financing

Stablecoin company Fin.com announced the completion of a $20 million seed round financing, led by Expa and Uber co-founder Garrett Camp, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Tenet Fund, Figure founder, Mesh founder Bam Azizi, Second Sight Ventures, and Gulf and African sovereign and royal family offices.Fin.com was co-founded by Bangladeshi founder Nabeel Alamgir and Pakistani founder Mustafa Dar, dedicated to solving the "last mile" problem of stablecoin conversion to local bank accounts or digital wallets, providing white-label payment infrastructure to financial service companies, consumer platforms, and prediction markets. Its client platforms collectively serve over 800 million users. The company focuses on markets in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, with offices currently in New York, Las Vegas, Dubai, Dhaka, Bangalore, and Lahore.

According to The Information, Chinese AI chip company Biren Technology is planning to raise approximately $1 billion in funding.The related financing plan is currently in the preparation stage, coinciding with the acceleration of production expansion, research and development, and competition for the Nvidia replacement market among domestic Chinese AI chip manufacturers.

The Jiangsu Securities Regulatory Bureau issued a risk warning stating that recently some institutions and individuals have been speculating on the concept of RWA (Real World Asset Tokenization), using phrases like "backed by physical assets, guaranteed principal with high returns, low risk and steady appreciation" to attract public investment. Related activities may give rise to illegal fundraising, fraud, money laundering, and other criminal risks.The Jiangsu Securities Regulatory Bureau emphasized that any financing activities conducted domestically under the name of RWA are illegal financial activities. Without consent or filing, RWA business should not be conducted abroad, and investors are reminded to be wary of promotions such as "guaranteed principal with high returns" and "risk-free profits."

According to The Information, AI drone company Shield AI is in talks for a new round of financing at a valuation of at least $20 billion. This comes just six months after its $2 billion Series G funding round closed, which had a valuation of $12.7 billion.The company expects revenue growth of over 80% this year, reaching at least $540 million.

According to TechCrunch, AI networking technology company Cornelis announced the completion of a $205 million financing round, led by IAG Capital Partners. The company was spun off from Intel in 2020 and develops networking technology that helps AI chips communicate more effectively. It has released a product called Active Compute Fabric, which addresses the issue of a significant amount of GPU time being wasted waiting for data to arrive by allowing chips to process and send information simultaneously.Cornelis competes with Nvidia using an open architecture, allowing customers to use various GPU and accelerator hardware on its network architecture. Although Nvidia chips can technically run on other network architectures, they are optimized for their own software, making customers more inclined to use the full Nvidia GPU stack. Cornelis has begun shipping products and is developing a new generation of products expected to be released later this year.

The trading card market infrastructure Deadstock announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed round financing, led by Bullish (NYSE: BLSH) venture capital division Bullish Capital, with participation from a group of angel investors.The funds will support Deadstock in completing public testing and entering the next phase to build the infrastructure for a global liquidity trading card market.

The perpetual contract platform RWAperp announced the completion of a $2 million financing round, with a post-investment valuation of $50 million. Brad Bao, co-founder of Lime, Tim Shi, co-founder of Cresta AI, Phil Duan, a member of the Tesla Autopilot team, William Freiberg, a member of Crux, Charles Ferguson, as well as members of the a16z and Sequoia Scout systems participated in the investment.RWAperp is a decentralized perpetual contract protocol aimed at traditional financial assets, currently launched on OKX X Layer, and has opened 19 markets covering BTC, ETH, SOL, Korean and US stocks, the S&P 500 index, DRAM index, gold, silver, and WTI crude oil. Users can settle using USDC, USDT, or USDG, gaining leveraged long and short exposure to stocks, indices, commodities, and crypto assets without the need to hold, custody, or tokenize the underlying assets.RWAperp is primarily designed around the trading characteristics of the stock market, focusing on trading, pricing, liquidity, and risk management systems, and addressing situations such as market closures, overnight gaps, suspensions, and corporate actions. The platform employs a multi-issuer comprehensive oracle and provides a professional order book trading terminal. RWAperp is also developing Agent Mode. This AI feature aims to understand natural language trading instructions, analyze market conditions, and gradually support trading execution operations such as opening positions, position management, and closing positions.

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 official news, the security token trading platform tZERO announced a new round of financing, led by existing investors Marc and Max Cohodes, with participation from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), investor Bill Fleckenstein, and partner Dinari.Neighborhood Intelligence also pledged to support this round of financing, with some of the funds to be provided when tZERO announces a binding strategic transaction agreement, such as a change of control, sale of a majority of assets, or merger with a SPAC or other entity. This financing is intended to support tZERO's ongoing advancement of its infrastructure and serve as a transition for the company towards independent operations.

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 Business Insider, Discovery Loop, an AI startup founded by former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean after his departure, is undergoing a new round of financing with a target valuation of approximately $50 billion. Just weeks ago, the company completed a financing round of $1 billion at a valuation of about $10 billion.Discovery Loop is dedicated to automating experiments through AI, accelerating major discoveries in the fields of science and engineering. The first round of financing was led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and others. Alphabet was also a founding investor. The company's co-founder team consists of Google technology veterans, including Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, who each have deep expertise in distributed computing, deep learning, and reinforcement learning, respectively.

