financing

Polychain Capital founder and CEO Olaf Carlson-Wee announced at the Network State conference that Polychain is leading a new round of financing for Network School, with a valuation of $2 billion. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Coinbase, and Balaji himself, among other institutions and individuals, participated in the investment, with the specific financing amount not disclosed.Olaf stated that Polychain's investment strategy does not solely focus on incremental improvements but seeks projects that utilize new business models or technologies to solve problems in different ways. He expressed anticipation for participating in the financing of Network School and mentioned that he has known and collaborated with Balaji for over ten years.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the "Opinions on Developing New Quality Productive Forces," supporting high-quality technology enterprises to go public for financing, optimizing systems for mergers and acquisitions, equity incentives, and more for technology enterprises. The opinions also mentioned increasing the supply of financial innovation products, encouraging the development of angel investment, venture capital, and private equity investment, and improving long-term capital support policies.

Hong Kong Cyberport personnel clearly stated to RootData that, after internal verification, Cyberport is not an investor in Metafyed and does not hold any equity in the company.According to RootData, Metafyed is a blockchain-based real-world asset (RWA) tokenization platform, involved in private credit and project financing. The project previously disclosed completing a $5.5 million financing round and stated in the financing press release that it received "incubation and support" from Hong Kong Cyberport, Draper, and the Stellar Development Foundation.RootData marked this financing as "questionable" in March of this year. RootData reminds users to pay attention to the risks associated with the project, to prudently assess the relevant financing information, and welcomes users to provide verifiable information and correction leads to jointly supervise the platform's data quality, enhancing the accuracy and reliability of the data.

On October 8, SonicStrategy (CSE: SONI, OTCQB: SONIF), a digital asset infrastructure company listed in Toronto, Canada, announced the completion of the first phase of a non-brokered private placement, issuing 11,250,000 common shares at a price of CAD 0.20 per share, totaling CAD 2.25 million, all settled in 7,922,535 SYN tokens, without receiving cash.SYN is priced at USD 0.20 per token, with an agreed exchange rate of 1 USD to 1.42 CAD, equivalent to CAD 0.284, with the price confirmed in writing by all parties and approved by the board of directors. The company stated that from September 28 to October 7, the volume-weighted average price of SYN/USDC on Binance was approximately USD 0.1849. No warrants were issued in this phase, and no intermediary fees were paid; the shares are subject to a holding period restriction under Canadian securities law until February 9, 2027. After the closing, the total issued common shares are 60,870,466, with no new shareholders holding 10% or more; the first phase of the closing is still pending final acceptance by the Canadian Securities Exchange.CEO Dustin Zinger stated that this acquisition strengthens the company's digital asset portfolio and allows the company to access ecosystems including the on-chain options platform Hypercall. The received SYN is held in custody controlled by the company and can be used for staking, validating nodes, and operating digital asset infrastructure, or sold and converted to fund operations.

According to BBX data, yesterday global digital asset institutions disclosed the latest developments in capital operations, top venture capital layouts, and privacy infrastructure expansion. The core information is as follows:First Digital has reached a merger agreement with a SPAC, valuing at $250 million, aiming for a Nasdaq listing: The issuer of the dollar stablecoin FDUSD, First Digital, officially announced the signing of a final business merger agreement with the special purpose acquisition company CSLM Digital Asset Acquisition Corp III. The pre-transaction equity valuation for this deal is $250 million. Upon completion of the merger, First Digital will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of a newly established Cayman holding company, with its existing shareholders fully exchanged for Class A common stock of the holding company. The newly merged entity is expected to officially list on Nasdaq in the first half of 2027.AI trading agent startup Catalyst completes $30 million seed round financing, led by Sequoia Capital: AI trading agent startup Catalyst announced the completion of a $30 million seed round financing. This round was led by the world’s top venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, with participation from Wall Street high-frequency quantitative firm Jump Trading, Peak XV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, cryptocurrency exchange giant Coinbase, and Premji Invest, among other well-known institutions. The funds will be used to advance the development of the next-generation on-chain smart trading agent protocol.Blockchain privacy infrastructure Soda Labs receives exclusive $3 million seed round investment from NextBlock: Blockchain privacy infrastructure developer Soda Labs announced the completion of a $3 million seed round financing, exclusively invested by NextBlock. This funding will be specifically used for global market expansion, expanding the verification node network and blockchain support coverage, core team building, and accelerating the integration of its underlying protocol with commercial banks, traditional payment companies, and real-world asset (RWA) platforms. Soda Labs disclosed that its core privacy layer Bubble currently supports Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, and COTI, and is fully expanding to high-performance networks like Solana.

