financing

Julian Lafarge, Chief Market Strategist at Barclays Private Bank, stated that despite the uncertainty surrounding Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's future, the uncertain returns on AI investments, and rising financing costs testing market confidence, investors should continue to participate in the AI market. Lafarge believes that AI is not a bubble but a technological revolution that will impact all industries, although its commercialization and infrastructure development cannot happen overnight.Lafarge pointed out that Nvidia is referred to as the "central bank of AI trading," but even if the company changes its CEO, it does not mean that the entire AI industry chain's trading needs to be re-evaluated or renegotiated. He compared the potential leadership transition at Nvidia to previous management transitions at Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon, arguing that a successor taking over does not necessarily weaken corporate value.However, Barclays lists interest rates and the financing environment as major risks that could disrupt the market. As the scale of AI infrastructure investment expands, the market's focus is shifting from whether the demand for computing power is real to whether the massive capital expenditures can generate sufficient returns. Data center construction also faces bottlenecks such as power access, equipment installation, and commercial operation cycles, while expectations of tightening Federal Reserve policies may also raise corporate financing costs and depress long-term cash flow valuations.Lafarge emphasized that the trillions of dollars in AI investment commitments cannot quickly translate into actual computing power delivery, and there will be significant divergence in investment returns among companies. Tighter financing conditions may change the pace of industry investment and competitive landscape, but it does not mean that the long-term demand for AI infrastructure will disappear. Barclays still prefers to maintain exposure to AI investments until there are clear signs of a significant slowdown in industry growth momentum.

British bank Griffin has completed a $20 million Series B financing round, led by Octagon Partners, with participation from Notion Capital, A+ Ventures, Nordic Ninja, Breega, and others. The company's valuation exceeds $100 million, though it has not disclosed whether this is pre-money or post-money valuation. Griffin stated that the funds from this round will be used to drive business expansion and achieve profitability.Griffin was founded in 2017 by former Airbnb employee David Jarvis and CircleC co-founder Allen Rohner, and it obtained a full banking license in 2024 and officially launched. Currently, Griffin provides banking infrastructure services to over 80 companies, including Uber, Countingup, Anna Money, Yonder, and Prosper. The company serves over 300,000 retail and business customers, processing approximately 10 million payments annually. As of September 2026, its recurring revenue has increased 3.2 times year-on-year, a figure that has not yet been audited.Griffin co-founder and CEO David Jarvis stated that the company will expand its card issuance and stablecoin business: the card issuance business will support branded retail and corporate debit cards, with credit card products to be launched later; in terms of stablecoins, the company is developing reserve-related services for enterprises and advancing on-chain cross-border payment solutions.

According to EU-Startups, the startup Nebuly, headquartered in Turin and New York, has completed a Series A funding round of 18.95 million euros (approximately 21 million dollars), led by Planven, with participation from Exor Ventures, Tenacity Capital, TGV, and others.

SE3, headquartered in Munich, has completed a $30 million Series A funding round, led by Accel, with participation from Keen Venture Partners, Seedcamp, and Lakestar.SE3 is developing spatial AI for drones.

According to Jiemian News, Tongxin Intelligence has completed hundreds of millions in seed and angel round financing, with investors including Tsinghua Alumni Seed Fund, Beijing General Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Songlin Technology, Pingzhi Information, Anwu Intelligence, and Yuzizhangquan.The funds from this round will mainly be used for core architecture design and research and development before chip tape-out. Tongxin Intelligence was founded in April 2026 by artificial intelligence scientist, president of Beijing General Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, and chair professor at Peking University and Tsinghua University, Zhu Songchun. Its first product is positioned to support AGI algorithm inference chips, aimed at applications such as large models, world models, and general intelligent agents, with plans to start FPGA prototype verification in early December this year.

According to The New York Times, German industrial robot company Agile Robots has raised $500 million in a new round of financing led by SoftBank, with investors including Nvidia, bringing its valuation to $8.5 billion. Agile Robots founder Zhaopeng Chen stated that the funds will be used for expansion in the United States, increasing production in Germany, and entering new markets, preparing for a potential IPO in the future.The company is collaborating with partners such as Google DeepMind, with total financing reaching $2 billion. Agile Robots was founded in 2018 and is dedicated to combining artificial intelligence with robotics to help factories increase productivity and reduce costs. Zhaopeng Chen mentioned that physical AI is one of the solutions for Europe to close the gap with AI in the United States and China and to revitalize its industry.

