financing

The cryptocurrency exchange Bybit's payment department Bybit Pay has completed integration with the cryptocurrency payment infrastructure provider Mesh. Users can now directly use their Bybit account balance for payments or account top-ups on supported platforms without needing to withdraw assets or transfer them to other platforms first.Users can directly select Bybit Pay as the payment method during settlement or recharge. For merchants already integrated with Mesh, Bybit Pay can be added as a payment option through existing integrations, reaching the 80 million users claimed by Bybit. Bybit stated that this integration also supports programmable settlement options, allowing merchants to control the payment settlement methods and timing across different markets.Mesh stated that its network is connected to over 300 wallets, exchanges, and financial service platforms. In January of this year, the company completed a $75 million Series C funding round led by Dragonfly, achieving a valuation of $1 billion, with total funding exceeding $200 million, and plans to expand into the Latin American, Asian, and European markets.

Stablecoin payment infrastructure startup Diameter Pay has completed a $10 million Series A funding round, co-led by CMT Digital and Lightspeed Faction.Diameter Pay stated that since the beginning of this year, it has processed over $10 billion in payments by helping institutional clients access dollar accounts, payment channels, and stablecoin deposit and withdrawal pathways.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has preliminarily approved OpenReserve's application for a national bank charter. The company completed a $25 million seed round of financing in April, led by a16z crypto, with participation from Jump Capital, Acrew, Coinbase Ventures, Clocktower, Quona, and the Middle Eastern venture capital fund AAF Management.OpenReserve is led by fintech executives including Dee Choubey, co-founder of MoneyLion, and is committed to combining traditional banking, blockchain infrastructure, and digital asset services, utilizing digital assets and technology to achieve 24/7 operations. OpenReserve is also applying for Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance and has submitted its application to the FDIC.

According to Businesswire, the bank-led digital currency network Cari announced that it has raised $32.5 million in its first round of external financing, with all funds coming from banking institutions, including First Horizon Bank, Huntington Bank, KeyBank, M&T Bank, Old National Bank, and SouthState Bank, as well as Glacier Bank.Cari is built on an Ethereum-based permissioned Layer 2 blockchain, aimed at helping banks put funds on-chain through shared infrastructure, providing programmable financial services. The new funds will be used to accelerate bank access and integration, expanding tokenized deposits and programmable currency application scenarios.

According to Tech Funding News, German AI data analytics startup Zeit AI has completed a €5 million seed round financing, with investors including Y Combinator, the Oxford University Seed Fund, Sequoia Capital Scout Fund, ACE Ventures, and HPVC, founded by SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner.Angel investors include former German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, 2014 World Cup champion Mario Götze, and Meta board member Charlie Songhurst. Zeit AI was founded two years ago by two former Palantir employees, and its product ZeitMind is an autonomous data analyst that can automatically process raw data and generate reports, alerts, inventory optimization, and other applications without the need for human data engineers to intervene.

According to Crypto Briefing, Colombian fintech company Plenti has completed a $3 million seed round financing, led by Tether with participation from Verda Ventures. The new funds will be used to support existing operations in Colombia and expand into Peru and Bolivia.Founded in 2022, Plenti provides multi-currency account services for freelancers and remote workers, allowing users to hold US dollars, euros, and Colombian pesos, earn balance yields, and invest in US stocks, ETFs, digital gold, and crypto assets. The company has served over 150,000 active users, with an annual transaction volume exceeding $3.1 billion, and has processed over 680 million USDT since 2023.

According to Bloomberg, G42, an AI company supported by Microsoft, has had preliminary discussions with potential investors about raising billions of dollars, potentially becoming one of the first government-affiliated AI companies in the UAE to expand its capital scale through external financing.Insiders revealed that the scale of financing and transaction structure have not yet been finalized, and discussions are still in the exploratory stage. G42 has previously advanced data center projects in Abu Dhabi with Microsoft and OpenAI, and has received support from companies like Microsoft.

According to Bloomberg, AI and cloud security startup Upwind Security has completed a new round of financing of $300 million, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from some existing investors, bringing the post-financing valuation to $3.8 billion.Upwind Security, headquartered in San Francisco, primarily provides cybersecurity services for AI applications and cloud applications. The new funds are intended to expand the AI security capabilities of its core cloud security platform, aiming to be closer to developers.

