financing

According to Bloomberg, Ant Group's overseas business subsidiary Ant International is considering raising approximately $1 billion to accelerate business growth, with a valuation expected to reach $10 billion or higher. Sources reveal that potential investors include existing shareholders General Atlantic and Silver Lake, and relevant communications are still ongoing, with no final decision made yet.If the financing is successfully completed, it will help Ant International prepare for a potential listing in Hong Kong as early as this year. If the listing plan goes ahead, it will restart Ant Group's IPO process, which was halted by regulators in 2020, making it the largest IPO globally. After undergoing a compliance restructuring, Ant International established an independent board in 2024. Due to R&D investments and regulatory factors, the overall valuation of the parent company Ant Group has shrunk to approximately $79 billion in 2023.Ant International achieved revenue of $3 billion in 2024 and recorded about 25% growth in 2025. As of April 2026, its services have covered over 220 markets worldwide, supporting more than 300 payment methods. Its core business consists of four major segments, including the cross-border payment network Alipay+, merchant acquiring service Antom, cross-border trade payment platform WorldFirst, and AI digital lending and foreign exchange fund management service Bettr.In March 2026, Ant Group received approval from Chinese regulators to acquire the Hong Kong-listed brokerage Bright Smart Securities & Commodities Group Ltd. to expand its online securities business outside mainland China. Ant Group is also continuously investing in emerging technologies to explore new revenue sources, with investment directions covering large language models, humanoid robots, and a healthcare application with 140 million users.

According to Bloomberg, Standard Bots has completed a new round of financing of $200 million to expand the production scale of robotic arms in the United States. As the U.S. accelerates its efforts to catch up with China in the field of advanced robotics, the company is speeding up its capacity layout.This round of financing was led by General Catalyst and the RoboStrategy fund, which focuses on the robotics sector, bringing Standard Bots' valuation to $1 billion. Approximately two years ago, the company raised $63 million, but the valuation was not disclosed at that time.

According to a report by Fortune, the DeFi lending protocol Morpho has completed a $175 million financing round at a valuation of $2 billion, led by a16z crypto, Paradigm, and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Apollo Funds, Circle Ventures, VanEck, IOSG Ventures, Variant, and others.Morpho allows institutions to customize lending markets and risk parameters on-chain, and has already attracted users such as Coinbase, Kraken, Anchorage Digital, and Galaxy Digital. The protocol has a total locked value of approximately $6.6 billion and is accelerating its competition with traditional DeFi lending protocols like Aave, while planning to further expand into high-yield DeFi asset allocations sought by traditional financial institutions.

An analysis published by Fortune magazine points out that despite the recent decline in Bitcoin dragging down the stock price of Strategy (MSTR), the company's current market value still has a premium of about 31% over its underlying net asset value.The analysis believes that this premium stems from the market's past recognition of Michael Saylor's "Bitcoin appreciation flywheel" model, but as this model becomes ineffective, the related premium faces further compression risks.

According to the Financial Times, AI giant Anthropic has finalized a $35 billion private credit financing deal, led by private equity giants Apollo and Blackstone. The funds from this financing will be used to purchase AI chips and expand its AI infrastructure.

According to PR Newswire, the prediction market infrastructure company EDGE Markets announced the completion of a $29.2 million Series A financing round, led by CoinFund, with participation from Indicator Ventures, Mantis VC, Stepstone Group, and Bullpen Capital. This round of financing will be used to launch the banking platform EDGE Pro for prediction market market makers, as well as the payment network EDGE Connect designed specifically for entertainment and prediction markets.Among them, EDGE Pro will provide market makers with high-throughput deposit accounts, supporting real-time fund transfers and settlements between trading platforms regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The company is applying for Introducing Broker (IB) and Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) licenses from the National Futures Association (NFA) to enhance capital efficiency and support margin management.EDGE Connect is positioned as a payment network dedicated to the prediction market industry, enabling 24/7 real-time payments (RTP) and reducing transaction costs through a model that only charges for new net deposits. The company stated that compared to traditional payment channels, this system can reduce payment processing costs by more than 70%, while also decreasing refunds and user churn.

According to PR Newswire, AI-driven anti-fraud infrastructure InfoHawk announced the completion of a $2.25 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from former Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Jon Leibowitz, AppNexus founder Brian O'Kelley, former head of advertising at Meta Rob Goldman, GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov, and others.The new funds are intended to support its efforts to help businesses detect, analyze, and combat large-scale online fraud, phishing sites, brand impersonation, and deepfake attacks through AI content recognition and deep infrastructure analysis technology.

According to Bloomberg, Moonshot AI is in preliminary talks with potential investors for a new round of financing, aiming to raise over $1 billion, with a maximum of $2 billion, and a valuation target of $30 billion.The report states that this is the company's third round of financing in six months, aimed at addressing the increasingly fierce AI competition in China.

According to the Times of India, the Gujarat police have arrested two suspects involved in cryptocurrency-related cybercrime, with the network allegedly trading over 226 million rupees. Investigators claim that the network is linked to terrorist financing, global drug trafficking, and dark web financial activities.Officials stated that this arrest is part of an ongoing investigation into the use of cryptocurrency channels for terrorist financing. Previously, 10 suspects had already been arrested during the investigation. The two latest suspects are accused of using the KYC information of a man named Sabbir Ali Sarani to create a Binance wallet and receiving 5,000 USDT through layered transactions.

