financing

The developer of the Bitcoin yield platform HoneyB, Nectar Group, has completed a $5 million seed round financing, led by Portal Ventures, with participation from Peer Venture Partners, Anchorage Digital Ventures, an unnamed family office, and angel investors. Co-founder and CEO Josh Gordon stated that this round of financing uses a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) plus a one-to-one token warrant structure, with a post-investment valuation of $30 million, and none of the investors received board seats or advisory positions.HoneyB aims to help Bitcoin holders earn yields on their holdings. In its first strategy, users borrow stablecoins using Bitcoin as collateral and then invest them in yield strategies involving U.S. Treasuries, fixed income, credit, gold, volatility, and options. The Bitcoin collateral can be held through on-chain smart contracts or by a tripartite arrangement consisting of borrowers, lenders, and custodians, with Anchorage Digital and BitGo providing custody services. HoneyB has also deployed infrastructure on Ethereum, Sui, Solana, and Arch Network. Gordon stated that the underlying investment products target an annualized return of about 10%, and HoneyB aims to provide users with an annualized return of about 2% to 4% on their Bitcoin holdings after deducting borrowing costs and fees.The first strategy will use a fund under Simplify Asset Management, which manages approximately $13.5 billion in assets, with Alphaledger responsible for managing and tokenizing the fund, and Amber Capital SPC as the issuer. Gordon named Bitwise, Lombard, Solv, and Sentora as competing platforms, noting that HoneyB's differentiation lies in integrating custody, lending, and investment services on the same platform, allowing institutional partners to offer their products under their own brand. HoneyB plans to launch in the fourth quarter of 2026, with its first product aimed at institutional investors outside the U.S., followed by plans to launch institutional products in the U.S. and retail products expected in the first quarter of 2027. Its business model involves charging a platform fee on deployed funds, and this round of funding will be used for product development, custody and financing integration, legal compliance, and distribution. Nectar was established in October last year and currently has more than 12 employees.

American fintech company Meow has completed a $31.6 million Series B financing round, led by Stifel, with participation from Archetype VC. Stifel will provide a white-label version of the Meow platform to its commercial banking clients, prioritizing venture capital and fund banking services, expected to launch in early 2027.Meow's CEO Brandon Arvanaghi stated that the platform has served billions of dollars in assets and payment volumes and has stablecoin capabilities. This collaboration will help traditional banks gain fintech capabilities that have already been validated in the market. Meow has previously collaborated with Stripe, Bridge, and Tempo in the stablecoin business.

Cryptocurrency researcher Kerman Kohli published "Compute Financing" on Substack on October 19, 2026, discussing financing for computing power construction. He believes one of the main bottlenecks is capital, especially credit: early expenditures mainly come from balance sheet cash, followed by a shift to equity financing. The article cites Alphabet's $85 billion financing and Meta's fundraising through shareholder dilution, with the next step being the credit market.Kohli summarizes the current beliefs of creditors into three points, which he believes are incompatible: AI may be a bubble; the biggest risk is counterparty risk in purchase contracts; the underlying GPUs are not valuable and depreciate like ordinary hardware. He argues that demand is closer to infinite, stating that the demand for agentic AI is growing by about 2.5 to 5 times each year, with supply potentially doubling by the end of 2030. Memory is expected to sell out by 2027, with computing power commitments reaching trillions of dollars, and he mentions Jane Street's multi-billion dollar commitments, as well as the needs of pharmaceutical companies, research, military, and cybersecurity.Regarding efficiency, he states that when the cost of intelligence drops by 90%, the increase in usage is even greater, with a baseline exceeding 10 times, and he cites Jevons' Paradox.On the topic of purchasing, Kohli believes that computing power is more substitutable than real estate; when demand is strong, if someone withdraws their commitment, others will take over. He mentions that many creditors require 2 to 3 year contracts and down payments of 20% to 30%, sometimes as high as 50%, and locking in long-term discount contracts effectively shorts computing power for lenders. The article also states that computing power rental prices have risen by about 50% in the past 6 months and about 100% in the past year, with B300 supplies being tight. Regarding collateral, he notes that the A100 from 2020 is still operational and rented out until 2029, leading him to believe it has at least about 9 years of use value; the current price of B200 is about 50% higher than when it was released about two years ago, and a 6-year-old A100 is still worth about 25% of its value. He concludes that computing power will surpass real estate to become the largest asset class, and the scale of credit-supported computing power is currently just beginning.