According to Bloomberg, cryptocurrency market data service provider Kaiko has received a new round of investment led by S&P Global, with the total scale of the latest financing expanding to $110 million. DRW Holdings, Susquehanna, Royal Bank of Canada, Nasdaq, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Broadridge, Canton Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Stellar also participated in this round.The background of this financing is Wall Street's accelerated push towards asset tokenization, with the rise of around-the-clock markets driving demand for 24/7 pricing, valuation, and risk management data infrastructure. Kaiko will use this financing to develop new products and services.Previously, cryptocurrency market data provider Kaiko completed a $53 million Series B financing in June 2022, led by Eight Roads (the venture capital arm backed by Fidelity), with participation from French venture capital firm Revaia and existing investors Alven, Point Nine, Anthemis, and Underscore.

According to EU-Startups, Zurich-based preventive healthcare company Aeon announced the completion of its seed round extension financing and simultaneously acquired the German blood diagnostics platform Aware Health, bringing the total amount of seed round financing to over 12 million euros (approximately 14 million dollars).This round was co-led by Araya Ventures, with existing investors Concentric, GoHub Ventures, Kadmos Capital, Calm/Storm Ventures, N&V Capital, and Bigwave Capital participating.

Zhiyu announced the completion of approximately 5 billion USD in financing, including 2 billion USD in equity placement and 3 billion USD in zero-interest convertible bonds. The funds will primarily be used for the next-generation GLM model, self-training systems, and computing power infrastructure construction.

According to TechCrunch, the startup Mecka AI, which is dedicated to collecting and analyzing human motion data to train humanoid robots and other robotic systems, is nearing completion of a new round of financing led by Sequoia Capital, with a valuation of approximately $500 million. The exact amount of this round of financing has not been disclosed, and the terms of the deal have not been finalized.This financing comes just three months after Mecka's previous round of financing; that round was led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures, raising $60 million.

The wealthiest state in India, Maharashtra, is formulating policies to tokenize state government assets (including power transmission infrastructure), with the funds raised to be used for constructing new transmission lines and energy storage facilities. The Chief Minister's Chief Economic Advisor and CEO of the Maharashtra Transformation Institute (MITRA), Praveen Pardeshi, introduced this plan at an invitation-only event called "The Box Launch," hosted by the real estate tokenization company RealX and MST Blockchain at the Mumbai World Trade Center.Pardeshi stated that transmission lines could be partially tokenized, for example, 40% to 50%, allowing investors holding tokens to receive a portion of the revenue from Maharashtra Transco. The new funds generated from token sales could be used to build more transmission lines and solar energy storage centers. He pointed out that the state currently has a significant surplus of solar power but lacks the grid capacity to deliver it to where it is needed; distribution companies must pay high prices of 16 to 18 rupees per unit during peak hours, while the price during surplus periods on the power exchange is only 2 paise per unit.He also illustrated the practice of real estate tokenization with the example of the Mumbai Express Towers commercial building tokenized under a REIT structure, emphasizing that tokenization does not equate to privatization but rather allows more citizens to participate in the development activities of public asset creation. Additionally, the state is drafting the Maharashtra Digital and Land Token Asset Trading Act (DELTA Act), which, if passed, will make it the first state in India to legislate for blockchain-based property tokenization.

Geo-DePIN project TINA announced the completion of a $3 million financing round, with investors including THINKWARE, Gemhead Capital, Archer Capital, Astra Capital, Mayer Venture, and Tidal Capital.TINA stated that this round of funding will be used to accelerate TINAGeo's global expansion, the growth of the dashcam ecosystem, and to advance the construction of Geo-DePIN data infrastructure.It is reported that TINA is a geospatial DePIN project based on Solana, where users can earn rewards by contributing and verifying POI location data and collecting spatial data during daily driving. The project is collaborating with dashcam manufacturer THINKWARE to launch TINAGeo Dashcam, promoting the implementation of Drive-to-Earn.

According to a report by Reuters, artificial intelligence company Zhipu has launched a Hong Kong stock placement of approximately 2 billion USD and a convertible bond issuance of about 3 billion USD, totaling a financing scale of around 5 billion USD. Zhipu will issue 21.97 million new shares at a placement price of 714 HKD per share, which is about a 10% discount compared to the closing price of 793 HKD; at the same time, it will issue 20.14 billion RMB (approximately 3 billion USD) zero-coupon convertible bonds, maturing in September 2027. The issuance price of the convertible bonds is 100% to 100.5% of face value, corresponding to a yield of -0.5% to 0%, with an initial conversion price of 892.5 HKD, which is a 25% premium over the placement price.The proceeds from the financing will mainly be used for research and development, computing power resources, and related infrastructure, as well as for business expansion, strategic investments, potential mergers and acquisitions, working capital, and other corporate purposes. This stock placement and convertible bond issuance will occur simultaneously, but the settlement of the two transactions is not interdependent.

AI entity operation platform Motive announced the completion of a $1.3 billion financing round, with General Catalyst participating through its Customer Value Fund; specific valuation data has not yet been disclosed.In addition, the company also disclosed that it has withdrawn its previously submitted S-1 registration statement, officially abandoning its plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange.

According to informed sources, Chinese venture capital firm 5Y Capital is seeking to raise a new fund with a target size of approximately $600 million, aiming to complete the fundraising by early 2027, with the fundraising efforts set to begin later this year.5Y Capital is an early investor in Chinese tech companies such as Moonshot AI and Xiaomi. This fundraising will place it among a group of fund managers focusing on the Chinese market, introducing new startup investment opportunities to investors. The informed sources requested anonymity due to the confidential nature of the information.