According to Bloomberg, the physical AI company Lyte announced the completion of a $165 million Series C financing round, led by Maverick Silicon, with participation from Fidelity Management & Research, Atreides Management, Key1 Capital, and Ora Global, bringing the post-money valuation to $1.6 billion.Founded in 2021 by former Apple and PrimeSense engineers, Lyte focuses on providing a complete perception technology stack for robots, including custom chips, multimodal sensors, and spatial software. To date, the company has raised a total of $272 million.The funds from this round will be used to expand the production scale of perception chips and its LyteVision platform, as well as to advance AI perception capabilities and the commercialization of robotics.

According to Bloomberg, the French robotics startup Wandercraft (a subsidiary investment of Renault SA) is seeking approximately 100 million euros (about 116 million dollars) in a new round of financing and has appointed Goldman Sachs as the advisor for this financing.The pre-financing valuation is approximately 750 million euros, and the funds raised will be used to expand the company's business scale.

AI-native operating system Metal, aimed at the private capital market, announced the completion of a $4.5 million seed round financing, led by a16z, Speedrun, and Y Combinator, with participation from Pioneer Fund, Rebel Fund, Gaingels, Indus Valley Capital, Team Ignite VC, Goodwater Capital, and Phaze Ventures.This round of financing will accelerate its development of software that founders can use during fundraising and continue to use throughout the capital formation process. Metal also released a paper on the trends in the private capital market.

AI security startup AIR has completed a $50 million financing round, led by Sequoia Capital with an initial $10 million in the first round, followed by Greenoaks leading a second round of $40 million, with participation from Swish, Netz, and several angel investors.The company was founded by Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, senior members of Israel's Unit 8200, and offers an AI agent security platform that can discover AI agents operating within enterprises, continuously review the skills and tools they use, and prevent them from interacting with non-compliant software or external sources, while providing a vetted AI agent plugin and skills marketplace.

According to reports from the investment community, the embodied robot vision company Joint Imaging has completed a new round of financing worth hundreds of millions, with participation from industrial capital, state-owned enterprises, and market-oriented institutions. Investors include Dunhong Asset, Hangzhou Embodied Intelligence Industry Fund, Fuyang Industrial Investment, and Zhi Ping Fang.Joint Imaging is a visual supplier for humanoid robot manufacturers and AI hardware companies such as Yushu, Zhi Ping Fang, Self-Variable, and Rokid, and has achieved revenue at the level of 2 billion. With this round of financing, Joint Imaging will further upgrade its strategic positioning of "the visual infrastructure of the physical AI world," integrating optical design, visual modules, depth cameras, edge AI, data collection, AI Base engineering toolchain, and large-scale manufacturing capabilities to serve customers throughout the complete cycle from Idea to mass production.At the same time, Joint Imaging is advancing a billion-level intelligent vision industry project in Hangzhou.

According to market news, AI training data startup AfterQuery has completed a new round of financing, with a valuation reaching $3.2 billion. Just five months after completing a $30 million Series A round at a valuation of $300 million in April, the valuation has increased more than tenfold.According to Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer, this is the fastest startup in YC history to go from founding to becoming a unicorn. The founders of AfterQuery are only 22 and 23 years old and just participated in the YC Winter 2025 batch 18 months ago. The company announced in April that its annualized revenue has reached $100 million, with clients including NVIDIA, Legora, and the South Korean AI lab Motif Technologies. AfterQuery focuses on training models and agents to complete tasks like professionals rather than just ensuring the accuracy of answers.

BitcoinTreasuries.NET indicates that Strive's SATA has raised enough funds to purchase 104 bitcoins.

According to CoinDesk, the DeFi protection protocol Firelight Protocol announced the completion of $8 million in financing, led by Gumi Cryptos Capital, with participation from Maven 11, Metalayer, Joint Effects, and Tribe Capital.Firelight is incubated by the DeFi infrastructure provider Sentora (managing assets totaling $2.4 billion) and plans to officially launch in September this year.

