financing

Investor Mark Cuban and "Big Short" Michael Burry recently issued warnings about the valuation risks of Nvidia (NVDA) and AI stocks. Cuban stated on the X platform that the current AI capital cycle bears similarities to the internet bubble of the 1990s, believing that Nvidia is playing the role of the IPO market back then, driving continuous capital inflow by supporting customers in purchasing AI chips.Burry, on the other hand, is concerned about the rising prices of Nvidia's credit default swaps (CDS) and claims that the scale of "circular financing" driven by Nvidia is expanding. He believes that some AI demand relies on financing support, and future revenues may be built on complex funding cycles. Previously, Nvidia's stock price fell about 5% in a single day, with a market value shrinkage of approximately $250 billion. The IMF and the Bank for International Settlements have also warned about the systemic risks that AI circular financing may bring. However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded that the related criticisms are "absurd."

According to Cryptopolitan, the decentralized AI data network Perceptron has completed a $6.5 million strategic financing round, with participation from Sigma Capital, Selini Capital, and others. The funds will be used to build AI infrastructure and acquire AI training data from the Web3 community.Perceptron plans to launch a data task platform that allows AI companies to directly commission customized high-quality datasets from the community, aiming to expand the decentralized network to 5 million nodes. The CEO stated that through this platform, AI companies can obtain complete, verified datasets within days. The project is currently in the pre-airdrop phase, and users can earn points by contributing data.

Quantum Dynamics, a Physical AI platform company, recently completed a seed round financing of over 100 million yuan, jointly invested by Yunqi Capital and SenseTime. The company's founder was the CTO of Cainiao Group and also the technical leader of Alibaba's international digital business sector.The funds will primarily be used for the research and development of core Physical AI technologies, talent team building, and global market expansion, accelerating the full-link construction of intelligent systems aimed at the physical world from underlying models to scenario-based implementation. Quantum Dynamics was established in the first half of 2026, focusing on the deep integration of AI and the real physical world, developing its own underlying platform for Physical AI applicable across all industries.

According to TechCrunch, AI startup Simile completed a $200 million Series B funding round at a valuation of $2 billion just five months after finishing a $100 million Series A funding round, led by Greenoaks, with participation from Index Ventures, Hanabi, Bain Capital Ventures, A*, Factory, Definition, and CVS Health Ventures, with CVS also being a major client of Simile.Simile was founded by Stanford PhD Joon Sung Park, whose doctoral project "Smallville" allows AI agents to simulate human life. The company claims its goal is to "accurately and honestly simulate all 8 billion people on Earth," by simulating users for marketing and product research.

AI Agent Security Tool V12 announces the completion of a $10 million seed round financing, led by Electric Capital, with participation from ZachXBT, samczsun, Walden Yan, and others.Previously, V12 independently discovered a major vulnerability in a primary blockchain, which involved a risk of over $100 million in funds. The team thus received a $2.5 million bug bounty, the largest single bounty obtained by an AI agent. The team stated that their goal is to build a "cyber nuclear weapon"—an AI system capable of finding all vulnerabilities in a system, focusing on white-box code audits rather than black-box penetration testing, believing that the bug bounty system will disappear in the AI era, and the only solution is to eliminate vulnerabilities before the code goes live.V12 stated that the cryptocurrency industry is one of its key application scenarios. The team previously established the blockchain security company Zellic, completing over 1,500 security reviews and participating in multiple vulnerability research projects.

Aave founder Stani stated that the recent gradual contraction of low adoption assets and networks on Aave should not be interpreted as a judgment on any L1 or L2. This move is primarily aimed at reducing Aave's risk exposure in operational, technical, and economic aspects, thereby concentrating resources on more impactful key directions, including expanding existing high-value markets and developing securities financing business.He also emphasized that L2 remains an important component of the Ethereum user experience. For example, the stablecoin vault in the Aave application uses L2 as its accounting layer, with the goal of driving mainstream users into decentralized finance. Meanwhile, networks like Avalanche are also promoting the on-chain of real-world assets through institutional business expansion, which has been a relatively weak area for Ethereum in the past.