According to Businesswire, financial technology infrastructure company Cross River Bank announced a $250 million forward financing to Figure to support Figure's cryptocurrency collateralized loan business.Cross River will provide ongoing capital support for Figure's crypto loans, helping borrowers obtain dollar liquidity without selling their cryptocurrency assets.

According to The Block, the Web3 asset management platform XEFFY announced the completion of a $20 million financing round, which includes $5 million in angel funding and $15 million in a private round supported by early strategic investors.The funds will be used to develop its Vault management platform, expand the on-chain real-world asset (RWA) infrastructure, and support early RWA projects through the XEFFY fund to expand the global ecosystem. The platform combines market-neutral Vault strategies with dedicated on-chain RWA infrastructure built for retail and institutional users.Currently, the tokenized RWA market is expected to exceed $30 billion by 2025, with institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity already deploying related products. The XEFFY platform has approximately 200,000 community members on X, Telegram, and Discord, and its Asia-Pacific ambassador program has about 200 contributors.

On-chain capital and prediction market infrastructure project Nova Markets announced the completion of a new round of financing, with participation from Wintermute Ventures, Robot Ventures, Big Brain VC, Cumberland, GSR, Greenfield Capital, Hash3, Bodhi Ventures, and Kairos Research.This round of financing will be used to migrate more perpetual contracts and prediction markets on-chain.Nova stated that the actual number of existing on-chain capital markets is far below the expected level, and the financing will be used to migrate more perpetual contracts and prediction markets on-chain, reshaping the generation and trading structure of related markets.

According to a report by The Information, Helion, a fusion startup backed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, announced the completion of a $465 million financing round, led by Thrive Capital.After this investment, Helion's valuation reached $15.5 billion, nearly three times its previous valuation of $543 million.

Robot AI startup Generalist AI has completed a new round of financing of $400 million, led by Radical Ventures, with participation from 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital, and existing investors NVIDIA and Bezos Expeditions. After this round of financing, the company's valuation has reached $2 billion.The company was co-founded by Pete Florence, Andy Zeng, and Andy Barry, focusing on leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology to iterate robot models and develop intelligent robot products capable of handling complex tasks. The funds raised in this round will be used for advanced AI model development and expanding the application scenarios for robots.

According to PR Newswire, the enterprise-level AI payment and financial management platform Ramp announced the completion of a new round of financing totaling $750 million, with a post-money valuation of $44 billion.This round of financing was led by ICONIQ, GIC, and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, with participation from institutions such as Goldman Sachs Alternatives, D.E. Shaw, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Generation Investment Management, and Insight Partners.Ramp stated that the company is expanding its business into the AI cost management field, launching the AI Token spending management tool to help businesses monitor and control expenses related to large models and AI services. In recent months, Ramp has completed acquisitions of the UK and European payment platform Billhop and the business travel platform Juno, and has also deepened its long-term collaboration with Visa to promote AI agents to autonomously execute corporate payments within a real-time risk control framework.Ramp revealed that its internal AI tools have achieved a 99.5% employee adoption rate, with the internally developed platform Inspect currently generating over two-thirds of the company's code. The company plans to use this round of financing to further expand its product layout and accelerate its expansion into the UK and European markets.

AI infrastructure startup Nscale has disclosed that it has completed nearly $4 billion in financing, with a valuation of $14.6 billion following its latest $2 billion Series C round. Nscale, formerly a cryptocurrency mining company spun off from Arkon Energy, is currently focused on building and operating AI data centers and leasing computing power resources to enterprises. Its investors include technology companies such as Nvidia, Dell, and Nokia.Since 2026, Nscale has also secured $1.4 billion in GPU collateral loans and a $790 million financing line to support its AI infrastructure expansion plans. Nscale participated in OpenAI's "Stargate" infrastructure project, deploying AI computing facilities in the UK and Norway, but as OpenAI adjusted its related plans, some projects have been taken over by Microsoft and Google.

According to TechFundingNews, AI company Lassie, founded by former Robinhood and Superhuman employees Steijn Pelle and Frédéric Renken, has completed a $35 million Series A funding round led by a16z, with participation from Night Capital, the founder of Superhuman, the co-founder of Plaid, the co-founder of Wise, among others, bringing the total funding to $47 million.The two co-founders worked manually for months at a dental clinic before writing code, handling insurance claims and reconciling payments. Currently, Lassie operates in over 700 clinics across 49 states in the U.S., saving owners more than 250,000 hours of administrative work each year. a16z general partner Alex Rampell has joined the board of Lassie. Lassie's AI agent directly accesses the clinic's insurance portal, pulls reimbursement data, reconciles, updates system records, and verifies bank funds, completely replacing human labor rather than adding a software layer.

According to The Block, the monthly transaction volume of crypto venture capital has dropped to about 50 transactions, the lowest level since before 2021. The two historically most active sectors, infrastructure and crypto financial services, have both fallen to multi-year lows. The massive shift of investor attention towards the AI sector, combined with a shortage of early high-quality project supply, is the main reason for the decline in transaction volume.Despite the drop in the number of transactions, the total amount of financing remains relatively high, showing a "few large amounts" characteristic—recently, the prediction market platform Kalshi completed a $1 billion financing, which is a typical example. Analysts point out that the current low-noise environment is actually a window period for projects with clear use cases and real traction. Whether a recovery can be achieved in the second half of 2026 will depend on whether new sectors beyond prediction markets and financial infrastructure can form a consensus for large-scale investment.