financing

Fomo co-founder Se Yong Park announced the completion of the first round of financing, with 140 angel investors participating in this round, and there are now over 200 angel investors on the cap table.He stated that early founders almost always misunderstand the dynamics between the company and angel investors, and should view angel investors as call options for product success. Even if the cap table includes tech CEOs, celebrities, athletes, etc., their likelihood of providing early assistance is close to zero. As the scale expands and products are created that angel investors are truly willing to use and proudly share, more and more people will naturally recommend the product to the outside world.

According to Morningstar, the AI platform Owner, aimed at local businesses, announced the completion of a $240 million financing round, with the company valuation reaching $2.3 billion. This round of financing was led by Growth Equity under Goldman Sachs Alternative Asset Management, with participation from existing investors Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, and Jack Altman.The company uses AI Agents to automatically complete marketing promotion, customer communication, and operational optimization services for local businesses. The new funds are intended to expand international operations and develop local business scenarios.

According to CoinDesk, the cryptocurrency platform Bullish will provide USD.AI with $100 million in stablecoin debt financing to support loans collateralized by GPUs and other high-performance computing assets, promoting the construction of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

According to LatePost, the general robotics company Sharpa has completed over 4.5 billion yuan in financing, with investors including Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com, and other industrial capital, as well as Sequoia China, Qiming Venture Partners, and Meituan Longzhu. The post-investment valuation is 22 billion yuan. This is the first time Sharpa has publicly disclosed its financing since its establishment.Sharpa was founded at the end of 2024 by He Sai Technology CEO Li Yifan, CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and Chief Scientist Sun Kai, focusing on developing general-purpose robots and components that specialize in dexterous operations. Co-founder Li Yifan stated that Sharpa's logic is to first "navigate" several real-world scenarios, accumulating generalized capabilities and real data on the "track," gradually entering households starting in 2028; real scenarios must meet three conditions: the environment is not specially modified for robots, operations are fully autonomous by robots, and complex tasks involving multiple steps are completed.

According to Bloomberg, the new regulations on cryptocurrency asset financing proposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this month aim to restart the ICO financing model. The proposal allows startups to raise up to $5 million within four years and large projects to raise up to $75 million annually without full SEC registration.However, the market environment has fundamentally changed: in January 2018, ICO financing reached $3 billion, but now VC token trading volumes have significantly declined, and speculative funds have shifted to perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and AI stocks. Dragonfly partner Tom Schmidt stated, "Having something is better than having nothing, but it would have been more useful if launched a few years ago." Pantera Capital partner Cosmo Jiang pointed out, "Previously, meme coins that were legal but had actual value were illegal, which is completely contrary to the way capitalism operates." Analysts believe, "The ICO of 2026 is not the ICO of 2018; the era when white papers and dreams could attract capital has ended."

According to Crunchbase, AI fraud prevention company Socure announced the completion of a $156 million strategic growth round financing, with the company's valuation reaching $5.2 billion. Summit Partners led the investment, with participation from Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Docusign, and others. Currently, its fraud prevention services are applied to companies such as cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, stablecoin issuer Circle, digital bank Revolut, and Robinhood.In addition, the company also announced the acquisition of AI startup Fravity, aiming to leverage AI agents to conduct fraud, risk, and compliance investigations, with the specific acquisition amount not yet disclosed.

Physics AI company Transfyr announced the completion of a $25 million seed round financing, led by General Catalyst, with participation from Lux Capital, Breakout Ventures, Factory, Neo, SV Angel, MVP Ventures, Underscore VC, Lyda Hill, and several angel investors.The company is dedicated to bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds, transforming scientific operational data into machine-readable data, and achieving a truly closed-loop system driven by artificial intelligence and automation.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia has suspended some transactions in its new financing plan. This plan aims to provide credit support to AI cloud companies in exchange for revenue sharing. Insiders say that the chip giant withdrew from the related arrangements last week but may adjust the plan in the future or incorporate it into other projects.A Nvidia spokesperson stated that the new business model aimed at the rapidly growing AI ecosystem and open computing power access is still progressing and continues to evolve due to strong demand. The plan was announced less than two months ago, intending to support the financing needs of small AI cloud companies: if customers cannot sell computing power, Nvidia can lease back the relevant computing power, acting as a guarantee buyer, thereby facilitating companies in raising funds to purchase Nvidia AI chips; Nvidia would then share cloud revenue generated by customers based on its chips, in addition to hardware sales.Nvidia stated in this week's earnings call that this model is expected to contribute billions of dollars in revenue in the medium to long term. However, recent investor scrutiny regarding its capital flow back to the AI ecosystem has increased, raising concerns that so-called circular transactions may inflate demand. Reports indicate that some employees had expressed antitrust concerns to customers; in the early stages of the plan, Nvidia also faced dissatisfaction from some potential partners due to attempts to limit chip rental targets, preferring to distribute to multiple small customers rather than a single large customer, and requiring a 50% revenue share after reaching a certain threshold.

