financing

Miami-based payment infrastructure startup Cyclops announced the completion of a $20 million Series A funding round, led by Nava Ventures, with participation from Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Lasagna Ventures, and GPT Ventures.

ADI Chain announced the completion of a $50 million financing round, with participation from IHC.The main business of this project is stablecoin settlement and financial infrastructure development, with ecological cooperation covering compliant stablecoins, tokenized securities, institutional payments, Chainlink, ZKsync, and mainstream cryptocurrency wallets.

DeepSeek's first round of financing has officially landed. Business registration information shows that DeepSeek's affiliated company, Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd., recently underwent a business change, adding Hangzhou Chengli Enterprise Management Consulting Partnership (Limited Partnership) and National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund Partnership (Limited Partnership) as shareholders, with registered capital increased to 16.4475 million yuan.

According to RootData, the total financing amount in the cryptocurrency industry in the first half of the year was $9.081 billion, with a total of 259 financing events; among them, the primary market financing amount (excluding IPO/Post IPO/M&A rounds) was $8.658 billion, a decrease of 26.1% compared to the same period last year, and the number of financing events decreased by 28.5% year-on-year.March and May were the two peaks for financing amounts in the first half of the year, with the number of financing events reaching 66 and 68 respectively; in June, the number of financing events fell back to 43, indicating that after entering the end of the second quarter, market funding activity has cooled down. Overall, large financing still significantly boosts monthly financing scale, but the enthusiasm for regular financing rounds has begun to shrink.In the first half of 2026, there were a total of 75 M&A transactions in the cryptocurrency industry, of which 16 disclosed specific amounts (totaling approximately $3.836 billion). M&A activities were mainly concentrated in the CeFi, tools and information services, DeFi, and infrastructure sectors. Representative M&A events include: Mastercard acquiring BVNK ($1.8 billion), Kraken acquiring Reap ($600 million), etc.Leading cryptocurrency venture capital firms still maintain a high frequency of investments, with Coinbase Ventures participating in 25 investments in the first half of 2026, ranking first; Animoca Brands participated in 20, while a16z and Tether participated in 14 each. In the past 12 months, Coinbase Ventures participated in a total of 68 investments, continuing to lead the industry, followed by Animoca Brands, Pantera Capital, YZi Labs, a16z, Tether, and GSR.From the perspective of sectors, DeFi, infrastructure, and CeFi were the three most active directions for financing in the first half of 2026. In the first half of the year, DeFi completed 129 financing events, infrastructure completed 116, and CeFi completed 69. AI, payments, prediction markets, and RWA were also key sub-sectors of capital focus, with AI-related financing at 59 events, payment-related projects at 46 events, and RWA-related projects at 28 events.Overall, the primary market for cryptocurrency in the first half of 2026 has not completely stagnated, but the market structure has changed: the total financing amount is still supported by a few large transactions, institutional investments are more concentrated, sector preferences are more pragmatic, and M&A has become an important means of industry consolidation. Funds are shifting towards structural allocations around infrastructure, DeFi, CeFi, payments, AI, and RWA.

According to a report by The Information, DeepSeek is seeking a new round of financing, targeting an amount of $7.4 billion, with a company valuation of $74 billion. DeepSeek's recent annual revenue reached $400 million to $500 million, mainly from enterprises and developers calling the model through the API, with a gross margin of over 50% for the V4 API.

According to PR Newswire, AI compliance infrastructure company Hadrius announced the completion of a $27 million seed and Series A financing round, led by CRV, with participation from Y Combinator, Pathlight Ventures, as well as founders from Altruist, Jump AI, and FINNY.The new funds will be used to build AI-native compliance infrastructure for the financial services industry, integrating decentralized compliance reviews, risk monitoring, and regulatory document management into a single intelligent workflow through Agentic AI technology.

According to Bloomberg, Brinc, an AI drone company supported by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, announced the completion of a $125 million financing round, led by existing investor Motorola Solutions, with participation from Index Ventures and previous investors such as Dylan Field.It is reported that the company focuses on applying AI-based drone technology in the field of public safety, including replacing some high-risk manual response tasks.

