financing

Base officially announced that its accelerator program Base Batches 004 is now open for applications, targeting the Fall 2026 batch, with a deadline of September 9. The program is jointly operated by Base and the Base Ecosystem Fund, aiming to help early teams building on Base to launch, fundraise, and achieve growth. Selected teams will receive a $100,000 investment offer from the Base Ecosystem Fund (subject to due diligence) and participate in an 8-week hands-on support program to refine their product and narrative, culminating in a Demo Day in November in New York to present to selected investors.Applicant teams must meet the following criteria: be in the early stage (from having a founder-market fit product to post-MVP), be in the pre-seed stage without completing a formal seed round, prefer Base as their primary network, and focus on driving on-chain economic development, covering areas such as transactions, payments, smart contracts, or financing. Selected teams will also receive exclusive advisor guidance, weekly support, cross-domain expert resources, content exposure, and opportunities to showcase to investors. Base stated that applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis and encourages early submission, with the application address being base.org/batches.

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Frier stated that OpenAI plans to become a publicly traded company by 2027, but may go public earlier if business growth accelerates. Frier mentioned that the IPO is a milestone and a means of financing. In March of this year, the company completed a $122 billion financing round, providing greater flexibility for future development.

According to Bloomberg, Prosus NV plans to invest $100 million in Indian fintech company Navi Ltd., marking Navi's first introduction of institutional capital. This round of investment requires regulatory approval, including from the Competition Commission of India, to be completed.Navi is headquartered in Bangalore and operates in payments, credit, insurance, and mutual funds. Its UPI payment application ranked fourth in India by scale for the fiscal year ending in March; its subsidiary Navi Finserv has surpassed an asset management scale of approximately 130 billion rupees.

According to PR Newswire, cryptocurrency institutional broker FalconX announced a $1 billion secured loan financing mechanism in collaboration with the stablecoin protocol Ethena. The two parties will utilize Ethena USDe reserve assets through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to provide over-collateralized credit services to institutional clients.According to the announcement, this financing mechanism will connect Ethena's on-chain liquid assets with FalconX's institutional lending demand, driving on-chain capital into the traditional credit market. The loan assets will be held by qualified custodians, while FalconX will be responsible for asset origination, loan servicing, and collateral management.Ethena is the developer of the stablecoin protocol USDe. USDe maintains its dollar-pegged stability through crypto asset collateralization and hedging mechanisms, and has already partnered with several centralized exchanges and DeFi protocols. FalconX is a digital asset prime broker aimed at institutional investors, providing trading, financing, and liquidity services.

According to Bloomberg, AI data center operator DataVita announced the completion of a $406 million financing round, with participation from ING, ABN AMRO, Banco Santander, the Scottish National Investment Bank, and Siemens Financial Services.The new funds will be used for the AI data center park and a 15-year data center lease agreement with AI cloud service provider CoreWeave.

The enterprise-level AI data platform Prevalent AI announced the completion of a $22 million financing round, with participation from the Los Angeles investment firm Integrity Growth Partners (IGP).Founded in 2017, the company focuses on developing AI-driven data platforms that help businesses build continuously updated "sovereign knowledge graphs" by connecting and integrating data from multiple internal systems, and supports the deployment of AI Agents and automation systems.

According to Reuters, artificial intelligence chip design company Velaura AI announced the completion of a $110 million Series A financing round, with a valuation exceeding $1 billion. Seligman Ventures led the investment, with participation from Capricorn Investment Group, Samsung Catalyst Fund, StepStone Group, and Maverick Silicon.The company primarily develops low-power chips and software technologies for data centers and physical AI applications, including robotics and autonomous systems. The new funds will be used to accelerate the development and deployment of its AI products and to hire engineers and customer service personnel. It is reported that the company is in talks with three of the four major cloud service providers and hopes to develop them into potential clients, but declined to disclose which three they are.

Ant Group's three independent sectors, Ant International, OceanBase, and Ant Technology, have recently launched intensive external financing. Among them, Ant International completed approximately $1.2 billion in Series A financing in July, OceanBase is seeking about 2 to 3 billion yuan in Series A financing, and Ant Technology is preparing for Pre-IPO financing. All three companies will operate independently starting in March 2024. Sources close to Ant indicate that this round of financing is more of a phased test of the effectiveness of the three companies' independent operations, and they have not yet entered the preparation stage for an IPO.OceanBase's annual revenue has exceeded 1.4 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth of about 70%; Ant Technology's revenue is expected to be around 5 billion yuan in 2025, with a target of about 8 billion yuan in 2026. Ant International's revenue is projected to be around $3.75 billion in 2025. Since 2023, Ant Group has invested nearly 80 billion yuan in technology, shifting its strategic focus from fintech to AI and data elements, with its financial business humorously referred to internally as the department that "earns living expenses" for the AI business.Currently, Ant's overall valuation is approximately 592 billion yuan, a reduction of more than 70% from 2.1 trillion yuan on the eve of its IPO in 2020. The market believes that a spin-off listing is a more realistic path than an overall listing for the group, but each sector still needs to prove its independent customer acquisition capabilities to open the doors to the capital market.