According to Bloomberg, AI computing power cloud service provider CoreWeave is seeking to raise at least $4 billion through an investment-grade, asset-backed loan led by Morgan Stanley.The funds will be used to procure NVIDIA chips and other computing equipment for a contract with an investment-grade client, with an expected annual interest rate between 7% and 7.5%. CEO Michael Intrator previously stated that at current interest rates, the company would not finance through the unsecured bond market.

British AI chip startup Fractile has completed a $720 million Series C funding round and plans to deliver its first batch of chips and systems next year.

According to a Torus announcement, this energy storage company headquartered in Salt Lake City, USA, has completed a $500 million Series C financing round, led by Magnetar, with participation from ICONIQ, Origin Ventures, Ridgeline Partners, and Trinity Capital.Torus also launched a modular AI inference computing power product called Foundry, which integrates power supply, energy storage, heat dissipation, networking, and computing power into prefabricated equipment, with each site ranging from 1 to 20 megawatts, requiring approximately 12 to 16 weeks from contract signing to operation. The first batch of customers includes Hydra Host, and the company's goal is to deploy over 47,000 GPUs by the end of 2027.

According to Bloomberg, informed sources revealed that the autonomous driving and automation technology company Applied Intuition is in talks for a new round of financing led by General Catalyst, aiming to raise at least $1.5 billion, with a pre-money valuation of about $30 billion, which is double its valuation in June 2025, with General Catalyst planning to invest $250 million.The sources also stated that the company expects revenue to exceed $560 million in fiscal year 2026 and total revenue to exceed $1 billion in 2027. Founded in 2017, Applied Intuition develops automation operating systems and autonomous driving technology for industries such as construction, transportation, and defense. The previous round of financing was led by a fund under BlackRock and Kleiner Perkins. Currently, neither Applied Intuition nor General Catalyst has commented on this.

According to TechCrunch, the AI simulation platform Plurai has completed a $13 million seed round of financing, led by Team8, with participation from U&I, Velocity, and Mercer.Plurai uses synthetic data from enterprise digital systems for simulation to help agents handle complex edge cases. Its platform creates digital twins for enterprise knowledge bases and tools that agents can call upon, outlining possible execution processes for agents and assessing and correcting potential issues.Co-founder Ilan Kadar stated that the company also plans to use the collected data to perform post-training on open-source lightweight models to meet the needs of different clients.

According to Forbes, data infrastructure company Edelbyte has completed a $45 million Series A funding round, reaching a valuation of $500 million, led by Quiet Capital, with all existing investors participating. New investors include QP Ventures, Startpoint Capital, and Cerca Partners.The company had previously completed a $25 million seed round led by Sequoia, with Greenoaks and Swish Ventures participating, bringing total funding to $70 million. Edelbyte was founded in November 2025 by four former Microsoft engineers to provide a data platform for increasingly complex query workloads in the AI era.Co-founder and CEO Avner Aharoni, CTO Evgeney Ryzhyk, VP of Engineering Alexander Sloutsky, and VP of Platform Engineering Yoni Leibowitz all worked at Microsoft for about 20 years and have over a decade of experience working together.Among them, Ryzhyk and Sloutsky were part of the founding team of Microsoft's internal data platform Kusto, which later became the foundation for products like Azure Data Explorer. Edelbyte's platform integrates traditional analytics, text search, spatial queries, and AI workloads on the same infrastructure and can be deployed in public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments.

According to Sifted, game engine company Unity and NVIDIA's investment arm NVentures have joined the approximately $700 million funding round for UK AI startup Emulate.Emulate was founded in August this year by several former researchers from Google DeepMind and is registered in the UK. The founders include Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill, and others. The company's focus is on "world models," which learn the laws of the physical world from video and interactive data to train agents that can act in real environments.Previously, the Financial Times reported in September that Emulate planned to raise up to $700 million at a valuation of about $3.7 billion; Bloomberg and PYMNTS later stated that its valuation was approaching $4 billion just one month after its establishment. Sifted noted that Unity and NVentures are the latest investors to join, but did not disclose the specific investment amounts from each.

Nick Tomaino, a partner at 1confirmation, stated that 1confirmation has participated in all rounds of financing for Polymarket to date and has decided to increase its investment again. Although the fund focuses on seed-stage investments and typically does not participate in later-stage financing, it believes that Polymarket is worth breaking this investment convention.Nick Tomaino mentioned that there has been a demand for prediction markets for over a century, as users wish to place bets on events in politics, culture, and more. In the age of AI, one of the biggest challenges faced by young people is discerning the truth of information, and prediction markets can transform users' trading and investment enthusiasm into more accurate information.He emphasized that the long-term value of Polymarket is not just in sports betting, but in providing a more effective information discovery mechanism for political, geopolitical, and cultural events. Currently, while the U.S. market is primarily focused on sports trading, the accuracy of information is what gives prediction markets their more enduring value.Additionally, he believes that Polymarket's business is continuously upgrading, with the current management team performing excellently, and the products in the U.S. market are at an industry-leading level, with revenue consistently reaching new highs. Regarding the token program, he stated that while he did not fully agree with some of the related promotional methods previously, it is unreasonable to assert that the token program has lost its potential.Finally, Nick Tomaino stated that Polymarket founder Shayne has a strong desire for success and is one of the most direct and transparent people he knows.