According to official news, Tether announced it will lead a $7 million Series A financing for Pact Labs, with Blockchange Ventures and Lasagna participating in the follow-on investment. The funds will be used to support Pact Labs in building infrastructure related to USA₮ and expanding its applications in payroll, earned wage access, credit, and daily payments.Pact Labs primarily provides digital wallet embedding, real-time payroll transfers, and financial service capabilities for enterprise platforms, aiming to improve the low processing efficiency and long settlement periods of the traditional U.S. payroll system. Tether stated that this collaboration aims to promote deeper integration of the digital dollar USA₮ designed for U.S. compliance standards into the daily financial systems of local workers and businesses.

According to official news, Galaxy announced the launch of the institutional-level on-chain financing program GOFR (Galaxy On-Chain Financing Rate), allowing institutional clients to indirectly access the on-chain credit market through Galaxy, obtaining financing at a single optimized rate, with Galaxy acting as the counterparty.

According to Techcrunch, Nous Research, the developer of the open-source agent Hermes, is finalizing a new round of financing, expected to be led by Robot Ventures, with participation from institutions like USV. The company's valuation is approximately $1.5 billion. Sources indicate that the scale of this round of financing is at least $75 million.Its core product, Hermes, as an open-source local AI agent, has accumulated 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on the GitHub platform. It supports users in deploying and running locally on personal computers and virtual servers, with autonomous execution capabilities such as web retrieval and code generation.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng's net worth has risen to approximately $36 billion, more than doubling from about $16.7 billion previously, surpassing Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman.Previously, DeepSeek completed a $7.4 billion financing round in June 2026, with the company's valuation reaching $50 billion. Bloomberg estimates that Liang Wenfeng holds about 78% of DeepSeek's shares, and his wealth increase mainly comes from the rise in the company's valuation.

2U2.ai announced the completion of a new round of strategic financing, with the financing amount being 3 million USD and the project valuation reaching 100 million USD. This round of financing was led by Vega Venture, with participation from Archer Capital, UZ Capital, and Infinite Alliance.This round of financing will be used to further improve the MemeLayer infrastructure of 2U2.ai, continuously expand ecological cooperation, and promote the large-scale application of AI Meme in content creation, community communication, and attention distribution scenarios.2U2.ai is building an AI-driven MemeLayer for Web3, creating a Meme content network that connects creators, communities, and project parties through meme generation, remixing, distribution, and incentive mechanisms. Currently, the platform has launched the Meme Arms Race points system, where users can earn points by creating, sharing, and disseminating meme content, and participate in subsequent ecological incentives of the platform.

According to official news, the AI healthcare project Savior of Health announced the completion of a $4 million strategic financing round, with participation from Amber Group, Basics Capital, Animoca Brands, Candaq, TBV, Everwood Capital, Olaris Capital, MangoLabs, and Credit Scend.The funds from this round will be used to advance AI-driven healthcare and health management, build next-generation medical infrastructure, support AI scientific research through health questionnaires and surveys, and expand its global healthcare ecosystem.

High-performance AI-native PayFi L1 public chain AXON Finance announced the completion of a new round of institutional financing, with a total amount of 2 million USD. Among them, Infinite Alliance led the investment with 1 million USD; UZ Capital and Bluemount Foundation co-invested with 1 million USD.The funds from this round will be used to accelerate the construction of AXON L1 infrastructure and promote the launch of its first open ecosystem, the "U.S. Stock Copy Trading Engine." As the first open ecosystem of the PayFi public chain, the U.S. Stock Copy Trading Engine is supported by AXON's L1 settlement and account abstraction infrastructure, opening up the prediction platform ecosystem. AXON serves as the underlying infrastructure technology provider. Together, they form a closed loop of "prediction platform traffic diversion and AXON stablecoin yield": users can obtain stable returns by copying trades with idle stablecoins on the prediction platform through AXON L1, thereby allowing AXON to accumulate real on-chain traffic and TVL.