According to Bloomberg, informed sources revealed that JPMorgan Chase has begun preliminary discussions with potential lenders to seek a $5 billion debt financing plan to support Volta Infra Holdings Ltd. in building artificial intelligence data centers.Volta AI completed a $300 million venture capital financing earlier this month, with a valuation of $2.4 billion, aiming to help more tech companies access the costly resources of artificial intelligence chips.

According to official news, the anonymous Q&A game Chomp has completed a $3.6 million financing round, led jointly by Jsquare and Blueyard, with participation from VCs such as Accomplice, Big Brain Holdings, No Limit Holdings, Reverie, and Caballeros.Chomp is a social game based on anonymous Q&A and prediction mechanisms, allowing users to answer questions and predict others' answers, uncovering the public's true thoughts and their own biases in understanding others. In addition to consumer products, Chomp also applies these anonymous, well-labeled opinion data to scenarios such as AI model training and consumer research.The company believes that this type of data can capture subjective opinions that are difficult to obtain from the public internet and provide high-context data for AI models. Founder and CEO Kiko previously served as COO of Orca, a decentralized trading platform in the Solana ecosystem.

According to CoinDesk, the U.S. clearing and custody institution RQD Clearing announced the completion of a $74 million financing round, led by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, a technology investment division of Bain Capital, with participation from ABN AMRO Clearing Bank and Nyca Partners. This round of financing will be used to expand operations in North America, Asia, and the Middle East, and to enhance infrastructure development for digital asset custody and asset tokenization.RQD primarily provides post-trade clearing and custody services for broker-dealers, investment advisors, and overseas financial institutions in the U.S. market, responsible for key processes such as securities and funds settlement, and risk management. This year, the company has processed approximately 515 million stock trades, involving nearly $2 trillion, accounting for about 2.4% of the National Market System (NMS) stock trading volume in the U.S.As Wall Street institutions accelerate their exploration of on-chain finance, traditional market infrastructure is becoming an important direction for the competition of tokenized assets. RQD has previously collaborated with Blue Ocean Technologies to advance the clearing and settlement infrastructure for tokenized U.S. stocks and has aligned with the tokenized securities framework of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).

The Block reported that Hyperliquid Strategies raised $647 million in equity capital and more than doubled its Hyperliquid native token treasury to 29.3 million HYPE, valued at approximately $1.9 billion at the end of the fiscal year, while maintaining $149.9 million in cash and no debt.The company stated that it has since deployed $773.4 million to acquire approximately 16.5 million additional HYPE at an average cost of $46.77, and spent $27.8 million to repurchase PURR shares, with $132.6 million in cash remaining as of August 19.