According to informed sources, OpenAI expects its annual revenue to reach or exceed $70 billion by the end of this year, driven by growth in its enterprise business. As of the end of September, OpenAI's annual revenue was approximately $50 billion. OpenAI disclosed this data to investors during discussions about its latest round of financing.

AI company Hone announced the launch of Engines, referring to it as AI that is accountable for business outcomes. Hone stated that chatbots provide answers, agents perform tasks, while Engines deliver results and measure the value created in actual dollars, rather than in model token usage or subjective feelings.According to Hone, users only need to specify a business metric, and the Engine will autonomously complete the integration, build the required agents, skills, and memory, collaborate with relevant personnel, and continuously improve with experience. Its clients have used Engines to discover millions of dollars in procurement savings, optimize product conversion funnels, manage credit risk, increase qualified sales pipelines in new regions, and accelerate implementation while improving customer management.Hone also announced the completion of a $60 million seed round financing, led by Benchmark and Index, with participation from Elad Gil, Hanabi, Definition, Diffusion, Lux, SV Angel, and Align. Hone stated that the foundational capabilities of AI have clearly outpaced the value it creates in the real world, and Engines will be used to bridge this gap.

Meanwhile co-founder and CEO Zachary Townsend stated that the company has completed a $37.5 million funding round from existing investors, led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Haun Ventures, Framework, Pantera Capital, Digital Currents, and Apollo Global. The company has raised over $180 million in total, and this round of funding will be used to meet the demand for BTC life insurance from families in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.Meanwhile will launch the BTC Life 1-Pay product for customers outside the United States in early 2026, allowing users to pay premiums in Bitcoin as a one-time payment, receiving a guaranteed death benefit valued in Bitcoin for life. After the first year, up to 90% of the policy value can be borrowed, with no repayment plan. The company has announced partnerships with 15 brokers serving affluent families, covering Singapore, Hong Kong, the UAE, and Switzerland, with premium income expected to more than double year-on-year this year.

According to Bloomberg, the AI model evaluation platform Arena completed a new round of financing of $200 million with a valuation of $3.1 billion, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital.Arena originated from the Chatbot Arena research project at the University of California, Berkeley, and is known for its public large model rankings, achieving an annual revenue of $100 million in June of this year.

Programmable privacy infrastructure Soda Labs has completed a $3 million seed round financing, led by NextBlock. Over the past two and a half years, Soda Labs has developed a cryptographic privacy solution that combines garbled circuits with multi-party computation (GC-MPC), relying on proven standard cryptography such as AES and SHA256. Its privacy engine runs on standard cloud CPUs without the need for dedicated hardware, enabling applications to achieve privacy computing while maintaining a connection to existing public blockchain infrastructure.

According to Fortune, AI trading agent startup Catalyst announced the completion of a $30 million seed round financing, led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Jump Trading, Peak XV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase, and Premji Invest.The company was co-founded by Justin Zheng and Dylan Iskandar in 2025, aiming to assist ordinary investors in formulating and executing trading strategies through AI agents, allowing users to express investment goals in natural language. The AI agent then translates these into trading strategies and completes processes such as asset selection, cost optimization, and trade execution, but the final trades still require user confirmation. It is reported that Catalyst has currently completed a round of testing aimed at high-frequency trading users.

According to an official post from Chainlink, it has launched the institutional financing and collateral management solution Fulcrum, which separates financing agreement management from cash and collateral settlement networks, supports cross-chain repurchase (Repo) and 24/7 collateral movement, and will demonstrate with DTCC at Sibos 2026.Chainlink also stated that 40 new integrations were added in September, covering 24 users including Aave, Coinbase, Paxos, Monad, Tempo, and others.

Alphabet's AI drug development company Isomorphic Labs, led by Demis Hassabis, is in early negotiations for a new round of financing, with a valuation of at least $40 billion, potentially reaching $50 billion.The company completed a $2.1 billion Series B financing in May this year. Reports also indicate that the application of AI in the biopharmaceutical field is still in its early stages, and more efforts are needed before clinical trials and product launches. This negotiation is still in the early stages, and specific terms and investor information have not been disclosed.