According to EU-Startups, Cambridge semiconductor startup Tendrils has completed a $30 million seed round financing, approximately €26 million, led by Benchmark, with participation from Visionaries Club, the UK Sovereign AI Fund, FR8, Antimatter, Cloudberry VC, Conviction, Embassy Ventures, and SV Angels, along with several angel investors.The company was founded in 2025 by CEO Nils Cremer and co-founders T6 and Hugo McNally, and is developing a universal processor architecture that allows thousands of cores to work in parallel.The new architecture is based on an interactive network computing model, representing programs as interconnected nodes, allowing independent operations to be executed simultaneously, attempting to break free from traditional shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences. The company is also developing an open-source programming language called Vine, which has a syntax similar to Rust, making it easier for software to adapt to this parallel-first architecture. Tendrils stated that while GPUs have taken on large-scale numerical computations, AI agents still heavily rely on CPUs for irregular tasks such as executing code and retrieving documents. Jack Altman, general partner at Benchmark and co-founder of Lattice, will join the board.

AI localization software startup General Translation has completed a total of $27 million in funding, with this round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Upfront Ventures. The specific round and valuation have not been disclosed.

According to official news, the American robotics company Nidus announced the completion of a $30 million financing round, led by Kleiner Perkins and Costanoa, with participation from Ludlow Ventures, SF1, Absolute Partners, Tau, and angel investors, including Chris Power, founder of Hadrian, Adrian Aoun, co-founder of Dulo, and Nikhil Goel, Chief Business Officer of Archer.Nidus develops and deploys foundational robotic models that enable traditional industrial robots to perform precision assembly tasks, utilizing a sovereign AI training approach that allows clients to retain their own knowledge. The company currently delivers customized models for harness processing automation on its proprietary platform, which is built according to the security requirements of the U.S. Department of Defense. Nidus claims that its revenue has surpassed seven figures within the first four months of its establishment. This round of funding will be used to expand the engineering team, extend automation from harness processing to more factory processes, and scale deployments with U.S. defense manufacturers.

According to official news, the AI data/expert network company Mercor announced the completion of a $750 million Series D financing round, with a valuation reaching $20 billion, doubling from $10 billion in October 2025. The investors in this round include Benchmark, Felicis, Fundomo, funds under Apollo, G Squared, General Catalyst, GladeBrook Capital, Nvidia, Salesforce, Sapphire Ventures, StepStone VC, XTX Ventures, and Zoom.Mercor is an AI data/expert network company founded in 2023 in San Francisco, initially focused on an AI recruitment platform, and later shifted to providing high-quality human experts for cutting-edge AI laboratories (such as OpenAI) for model fine-tuning, evaluation, RLHF, and more. The experts include professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers, and are paid by the hour.

AI-driven Web3 trading and research platform Vision Makers has completed a $4 million seed round financing, with investors including MH Ventures, Castrum Capital, Titans Ventures, M2M Capital, Archer Capital, Gemhead Capital, MYR Venture (formerly Mayer Venture), ACN Labs (Aitech Labs), Zerone Venture, Velion Venture, Mira Capital, and BlockRise.Vision Makers is an AI-driven Web3 platform that integrates conversational crypto research, token analysis, and decentralized trading, allowing users to ask questions in natural language and receive answers based on on-chain data, social sentiment, and news. The platform is also preparing for exchanges, alerts, and agent services for signatures. Its VMKS token, based on the BNB Chain, is used for access, staking, and payments within the platform.

According to the official announcement, real estate investment infrastructure company Index Industries has completed a $50 million seed round financing, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Polychain Capital, Galaxy Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, and others.The company was co-founded by Josh Rosenthal, former president and general partner of Polychain Capital, and Brian Hardecker, CEO of residential real estate platform Longmark. The platform combines the daily published U.S. housing price index, tokenization technology, and real estate and capital market services, aiming to transform U.S. housing into an investable asset class, with its first product being the U.S. Housing Price Benchmark Index USHP Index.