According to Cointelegraph, Bitwise Research Director Ryan Rasmussen stated that in the third quarter of 2026, the overall purchasing of Bitcoin by treasury companies slowed down, with a net increase of 1,666 BTC for the Strategy that quarter, down from 83,901 BTC in the second quarter; other listed companies had a net increase of 5,617 BTC, down from 45,725 BTC in the previous quarter. He expects corporate purchases to accelerate again as early as this year.Bitfinex Derivatives Director Jag Kooner mentioned that if the stock prices of treasury companies rise above the value of their holdings, it may restart stock purchases, but "the likelihood of returning to last year's indiscriminate financing wave is low," and funds will prioritize mature companies with scale, liquidity, and a proven track record.

Robot AI company Dream Labs announced the completion of a $90 million seed round financing, with investors including B Capital, Kindred Ventures, A.Capital, SV Angel, and Wing VC. The company was founded in 2026 by the former head of the NVIDIA GR00T robotics research team, and the funds will primarily be used for computing power investment, expanding the tasks supported by the model, types of robots, and user scale.Dream Labs also launched Dream API, which can convert robot camera footage and natural language commands into motion control commands. The company claims that its Dream-1 model, through video learning, can adapt to robots from different manufacturers and has already partnered with over 20 hardware partners to support desktop tasks such as object grasping, placement, and folding clothes.

A startup that provides web data APIs for AI agents recently announced the completion of a $9 million funding round, led by General Catalyst, with participation from Orange Collective and Robinhood Ventures.The company's single API supports search, scraping, crawling, and monitoring functions, aiming to enable AI agents to easily access and utilize internet data. Currently, the API has been adopted by over 800 clients. Institutions such as SV Angel, Eniac VC, and Pioneer Fund, as well as angel investors like Paul Graham, Guillermo Rauch, and Rick Rubin also participated in this funding round.To coincide with this funding, the company announced the issuance of 50,000 credits to all users registered today.

OpenAI is intensifying its efforts to secure funding commitments from investors, hoping to complete the financing before its competitor Anthropic is expected to go public in mid-November. This round of financing could value OpenAI at over $1.4 trillion.SoftBank Group, MGX, and other existing investors are in negotiations to participate in this round of approximately $30 billion financing.

Market sources say that SoftBank and MGX are in talks to participate in this round of financing for OpenAI.

Market insiders reveal that OpenAI is racing against time to finalize a round of private financing commitments from investors before the Anthropic IPO.

According to the Shenzhen Economic Investigation Bureau, recent investors have suffered financial losses due to participating in investment scams under the guise of "RWA real estate tokenization." These scams typically use technical packaging such as "smart contract automatic dividends" and "blockchain browser verifiable" to lure investors into purchasing fictitious on-chain fragmented property rights. Once the funds are in place, they stop paying dividends and disappear.The Shenzhen Economic Investigation Bureau pointed out that the smart contract address and company registration information can only confirm the existence of the code and the business entity, and do not represent a real binding of underlying physical assets, nor do they indicate that the project has financial business qualifications. According to current regulatory regulations in China, any tokenized financing activities carried out domestically under the name of RWA are considered illegal financial activities. Virtual currencies do not have legal tender status, and related token issuance, financing, and trading speculation are not protected by law.