Bitcoin collateralized lending is gradually expanding from a cryptocurrency financial scene focused on trading and investment to real credit needs such as tuition fees, living expenses, business operating funds, and real estate, showing a significant change in market usage. Institutions like SALT Lending and Ledn indicate that more and more borrowers are choosing to collateralize BTC for liquidity instead of selling their holdings.Since its establishment in 2018, Ledn has issued loans totaling over $11 billion and expects this scale to grow to $1 trillion in the coming years. Its clients include entrepreneurs and institutional investors seeking operating funds, as well as individuals borrowing to pay for children's education, real estate investments, and short-term living expenses. This trend indicates that the financial attributes of BTC are extending from "tradable assets" further to "collateralizable assets." Borrowers hope to unlock its value without selling BTC while still retaining potential upside exposure.At the same time, institutions like SALT are promoting fixed-rate, long-term products, bringing crypto collateralized loans closer to traditional credit models like home mortgages. Coinbase has also recently launched fixed-rate BTC collateralized loans through Morpho. Ledn further anticipates that similar models may expand from BTC to traditional hard assets like gold, and the boundaries of the collateralized asset lending market are widening.

The cryptocurrency payment company Ripple has expanded into stablecoins, asset custody, and has entered the long-term leveraged exchange-traded fund (ETF) swap financing sector, which has been dominated by large banks, becoming an important participant. According to The Wall Street Journal, leveraged ETF managers achieve target returns through total return swaps and other derivatives, such as amplifying the daily fluctuations of a particular stock or index; banks or brokers sell related contracts and charge fees, then buy stocks or derivatives to hedge their own exposure.According to Morningstar Direct, there are 593 leveraged ETFs in the United States, managing over $256 billion in assets, of which 426 are single-stock leveraged funds, a category that received regulatory approval in 2022. Ripple entered swap financing after acquiring the prime broker Hidden Road, which caters to cryptocurrency hedge funds last year; this business is now called Ripple Prime, which is collaborating with multiple ETF providers and hopes to expand to include other investment managers, including hedge funds.On Tuesday, Ripple Prime announced it would provide prime brokerage, clearing, and financing services to the hedge fund Brevan Howard. Ripple Prime President Noel Kimmel stated that this is a growing and significant part of the company's business. The report cited an example where a fund paid Ripple at a rate of 4 percentage points above the overnight bank financing rate, which as of Tuesday was approximately equivalent to 8% of the fund's assets on an annualized basis; this cost is included in the net asset value of the leveraged fund, separate from the approximately 1% management fee.

Manus's parent company, Butterfly Effect, has officially announced that it has recently completed a new round of financing exceeding 500 million dollars. This round of financing was led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing shareholders Tencent, Sequoia China, and ZhenFund continuing to support.

According to reports from Lei Feng Network·Whale Rhino, AI hardware company Loke Technology NOOKLAB has completed several rounds of financing, with investors including Sequoia China, Linear Capital, and others, accumulating a total amount of several hundred million RMB, with a current valuation close to 100 million USD. The two rounds of financing were concentrated at the beginning of this year.Loke Technology's founder Raymond was born in 1996 and has previously worked at OPPO, OnePlus, Anker, and ByteDance, where he was responsible for the second-generation AI glasses in the Byte Ocean team. Its first product, Moonphase Flip, weighs 54 grams and attaches to the back of the phone via MagSafe magnetic suction. The company defines it as a low-disruption AI portable screen, primarily targeting overseas markets. The team currently consists of about 30 people.

New York startup Vest Labs announced the completion of a $13 million seed round financing, which closed in July this year, led by Portal Ventures, with participation from individual investors including Citadel Securities, BlackRock, and KKR executives.Vest was co-founded by University of Pennsylvania dropout Justin Ma, Rikuya Takatsu, and Maximilian Tsiang. The platform allows qualified traders to use company funds to trade perpetual futures contracts around the clock, with traders able to receive up to 80% of the profit share, differentiating itself from traditional proprietary trading firms that charge users for simulated account fees. The company plans to use the funding to develop a mobile application, expand its 22-person team, and broaden the range of tradable asset classes.

Robot data startup Mecka AI has completed a $60 million Series B funding round, led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Nvidia, Microsoft's venture fund M12, Qualcomm, and Samsung Electronics.Mecka AI is a startup dedicated to collecting and analyzing human motion data to train humanoid robots and other types of robots. According to previous reports, Mecka AI is set to complete a funding round led by Sequoia, with a valuation of approximately $500 million.