financing

According to The Information, AI agent startup Instinct is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion, with a valuation potentially reaching $10 billion.

AI Infrastructure Financing Agreement USD.AI announced that it has secured $40 million in stablecoin revolving debt financing from the crypto-native asset management company K3 Capital to support the launch of new financing products. This financing provides short-term credit collateralized by sUSDai, which can be withdrawn, repaid, and reused on demand.The loan term for USD.AI is three years with monthly amortization, and the cycle for funds entering and exiting sUSDai is shorter. K3 Capital co-founder Kiril Nikolov stated: K3's strategy is to identify inefficiencies in such market structures and support trusted teams willing to provide short-term credit collateralized by sUSDai. David Choi, CEO of Permian Labs (the developer of USD.AI), mentioned that the company is preparing to launch new products that require more flexible short-term funding sources, and K3 designed the on-chain credit arrangement accordingly.This financing builds on the existing liquidity relationship between the two parties. USD.AI provides non-dilutive financing to AI infrastructure operators, with loans being non-recourse and secured by underlying GPU infrastructure. Previously, USD.AI also announced that it secured $100 million in stablecoin debt financing from Bullish. K3 Capital has been managing strategies such as interest rate arbitrage and liquidity provision since 2021.

OpenAI is in discussions with investors for a new round of private financing, targeting a valuation of approximately $1.2 trillion in preparation for a future IPO. According to informed sources, OpenAI's valuation reached $852 billion after completing financing in March of this year.The company is discussing further financing plans with large investors, and the negotiations are still in the early stages. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that the listing date may not be earlier than 2027.

Rome-based Physical AI cybersecurity company Exein announced the completion of a new funding round of 234 million euros (approximately 270 million dollars), with a valuation of 1.4 billion euros (approximately 1.7 billion dollars), making it the highest-valued cybersecurity startup in Europe.This funding round was led by Headline, with participation from Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank Group, KfW Capital, and T.Capital, while J.P. Morgan simultaneously expanded its revolving credit facility.

According to CoinDesk, stablecoin payment startup Velocity announced that it has completed a total of $48 million in Series A funding, with a valuation of $200 million. This round includes an additional $10 million investment from Visa Ventures, Circle Ventures, Haun Ventures, Ripple, Translink Capital, and Mirana Ventures. Previously, the company completed $38 million in Series A funding in July.Velocity is headquartered in London, and its platform aims to help payment companies and banks use stablecoins for settlement, liquidity, and fund management without replacing existing systems. CEO Eric Queathem, who previously worked at Worldpay, which handled over $2 trillion in payment volume annually, believes that for the past 15 years, capital has been concentrated on improving the consumer front-end experience, while the back-end settlement layer has been neglected.Visa's involvement is particularly noteworthy, as Velocity does not believe that stablecoins will replace bank cards, but rather expects blockchain digital assets to take on more funding and settlement functions beneath the existing payment experience. Queathem anticipates that in the next five years, global enterprises will hold on-chain assets, and the partial on-chain funding of enterprises will create a greater infrastructure demand than merely stablecoin deposits and withdrawals.

Stablecoin company Fin.com announced the completion of a $20 million seed round financing, led by Expa and Uber co-founder Garrett Camp, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Tenet Fund, Figure founder, Mesh founder Bam Azizi, Second Sight Ventures, and Gulf and African sovereign and royal family offices.Fin.com was co-founded by Bangladeshi founder Nabeel Alamgir and Pakistani founder Mustafa Dar, dedicated to solving the "last mile" problem of stablecoin conversion to local bank accounts or digital wallets, providing white-label payment infrastructure to financial service companies, consumer platforms, and prediction markets. Its client platforms collectively serve over 800 million users. The company focuses on markets in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, with offices currently in New York, Las Vegas, Dubai, Dhaka, Bangalore, and Lahore.

According to The Information, Chinese AI chip company Biren Technology is planning to raise approximately $1 billion in funding.The related financing plan is currently in the preparation stage, coinciding with the acceleration of production expansion, research and development, and competition for the Nvidia replacement market among domestic Chinese AI chip manufacturers.

The Jiangsu Securities Regulatory Bureau issued a risk warning stating that recently some institutions and individuals have been speculating on the concept of RWA (Real World Asset Tokenization), using phrases like "backed by physical assets, guaranteed principal with high returns, low risk and steady appreciation" to attract public investment. Related activities may give rise to illegal fundraising, fraud, money laundering, and other criminal risks.The Jiangsu Securities Regulatory Bureau emphasized that any financing activities conducted domestically under the name of RWA are illegal financial activities. Without consent or filing, RWA business should not be conducted abroad, and investors are reminded to be wary of promotions such as "guaranteed principal with high returns" and "risk-free profits."

According to The Information, AI drone company Shield AI is in talks for a new round of financing at a valuation of at least $20 billion. This comes just six months after its $2 billion Series G funding round closed, which had a valuation of $12.7 billion.The company expects revenue growth of over 80% this year, reaching at least $540 million.

According to TechCrunch, AI networking technology company Cornelis announced the completion of a $205 million financing round, led by IAG Capital Partners. The company was spun off from Intel in 2020 and develops networking technology that helps AI chips communicate more effectively. It has released a product called Active Compute Fabric, which addresses the issue of a significant amount of GPU time being wasted waiting for data to arrive by allowing chips to process and send information simultaneously.Cornelis competes with Nvidia using an open architecture, allowing customers to use various GPU and accelerator hardware on its network architecture. Although Nvidia chips can technically run on other network architectures, they are optimized for their own software, making customers more inclined to use the full Nvidia GPU stack. Cornelis has begun shipping products and is developing a new generation of products expected to be released later this year.