AI supply chain management startup Freehand announced the completion of a $75 million financing round, co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and the fund PSP Growth under former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.Freehand's AI agents can autonomously handle tasks such as contract interpretation, vendor rate negotiations, overbilling identification, payment processing, and ERP system reconciliation. Clients include leading companies such as Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin', and Cardinal Health.

According to TNW, enterprise AI infrastructure company Modus announced the completion of a $10 million seed round of financing, led by Insight Partners, with participation from Soma Capital, Bullet Ventures, and several tech founders.Modus simultaneously launched the "Context Warehouse" product, positioned as the contextual foundation layer for enterprise AI, which provides precise context for AI Agents by learning the actual usage patterns of business data (rather than merely storing data), potentially reducing unnecessary retrieval and token consumption by up to 10 times.

According to the New York Daily, the decentralized data infrastructure project Permacast based on Permaweb announced the completion of its Series A funding round on January 15, 2025, raising over $5 million. Combined with the previously completed seed round and Pre-A round, the total funding raised by the project has reached $8.9 million.This round of financing received support from several leading Web3 funds, technology investment institutions, and strategic angel investors. Seed round investors include OKX Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, ChainVision, Foresight Research, and Digital Humanism (DRF); Pre-A round investors include ClearingPoint, 7 O'Clock Capital, Cipholio Ventures, SilverFox Foundation, and a number of private investors; Series A round investors include CoinSummer, angel investor Tomasz Boryniec, Waterwood Investment (Tsinghua), Scorpio VC, and a number of private investors.Permacast stated that as AI models reshape the way information is created and utilized, the demand for trustworthy, permanent, and verifiable data infrastructure is growing. The new funds will be used to accelerate protocol development, expand decentralized network infrastructure, strengthen ecological cooperation, and expand the engineering and product teams. The team stated that a permanent, verifiable, and open data network will become the foundational infrastructure for future intelligent applications.

The AI revenue intelligence agent Sigvi in the car rental industry of Vilnius, Lithuania has completed a €1.2 million seed pre-financing to accelerate product development and international expansion. This round of financing was led by Superhero Capital.

According to Jinshi News, Moonshot AI has raised an unexpected $3.5 billion in a recently completed round of financing, with a valuation reaching $35 billion.

According to TechCrunch, bot detection startup Spur Intelligence has completed a $200 million financing round led by Insight Partners. Founded in 2017, the company's technology helps businesses distinguish between real users and hidden bot traffic, identifying fake users and threats.Cloudflare reported last month that by mid-2026, internet bot activity has surpassed human activity for the first time. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated that the growth of proxy traffic has exceeded expectations. Spur pointed out that with the surge of anonymizing infrastructures such as criminal VPNs and residential proxy networks, businesses face a blind spot where they can see activity but not the underlying infrastructure.

According to DealRoom, the Web3 integrated consumption platform Beezie announced the completion of a $4 million financing round, with Psalion participating through its early-stage fund Psalion VC Fund III.The platform generates on-chain digital twins of physical goods, enabling programmability, tradability, and cross-scenario combinations. Through gamification mechanisms, it transforms physical asset transactions into interactive consumption experiences. The new funds will be used for global market expansion.

According to PR Newswire, the on-chain execution infrastructure company Birdai Labs announced the completion of a $4 million seed round financing, led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Metalayer Ventures and The Venture Dept.Birdai Labs focuses on providing measurement, verification, and optimization infrastructure for transaction execution quality on high-performance public chains, aiming to reduce value loss between orders and executions caused by sorting and propagation, and to return more value to traders and market makers. The company's team comes from traditional financial institutions such as Franklin Templeton and Citadel, and is expanding its senior engineering and quantitative research team to adapt to on-chain execution competition under a multi-proposer architecture, and to provide verifiable fairness and transparency execution standards for future institutional participation in the digital asset market.