According to EU-Startups, Berlin-based AI-native energy platform Cloover announced the completion of a new funding round of €86.2 million (approximately $100 million) and received €350 million in guarantees from the European Investment Fund (EIF), bringing the total funding amount to over €1.12 billion (approximately $1.3 billion). Meanwhile, the company announced that it has officially achieved profitability three years after its establishment, with an annualized revenue exceeding €301.7 million (approximately $350 million).Cloover focuses on residential solar energy, heat pumps, and home electrification, providing financing, software, and energy products in collaboration with independent installers. It currently covers the five major markets in Europe, completing approximately 20,000 installation projects each year, making it one of the top three residential energy players in Europe's largest energy market. The company plans to further expand into the UK, France, and Poland markets. In addition, Cloover has officially launched an AI-native "new utility" model, transforming each household into a virtual power plant through a home energy management system, aggregating distributed solar energy, energy storage, heat pumps, and electric vehicle charging stations to enable real-time trading of electricity flexibility.

Kuaishou's subsidiary Keling AI has received investment from a national industrial fund. The National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund has invested 1.4 billion yuan in Beijing Keling, while Charoen Pokphand Robotics has invested approximately 19.29 million USD, equivalent to about 131 million yuan.This is a follow-up to Keling's nearly 3 billion USD financing plan announced in July. The announcement shows that the upper limit of this round of capital increase, approximately 20.447 billion yuan (about 3 billion USD), has been fully utilized. The National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund and Charoen Pokphand Robotics will ultimately hold approximately 1.14% and 0.11% of the shares, respectively.The National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund involved in this investment has a scale of approximately 60.06 billion yuan and is controlled by the third phase of the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund.

According to RootData's financing data statistics, in August, the crypto primary market disclosed 49 financing events, with a total financing amount of approximately $596 million, a month-on-month decrease of 74.2% compared to July's approximately $2.312 billion, and a year-on-year decrease of 35.5% compared to August 2025's approximately $924 million; the number of financing events saw a slight month-on-month increase of 2.1% compared to July's 48 events, but a year-on-year decrease of 42.4% compared to 85 events during the same period last year. (This data does not include questionable financing and excludes mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, post-IPO, and debt financing.)From the perspective of sectors, DeFi was the most active sector this month, completing 19 financings, but the disclosed amount was only about $73.1 million; the infrastructure sector completed 14 financings, with a disclosed amount of approximately $311 million, ranking first in terms of amount; CeFi completed 8 financings, with a disclosed amount of approximately $199 million. The top three projects by financing amount were Ripple ($275 million), RQD Clearing ($74 million), and Fasset ($68 million), with the top three projects totaling approximately $417 million, accounting for about 70.0% of the overall disclosed financing scale.In terms of RWA, RootData currently includes 529 RWA-related projects, of which 149 projects have financing records, with a financing coverage rate of approximately 28.2%. However, looking at August alone, there was only one RWA-related financing, Entropy, with a financing amount of $14 million, accounting for about 2.0% of this month's financing events and approximately 2.3% of the disclosed financing amount.In addition, 6 merger and acquisition events were disclosed in August, a significant decrease from July's 19 events; among them, 4 belong to CeFi, including BitGo's acquisition of NYDIG, Nasdaq's acquisition of LeveL Markets, Rain's acquisition of Ansa, and OpenFX's acquisition of Global Ledger. These were mainly concentrated in CeFi, payments, market infrastructure, and data analysis services.In terms of investment institutions, YZi Labs, MH Ventures, Mapleblock, Polychain, and others remain active. Overall, in August, financing market funds mainly flowed into payments, clearing, stablecoins, CeFi, and institutional-level infrastructure; RWA sector projects have sufficient reserves and high narrative heat, but monthly financing has not yet seen a simultaneous increase.

According to Bloomberg, a fund under Blue Owl Capital has led a $2.4 billion debt financing to support cloud service provider Iren in purchasing NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra GPU for its data center campus in Canada.The financing includes a $1.2 billion senior secured term loan and an equivalent amount of senior secured notes, structured to allow Iren to procure equipment in phases over a specific period. Pacific Investment Management Company is also one of the guarantors of this financing. Documents show that the financing interest rate is 9%, with a term of two and a half years.