financing led by a16z at a valuation of $5 billion.

According to Business Insider, the Seattle-based artificial intelligence company Nuance announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Accel, NVentures (a subsidiary of NVIDIA), South Park Commons, and Define Ventures.Nuance was founded last year by three former Apple researchers, aiming to develop multimodal AI models with stronger emotional understanding capabilities. The company completed a $10 million seed funding round led by Accel last July.

According to Bloomberg, citing informed sources, Lightspeed Venture Partners is seeking to extend its holding period for OpenAI and four other assets through a secondary transaction of approximately $600 million, along with a new investment commitment to Anthropic.The transaction, codenamed "Project Mercury," involves Lightspeed's Select V and Opportunity II funds, as well as an independently managed account, transferring the related investments into a continuation fund while returning cash to existing investors.In addition to OpenAI, the assets to be transferred include security technology company Verkada, workforce management company Rippling, AI startup Reflection AI, and enterprise search platform Glean. Coller Capital is acting as the lead buyer for the continuation fund, while UBS serves as the transaction advisor. Lightspeed has invested in Anthropic multiple times, including its latest financing round, which valued Anthropic at $96.5 billion.

According to Bloomberg, the AI startup Inferact, founded by the team behind the open-source software vLLM, has completed a $150 million seed round financing at a valuation of $800 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Lightspeed, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and ZhenFund.Inferact focuses on the inference stage of artificial intelligence, aiming to address the issues of high operational costs and insufficient stability of existing AI models. The project originated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently overseen by the PyTorch Foundation.

According to Fortune, stablecoin service provider Meld has completed a $7 million funding round, led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from F-Prime, Yolo Investments, and Scytale Digital. To date, its total funding has reached $15 million.The company currently offers stablecoin payment services for businesses and individual users, aiming to create a "cryptocurrency version of Visa," supporting the purchase or settlement of stablecoins, Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other type of digital asset globally.

OpenEden announced on platform X that it has completed its latest round of strategic financing, with participants including Ripple, Lightspeed Faction, Gate Ventures, FalconX, Anchorage Digital Ventures, Flowdesk, Kaia Foundation, P2 Venture, Selini Capital, and Sigma Capital.

ChainCatcher news, according to PR Newswire, the blockchain credit protocol Credit Coop announced the completion of a $4.5 million seed round financing, led by Maven 11 and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Signature Ventures, Veris Ventures, TRGC, and dlab.The new funds will be used to support its credit protocol that transforms business cash flow into programmable collateral based on Spigot smart contracts, providing real-time settlement, automated loan services, and transparent credit monitoring.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, decentralized messaging protocol XMTP developer Ephemera has completed a $20 million Series B funding round aimed at building and expanding its ecosystem.This round of financing was co-led by Union Square Ventures, a16z crypto, and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Offline Ventures, Sound Ventures (founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary), and Distributed Global.

ChainCatcher news, according to the official announcement, the crypto payment platform RedotPay has completed a $40 million Series A financing round, led by Lightspeed, with participation from HSG and Galaxy Ventures, as well as institutions like DST Global Partners, Accel, and Vertex Ventures supported by Temasek.RedotPay is a blockchain technology company focused on digital currency wallets and payment solutions. Its vision is not only to provide services but also to lead a global paradigm shift in payment methods by accelerating the acceptance of cryptocurrencies in everyday transactions and payments.

According to ChainCatcher, Lightspeed predicts the following five major trends for Solana in 2025:Elon Musk's X platform will launch a native Solana token: Musk is expected to introduce the Solana token in conjunction with the X Premium subscription service, leveraging Solana's high throughput and low fees to enable e-commerce functionalities within the platform.The market capitalization of stablecoins will grow to 4 times: The market capitalization of stablecoins on the Solana chain is expected to increase from the current $5 billion to $20 billion, primarily driven by startups like Perena and Lulo, as well as the participation of stablecoin issuers like PayPal and Sky.Solana ETF will be approved but underperform compared to ETH: Although the Solana ETF may be approved under the new SEC leadership, market demand may not match that of BTC and ETH. The main users of the ETF still prefer to invest in SOL directly through other channels.Pump.fun may lose its leading position: Despite generating $330 million in revenue in 2024, it is predicted that Pump.fun may be replaced in 2025 by new, more innovative applications (such as AI-related platforms).There will be no major network outages in 2025: With the launch of the Firedancer client and the ongoing optimizations by the development team, Solana's frequency of outages has significantly decreased over the past two years, and it is expected to maintain stable operations in 2025.

ChainCatcher news, according to TechCrunch, Avara, the development company behind Aave, Lens, and Family, has completed a $31 million financing round for the social protocol Lens, led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Avail, AlchemyPlatform, Circle, Consensys, DFG, Fabric Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Superscrypt, Re7Capital, Wintermute Ventures, Caliber Ventures, G-20, Blockchain Coinvestors, Borderless Capital, and Bodhi Ventures.Avara founder Stani Kulechov stated that the Lens v3 version will launch on the mainnet in the first quarter of 2025, utilizing zkSync and validiums technology to reduce transaction costs, aiming to provide infrastructure for decentralized social applications.According to the Web3 asset data platform RootData, Avara was renamed from Aave Companies and is a vibrant collective of pioneering brands in the decentralized finance and social space, including Aave, Lens, GNO, and others.

ChainCatcher news, according to Cointelegraph, Bitcoin and ZK infrastructure company Fiamma has completed a $4 million seed round financing, led by Lightspeed Faction and L2IV, with participation from Astera Ventures, Contribution Capital, Sats Ventures, Chapter One, and FoundersHead. The investment also includes participation from major strategic investors in the Bitcoin infrastructure space, such as BOB (Build on Bitcoin), as well as various angel investors including the founders of Satlayer and Daedalus. The company plans to use this investment to expand Fiamma's business, accelerate product development, and drive the adoption of its underlying technology.Fiamma is described as a Bitcoin and ZK infrastructure company dedicated to transforming Bitcoin into a dynamically programmable asset. It is unlocking real use cases for Bitcoin, turning it into a dynamic asset and the foundation for decentralized internet and financial systems. Fiamma's products include the Bitcoin bridge Fiamma Bridge and the Bitcoin ZK verification layer Fiamma Layer powered by BitVM2.

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.