According to TechCrunch, Fish Audio announced on Tuesday that it has completed a $50 million seed round of financing. This round was led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with participation from institutions such as 359 Capital, Parable, Play Time, Alphalist Partners, Bayhouse Ventures, Carya Venture Partners, and HF0.Fish Audio was initially a small project initiated by former NVIDIA researcher Shijia Liao. Dissatisfied with the lack of expressive synthetic voice technology on the market, he trained a voice generation model using a single GPU and made it open source. Today, the Fish Speech project repository on GitHub has received over 31,000 stars and is widely used by independent developers, game designers, and content creators.In the past year, Fish Audio has launched five models, including four voice generation models and one speech-to-text model. The company has open-sourced three of the voice generation models, but the latest S2.1 Pro model is currently only available through a paid API. Since its launch last year, the startup's open-source and hosted version models have attracted over 8 million users, with current annual recurring revenue (ARR) reaching $21 million.

UK real estate technology startup Dwelly announced the completion of a $170 million financing round to acquire more real estate companies and integrate artificial intelligence into its operations.This round of financing was led by EQT Growth and General Catalyst, including $95 million in equity financing and a $75 million debt financing facility provided by Trinity Capital. The company did not disclose its valuation.

The Web3 AI infrastructure project AI W3 announced the completion of approximately $5 million in Pre-TGE round financing. This round of financing was led by Hundreds Capital, with follow-on investments from Kirin Capital and Crestwave Capital, and strategic investment from 0G Labs.It is reported that the leading investor, Hundreds Capital, is a private equity fund focused on growth-stage investments, with a long-term focus on technological innovation and the development of emerging industries. This investment in AI W3 marks Hundreds Capital's first foray into the Web3 space, as they express optimism about the long-term development potential of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology in the future digital economy, and recognize the next-generation infrastructure innovation opportunities brought by the integration of AI Agents and Web3.The strategic investment from 0G Labs further reflects the ecological value of AI W3 in the decentralized AI infrastructure field. 0G Labs is committed to promoting the integrated development of AI and blockchain technology, and this strategic investment further strengthens the ecological collaboration between both parties in the areas of on-chain AI Agents, decentralized computing, and open intelligent economy. Recently, AI W3 has also launched community incentive activities around ecological construction, attracting user participation through airdrop tasks, ecological interactions, and other methods to promote early community growth and ecological expansion.

Crypto KOL Phyrex posted on platform X, stating that American investors are chasing stock market highs with increasingly high leverage. As of June, the net credit balance of U.S. brokerage accounts fell by approximately $70 billion in a single month, dropping to negative $1.061 trillion, a historic low. During the same period, margin debt increased by about $86 billion to $1.53 trillion, rising for the third consecutive month and setting a new record.He pointed out that the continued deterioration of the net credit balance means that investors have less cash buffer and are increasingly reliant on borrowing for stock positions. Currently, leverage in the U.S. market is widespread throughout the brokerage system. In an upward phase, rising stock prices can further release financing limits after boosting account net worth, creating mechanical buying pressure; however, once the market weakens, margin pressure may force investors to add cash or sell stocks, turning the leverage that previously drove the rise into mechanical selling pressure. He believes that the U.S. stock market is currently facing both high valuations and a high financing environment, and if new funds slow down, leveraged positions may further amplify market volatility.

According to a report by Sifted, ETH Zurich spin-off startup ZuriQ announced the completion of a $25.5 million seed round financing.The company is dedicated to developing a new type of quantum chip architecture, which is said to have stronger scalability compared to existing solutions and is expected to accelerate the scaling process in the field of quantum computing.

According to Ventureburn, AI robotics company Enigma has completed a $71 million seed round financing, co-led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Conviction Partners and individual investors in the AI field such as OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, xAI, Cognition, and Wiz.The company was founded 11 months ago, and this round is one of the largest seed rounds in the physical AI sector. The funds will be used to expand the research and engineering team, enhance computing infrastructure, and increase real-world deployments. Enigma has developed over 100 self-developed robotic systems, operating in California and Israel, and has opened remote interaction to collect training data. The company believes that the biggest barrier to the widespread adoption of robots is the way humans interact with them, and its platform adopts a hardware-agnostic strategy that can adapt to robotic devices from different manufacturers.