According to PR Newswire, the US-listed Bitcoin treasury and AI data center company Hyperscale Data has disclosed that it has recently increased its BTC holdings again, and as of now, its Bitcoin reserves have surpassed 1,000 coins.The company's management revealed that it plans to use Bitcoin as a potential collateral for financing in the future, and to achieve balance sheet diversification alongside cash and other strategic assets.

According to Decrypt, the AI-driven decentralized finance infrastructure project TrueDAO announced the completion of a $10 million strategic financing round, led by Brevan Howard Digital, with participation from Zee Prime Capital and Jump Capital.The funds raised will primarily be used for the development of core AI protocols, the construction of AI risk control systems, security audits, compliance work, and the expansion of ecosystem partnerships. After the financing is completed, TrueDAO will advance the launch of the testnet, developer tools, and ecosystem integration plans.

The AI writing startup Marker, co-founded by the former creative head of DeepMind and based in London, announced the completion of a $13 million seed round financing. This round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Local Globe. Angel investors involved include: Writely co-founder Steve Newman, Slack co-founder Cal Henderson, and Thomas Wolf from Hugging Face.According to reports, early testing users of Marker have utilized the platform to write various types of content, including blog posts, Substack newsletters, business documents, memos, and novels. Marker’s CEO Steinback stated, "We are at a critical moment where people can choose the future of writing; I believe people will choose solutions that value writing techniques rather than those that produce shoddy content that seriously erodes the essence of writing."

According to TechCrunch, Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium has completed a $100 million seed round of financing, with new investors including Nvidia. Gradium was spun off from the Kyutai AI Lab and co-founded by researcher Neil Zeghidour, who has worked at Google Brain, DeepMind, and Facebook, focusing on ultra-low latency voice AI models.The company emerged from stealth mode last December with $70 million in funding, with investors including FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, DST Global Partners, Eric Schmidt, and French telecom magnate Xavier Niel. The company plans to use the new funds to open an office in the Bay Area to compete for AI talent and has signed clients including French automaker Renault.

According to BBX data, yesterday the global US stock market and companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange made significant moves in the accumulation of digital asset reserves. The latest updates from two core companies are as follows:GPUS core treasury breaks the 1,000 mark: Artificial intelligence data center company Hyperscale Data, Inc. (NYSE American: $GPUS) officially announced that the number of bitcoins held in its treasury has officially exceeded 1,000. Management stated that the company will continue to closely align with market conditions and existing capital allocation opportunities, supported by its core data center business, to continuously manage and expand its bitcoin reserve scale.Metaplanet raises $137 million through targeted private placement: Metaplanet Inc. (TSE: $3350) announced that it will issue new shares to specific institutional investors through the Third-Party Allotment mechanism under Japanese securities law, aiming to raise approximately $137 million (equivalent to 21.4 billion yen), with all funds to be used for purchasing bitcoin. The company accumulated 2,823 BTC in Q2 this year, and as of June 30, its total holdings have reached 43,000 BTC (valued at approximately $2.67 billion). Based on the current market price of about $62,000 per coin, this lightning private placement is expected to add approximately 2,210 BTC to its reserves, helping it strive towards its ultimate goal of 100,000 BTC by the end of the year.

According to official news, the privacy public chain project MOBLUS STRIP (MS) announced the completion of a $50 million strategic financing round, led by Ventures. It is reported that this financing round was successfully closed after a six-month technical due diligence, and due to oversubscription, the project has officially launched a new round of institutional financing.It is reported that MOBLUS STRIP is a vertical field project under the global Web3 industry ecosystem alliance Crypto Oasis (Dubai Crypto Valley), mainly dedicated to developing a full-spectrum privacy public chain. This underlying blockchain natively integrates zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), ring signatures, and distributed mixing protocols, while equipped with five sets of closed-loop decentralized application solutions, capable of providing security guarantees for any EVM-compatible blockchain or enterprise system without the need for hard forks.