The trading card market infrastructure Deadstock announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed round financing, led by Bullish (NYSE: BLSH) venture capital division Bullish Capital, with participation from a group of angel investors.The funds will support Deadstock in completing public testing and entering the next phase to build the infrastructure for a global liquidity trading card market.

The perpetual contract platform RWAperp announced the completion of a $2 million financing round, with a post-investment valuation of $50 million. Brad Bao, co-founder of Lime, Tim Shi, co-founder of Cresta AI, Phil Duan, a member of the Tesla Autopilot team, William Freiberg, a member of Crux, Charles Ferguson, as well as members of the a16z and Sequoia Scout systems participated in the investment.RWAperp is a decentralized perpetual contract protocol aimed at traditional financial assets, currently launched on OKX X Layer, and has opened 19 markets covering BTC, ETH, SOL, Korean and US stocks, the S&P 500 index, DRAM index, gold, silver, and WTI crude oil. Users can settle using USDC, USDT, or USDG, gaining leveraged long and short exposure to stocks, indices, commodities, and crypto assets without the need to hold, custody, or tokenize the underlying assets.RWAperp is primarily designed around the trading characteristics of the stock market, focusing on trading, pricing, liquidity, and risk management systems, and addressing situations such as market closures, overnight gaps, suspensions, and corporate actions. The platform employs a multi-issuer comprehensive oracle and provides a professional order book trading terminal. RWAperp is also developing Agent Mode. This AI feature aims to understand natural language trading instructions, analyze market conditions, and gradually support trading execution operations such as opening positions, position management, and closing positions.

According to Reuters, the artificial intelligence startup Temporal announced the completion of a $550 million late-stage financing, with its valuation more than doubling to $12.55 billion within seven months. This round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Wellington Management, Goldman Sachs Alternatives' Growth Equity, and Tiger Global participating as co-leads. SV Angel and T. Rowe Price Associates' advisory accounts also participated, while existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Sequoia Capital, and GIC continued to invest.The funds will be used to expand global operations and deepen platform research and development. Founded in 2019, Temporal develops open-source software that helps applications, including AI agents, recover from failures, reducing the need for engineers to write custom recovery code. Its clients include OpenAI, Snap, Nvidia, Netflix, and JPMorgan Chase.The company has 570 employees and an annualized revenue run rate exceeding $250 million, more than doubling year-over-year. In February of this year, the company completed a $300 million financing led by a16z at a valuation of $5 billion.

According to official news, the security token trading platform tZERO announced a new round of financing, led by existing investors Marc and Max Cohodes, with participation from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), investor Bill Fleckenstein, and partner Dinari.Neighborhood Intelligence also pledged to support this round of financing, with some of the funds to be provided when tZERO announces a binding strategic transaction agreement, such as a change of control, sale of a majority of assets, or merger with a SPAC or other entity. This financing is intended to support tZERO's ongoing advancement of its infrastructure and serve as a transition for the company towards independent operations.

According to Business Insider, the Seattle-based artificial intelligence company Nuance announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Accel, NVentures (a subsidiary of NVIDIA), South Park Commons, and Define Ventures.Nuance was founded last year by three former Apple researchers, aiming to develop multimodal AI models with stronger emotional understanding capabilities. The company completed a $10 million seed funding round led by Accel last July.

According to Business Insider, Discovery Loop, an AI startup founded by former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean after his departure, is undergoing a new round of financing with a target valuation of approximately $50 billion. Just weeks ago, the company completed a financing round of $1 billion at a valuation of about $10 billion.Discovery Loop is dedicated to automating experiments through AI, accelerating major discoveries in the fields of science and engineering. The first round of financing was led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and others. Alphabet was also a founding investor. The company's co-founder team consists of Google technology veterans, including Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, who each have deep expertise in distributed computing, deep learning, and reinforcement learning, respectively.

According to Bloomberg, cryptocurrency market data service provider Kaiko has received a new round of investment led by S&P Global, with the total scale of the latest financing expanding to $110 million. DRW Holdings, Susquehanna, Royal Bank of Canada, Nasdaq, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Broadridge, Canton Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Stellar also participated in this round.The background of this financing is Wall Street's accelerated push towards asset tokenization, with the rise of around-the-clock markets driving demand for 24/7 pricing, valuation, and risk management data infrastructure. Kaiko will use this financing to develop new products and services.Previously, cryptocurrency market data provider Kaiko completed a $53 million Series B financing in June 2022, led by Eight Roads (the venture capital arm backed by Fidelity), with participation from French venture capital firm Revaia and existing investors Alven, Point Nine, Anthemis, and Underscore.

According to EU-Startups, Zurich-based preventive healthcare company Aeon announced the completion of its seed round extension financing and simultaneously acquired the German blood diagnostics platform Aware Health, bringing the total amount of seed round financing to over 12 million euros (approximately 14 million dollars).This round was co-led by Araya Ventures, with existing investors Concentric, GoHub Ventures, Kadmos Capital, Calm/Storm Ventures, N&V Capital, and Bigwave Capital participating.

Zhiyu announced the completion of approximately 5 billion USD in financing, including 2 billion USD in equity placement and 3 billion USD in zero-interest convertible bonds. The funds will primarily be used for the next-generation GLM model, self-training systems, and computing power infrastructure construction.