According to LatePost's LatePost Auto report, Li Auto's chip subsidiary Shanghai Mahexin Technology has completed a Series A equity financing of 1.625 billion yuan, with Li Auto contributing 1 billion yuan and external investors contributing a total of 625 million yuan. After the financing is completed, Li Auto holds 74.01% of the shares, making it the largest shareholder, while external investment institutions include Hangzhou Jingtou, BlueRun Ventures, Huaye Tiancheng Capital, and Qiji Chuangtan.Hangzhou Jingtou has also received an additional investment equity of 500 million yuan, bringing the company's valuation to 17.1 billion yuan, with 20% of the equity allocated for employee incentives. Insiders say the funds will be used for subsequent chip research and development and commercialization, and they hope to supply externally and expand into businesses outside of automotive. Li Auto co-founder Ma Donghui stated on September 21 that Mahe chips, silicon carbide modules, and other products can be sold externally, and Li Auto is developing the second generation of Mahe intelligent driving chips.

According to Bloomberg, Asian semiconductor stocks continued to weaken on Monday. The Bloomberg Asia Chip Index fell more than 2%, reaching its lowest level since July, with TSMC, SK Hynix, and Advantest being the main drags. The Korea Composite Stock Price Index recorded its largest weekly decline since October 2008 last week, dropping more than 3% at one point on Monday before recovering some ground; the Nikkei 225 index fell 2.3% at one point, and the Taiwan Weighted Index dropped 2%.Market concerns stem from two aspects. First, the pressure on financing for AI infrastructure in the United States continues to ferment, with CoreWeave's financing capabilities being questioned and the IPO expectations for Anthropic and Nscale cooling. Second, Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a new model update over the weekend, claiming faster operation speeds and lower resource consumption, raising concerns about the potential decrease in storage capacity required for AI models and the possible impact on chip demand.Kang DaeKwun, CEO of Life Asset Management, stated that the market uncertainty is too high, making it difficult to determine when the Korean stock market will bottom out. Financing for U.S. corporate AI projects is one of the main risks, and the profitability of Korean chip companies still heavily relies on continuous investment in AI infrastructure by U.S. companies. This week, the earnings reports from tech giants like Meta and Tesla will be an important window to observe the growth momentum of AI capital expenditures.

According to The Block, Nasdaq-listed company OpenWorld (stock ticker: OPNW) has signed a merger agreement to acquire the AI agency Blocksight.Blocksight's AI agency is expected to serve as the operational layer for OpenWorld's recently announced tokenized financing plan, responsible for transaction structure design, asset verification, and daily reporting, with the total financing plan amount exceeding 1.1 billion dollars.

AIsa, an enterprise AI agent infrastructure company, announced the completion of its seed round extension financing, with stablecoin issuer Tether and HIVEN joining as strategic investors. This round brings its total financing amount to over $9 million. Tether and HIVEN join existing investors such as Alibaba, Tribe Capital, Sumitomo Corporation, Draper Associates, and Saison Capital.Jordan Liu, founder and CEO of AIsa, stated that the company will build infrastructure to support global discovery, access, and payment for AI agents. AIsa's network integrates resource discovery, access, and transactions, connecting enterprise AI agents with external data, AI searches, models, APIs, software tools, and industry services, while providing permission management, usage measurement, billing, and settlement.

The white-haired stock god Serenity stated that the storage chip industry is experiencing unprecedented long-term demand visibility, with large cloud service providers like Google even seeking to sign long-term supply agreements extending to 2035. However, the market is still affected by concerns over the sustainability of AI infrastructure investments and financing risks.Serenity also cited the views of Dell CEO Michael Dell, who indicated that the shortage of storage chip supply may last for about 4 years, as the construction cycle for new fabs is relatively long, and the related capacity is expected to be released by 2029 to 2030. Dell anticipates that the imbalance between supply and demand for storage chips may further worsen by 2027.

According to official news from Visa, the stablecoin pre-funding capability of Visa Direct has transitioned from the pilot phase to commercial deployment. Payment infrastructure provider Inyo Global has become the first service provider to put this functionality into production, supporting eligible Visa Direct clients and partners.