According to BBX data, yesterday global listed companies disclosed the latest developments in cryptocurrency strategic mergers and acquisitions and financing, with the core information as follows:Meta planet invests 2,100 BTC to control Super League and create a multinational treasury: Super League Enterprise has reached a final agreement with Meta planet. Meta planet will invest 2,100 bitcoins (worth approximately $132.1 million) and $2.5 million in cash through its wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary in exchange for 44,859,400 shares of common stock (at $3 per share), preferred stock, and warrants. After the transaction is completed, Super League will be renamed "Super planet, Inc." and become a merged subsidiary with approximately 95.7% ownership by Meta planet, thus creating a bitcoin treasury platform spanning Nasdaq and the Tokyo Stock Exchange.Zhibao Technology completes $154.7 million PIPE financing, fully paid in bitcoin: Nasdaq-listed Zhibao Technology (stock code: ZBAO) announced the completion of a $154.7 million private equity financing (PIPE). The company issued a total of 442 million PIPE units, with investors fully paying with 2,380 bitcoins (calculated at approximately $65,000 per bitcoin as of July 30). The funds raised will be used to strengthen the financial foundation, accelerate business growth, and deepen strategic synergies with the cryptocurrency and Web3 fields.

According to Bloomberg, AI startup Temporal Technologies Inc. is in negotiations for a new round of financing, with a pre-financing valuation of at least $12 billion and a financing scale of approximately $500 million.The company primarily offers an open-source orchestration platform that helps developers prevent failures in complex code. The financing round has not yet been completed, and specific details may still change.

According to The Block, Ripple has completed a private placement of senior unsecured notes expanded to $275 million. The notes were issued by its non-bank prime broker Ripple Prime, and the funds raised will be used for working capital and expansion of its business in the United States.This issuance received a BBB investment-grade rating from KBRA, and Ripple Prime plans to further expand multi-asset clearing, financing, and prime brokerage services.

Artificial intelligence chip startup Etched raised $700 million in a funding round led by Jane Street, bringing the company's valuation to $21 billion.Etched has signed Jane Street as its first customer and has begun shipping chips.

Zhibao Technology, a Nasdaq-listed company (Ticker: ZBAO), has completed a $154.7 million PIPE financing, with investors fully paying in 2,380 bitcoins (valued at $65,000 each based on the July 30 benchmark price).The financing issued 442 million PIPE units at a price of $0.35 per unit, each unit consisting of one share of Class A common stock and a two-year warrant with an exercise price of $0.35 per share. At closing, 395.6 million units were delivered, with the remaining 46.32 million units to be delivered pending shareholder approval, with no additional consideration required.

According to official news, the credit delegation layer project Twyne announced the completion of its seed round financing, which was co-led by Cyber Fund and Ethereal Ventures. Twyne aims to build a Credit Delegation Layer that connects idle credit in the lending market with parties in need of credit, addressing the issue of collateral depositors' credit being locked and half of the market's credit being idle while the other half urgently needs credit.Twyne stated that in the current lending market, credit often remains with the party depositing collateral, leading to a mismatch between supply and demand. The project will promote the flow and efficient allocation of credit through the credit delegation layer.

According to Cointelegraph, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance provided customer trading records and identity information to Russian authorities, which were subsequently used in a terrorism financing case against IT specialist Yuri Belenkiy.Yuri Belenkiy was detained in September 2025 and is currently awaiting trial in Russia. The Russian Investigative Committee accuses Yuri Belenkiy of donating over $700 in cryptocurrency to the Ukrainian military and banned organizations between January 2023 and March 2024.The information obtained by Russian authorities includes his transaction history, date of birth, address, phone number, Russian passport, and Bulgarian residence permit. Binance announced its complete withdrawal from Russia in September 2023 and sold its local business to CommEX.Binance stated that the company is not responsible for making or enforcing the laws of any jurisdiction, nor does it determine the content of charges or how governments use information in legal proceedings; the company will cooperate with legitimate information requests from global law enforcement agencies in accordance with applicable laws, privacy, and regulatory requirements.

UK agricultural robotics startup Versatile RobotX has completed over €1.17 million (approximately £1 million) in funding, with sources including the British Design Fund (BDF), the second round of the Innovate UK Growth Catalyst investor collaboration program, and grants from the Defra Agricultural Innovation Scheme.The company was co-founded in July 2024 by Professor Klaus McDonald-Maier from the University of Essex and Dr. Vishwanathan Mohan. Its two core products—the automated fruit and vegetable picking robot and the hydroponic harvesting robot—have completed field validation at well-known UK farms such as Wilkin & Sons.