Cryptocurrency financial and tax solutions provider FinTax announced the completion of its seed round financing, led by YZi Labs, with participation from Amber, Hash House, Pundi AI, Waverider International, and Nexus Holdings, resulting in a post-investment valuation of $40 million. Previous round investors include Victory Courage, BGIN, Tools Factory, and individual investor Fan Chao.In recent years, YZi Labs has been continuously investing in stablecoins, RWA, payment, and institutional-level digital asset infrastructure. Leveraging FinTax's expertise in on-chain data processing, crypto accounting, cross-jurisdictional tax practices, and crypto asset financial auditing, both parties will explore long-term ecological collaboration around institutional-level financial and tax infrastructure, compliance standards, and emerging scenarios such as stablecoins, RWA, and payments.Following this round of financing, FinTax will accelerate the scaling of its five product lines, expanding its business from the Asia-Pacific and North American markets to Europe and the Middle East, and deepening the application of AI in complex financial and tax scenarios. FinTax will continue to promote the dual iteration of blockchain and legal systems across dozens of jurisdictions, enabling on-chain economic activities to connect with the real-world financial and tax systems.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang defended the company's increasingly expanding role in financing the AI ecosystem on CNBC's "Mad Money," calling the investment in cutting-edge labs a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity and stating that the risks are relatively low. He pointed out that the outside world overlooks a key point: these are the first batch of startups that require hundreds of billions of dollars in funding, with a very high capital intensity for building and deploying AI. NVIDIA has invested in model companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as new cloud service providers, and has provided financial support for data center projects, including $105 billion in support for a large computing power park in Ohio (with OpenAI as a tenant), and has collaborated with Wall Street institutions to arrange up to $500 billion in data center financing.In response to criticisms of "circular financing" and comparisons to similar internet bubbles, Huang stated that NVIDIA hopes to become an equity investor in cutting-edge AI labs and provide broader support, as these companies do not yet have investment-grade qualifications and low-cost financing records. He emphasized that the invested capital will yield substantial returns and that the risks are low because the computing infrastructure can be redeployed to other clients and workloads when the supported companies encounter difficulties. NVIDIA just announced better-than-expected results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2027: revenue of $96.2 billion, more than doubling year-on-year; data center revenue increased by 117% to $89 billion, and it is expected that revenue will grow by about 70% in fiscal year 2028. Following the announcement, the stock price rose about 4% in after-hours trading.

AI assistant startup Instinct announced the completion of a $250 million Series B financing round, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. After this round of financing, the company's total funding amount reached $350 million, with a valuation rising to $2.5 billion.Instinct was launched by Spear Street Technology, led by 23-year-old founder Noah Shinn. The product is still in private testing. Users can connect it to personal applications and devices, and interact with the AI assistant via text messages and phone calls for planning trips, purchasing goods, booking events, and managing subscriptions among other daily tasks.

The Sui development team co-founder of Mysten Labs, Kostas Kryptos, stated that Havenex is undergoing Series A financing and is about to complete it. All necessary license applications and some additional license applications have been submitted, and the financing amount is also close to being fully allocated.Havenex is not positioned to become another Coinbase, Binance, Bybit, or Kraken, but rather to provide infrastructure for financial institutions, enabling them to offer digital assets and traditional financial assets to clients while meeting regulatory, custody, security, and transparency requirements. Havenex plans to support a multi-chain architecture, verifiable custody, continuous solvency proof, default multi-signature, quantum-resistant keys, hardware two-factor authentication wallets, as well as self-custody and key loss protection mechanisms; in regions where regulations allow, it will also support privacy assets and RWA. The project will use Sui technology in suitable scenarios while integrating assets, bridging protocols, and foundational components from other ecosystems.The concept of Havenex was proposed by him, and he will currently participate as an advisor, but Mysten Labs and Sui remain his main focus. He stated that the project aims to establish transparency and security standards different from those of FTX and Mt. Gox, and to reduce the serious vulnerability risks caused by code generated by large language models recently.

In August, Nvidia signed a memorandum of understanding with major capital providers, planning to establish an independent financing platform to raise over $500 billion in third-party capital.

According to Techcrunch, AI Agent testing infrastructure startup Arga Labs announced the completion of a $10 million seed round financing, led by General Catalyst, with participation from institutions such as BoxGroup, Emergence Capital, Gradient Ventures, and SV Angel.The company aims to address the challenges of testing, training, and adapting complex business systems during the deployment of enterprise-level AI Agents by creating a complete digital twin environment for enterprise software, replicating permission systems, Webhooks, and system interaction logic, allowing AI Agents to train in an environment close to real work.

According to TechCrunch, AI Agent development company Runable has completed a $21 million Series A funding round, led jointly by usquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Together Fund and Array VC.The AI Agent currently being developed by the company is capable of generating websites, applications, and presentations through natural language, and can also handle foundational tasks such as deployment and data analysis. The new funding will be used to optimize AI inference costs and integrate infrastructure, marketing, and distribution capabilities.

According to TechCrunch, AI-focused search infrastructure startup Keenable has completed a $26 million seed round of financing, led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and several angel investors.Keenable was co-founded by Andrey Styskin, former head of search, AI, and cloud business at Yandex, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri. The company is building a web search index for AI agents, which currently includes over 10 billion documents. Its Web Search API and AI-focused Web Query Language are now live and will be free until the end of September.