financing

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, the crypto primary market disclosed 49 financing events in August, with a total financing amount of approximately $596 million, a 74.2% decrease compared to about $2.312 billion in July, and a 35.5% decrease compared to about $924 million in August 2025; the number of financing events slightly increased by 2.1% compared to 48 events in July, and decreased by 42.4% compared to 85 events in 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 about $311 million, ranking first in amount; CeFi completed 8 financings, with a disclosed amount of about $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 about $417 million, accounting for approximately 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 about 28.2%. However, in 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 about 2.3% of the disclosed financing amount.In addition, 6 merger and acquisition events were disclosed in August, a significant decrease from 19 in July; 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 are well-reserved, with high narrative heat, but monthly financing has not yet seen a synchronized 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.

iTrading platform Catapult Trade announced the completion of a total of $6.6 million in financing across 4 rounds. The seed round investors include KuCoin Ventures, Oddiyana Ventures, Venture Vault VC, and a T1 fund whose name has not yet been disclosed. Angel investors include Blockstreet co-founder and CMO Kyle Klemmer (WLFI and USD1 advisor), veteran trader MacnBTC who entered the market in 2017, and former Manta Network CSO Aamir Ghai (Harvard Blockchain mentor).The private placement round was participated in by operators such as the founder of LIS Skins (with a CS:GO market asset management scale of about $50 million) and the founder of Trady (a multi-chain trading terminal). The KOL round involved over 30 first-line traders and analysts. The financing will support Catapult Turbo (which has achieved a nominal trading volume of $6 billion and a net income of $3.3 million since its launch) and three new products: Gamified Futures, a Gamified Prediction Market powered by Obsidian, and TradFi and crypto classic futures. The $PULT token, as part of the iTrading token plan, is scheduled to launch in the fall of 2026. Strategic round participants will be announced before the TGE and are currently in discussions with several first-line exchanges for listing.

Co-founder of the crypto trading app fomo, Se Yong Park, announced the completion of the first round of financing, with 140 angel investors participating in this round. Currently, there are over 200 angel investors on the cap table.He stated that early founders almost always misunderstand the dynamics between the company and angel investors, and should view angel investors as call options for product success. Even if there are tech CEOs, celebrities, athletes, etc., on the cap table, their likelihood of providing early assistance is close to zero. As the scale expands and a product is created that angel investors are truly willing to use and proudly share, more and more people will naturally recommend the product to the outside world.

According to Morningstar, the AI platform Owner, aimed at local businesses, announced the completion of a $240 million financing round, with the company valuation reaching $2.3 billion. This round of financing was led by Growth Equity under Goldman Sachs Alternative Asset Management, with participation from existing investors Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, and Jack Altman.The company uses AI Agents to automatically complete marketing promotion, customer communication, and operational optimization services for local businesses. The new funds are intended to expand international operations and develop local business scenarios.

According to LatePost, the general robotics company Sharpa has completed over 4.5 billion yuan in financing, with investors including Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com, and other industrial capital, as well as Sequoia China, Qiming Venture Partners, and Meituan Longzhu. The post-investment valuation is 22 billion yuan. This is the first time Sharpa has publicly disclosed its financing since its establishment.Sharpa was founded at the end of 2024 by He Sai Technology CEO Li Yifan, CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and Chief Scientist Sun Kai, focusing on developing general-purpose robots and components that specialize in dexterous operations. Co-founder Li Yifan stated that Sharpa's logic is to first "navigate" several real-world scenarios, accumulating generalized capabilities and real data on the "track," gradually entering households starting in 2028; real scenarios must meet three conditions: the environment is not specially modified for robots, operations are fully autonomous by robots, and complex tasks involving multiple steps are completed.

According to Bloomberg, the new regulations on cryptocurrency asset financing proposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this month aim to restart the ICO financing model. The proposal allows startups to raise up to $5 million within four years and large projects to raise up to $75 million annually without full SEC registration.However, the market environment has fundamentally changed: in January 2018, ICO financing reached $3 billion, but now VC token trading volumes have significantly declined, and speculative funds have shifted to perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and AI stocks. Dragonfly partner Tom Schmidt stated, "Having something is better than having nothing, but it would have been more useful if launched a few years ago." Pantera Capital partner Cosmo Jiang pointed out, "Previously, meme coins that were legal but had actual value were illegal, which is completely contrary to the way capitalism operates." Analysts believe, "The ICO of 2026 is not the ICO of 2018; the era when white papers and dreams could attract capital has ended."

According to Crunchbase, AI fraud prevention company Socure announced the completion of a $156 million strategic growth round financing, with the company's valuation reaching $5.2 billion. Summit Partners led the investment, with participation from Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Docusign, and others. Currently, its fraud prevention services are applied to companies such as cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, stablecoin issuer Circle, digital bank Revolut, and Robinhood.In addition, the company also announced the acquisition of AI startup Fravity, aiming to leverage AI agents to conduct fraud, risk, and compliance investigations, with the specific acquisition amount not yet disclosed.

Physics AI company Transfyr announced the completion of a $25 million seed round financing, led by General Catalyst, with participation from Lux Capital, Breakout Ventures, Factory, Neo, SV Angel, MVP Ventures, Underscore VC, Lyda Hill, and several angel investors.The company is dedicated to bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds, transforming scientific operational data into machine-readable data, and achieving a truly closed-loop system driven by artificial intelligence and automation.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia has suspended some transactions in its new financing plan. This plan aims to provide credit support to AI cloud companies in exchange for revenue sharing. Insiders say that the chip giant withdrew from the related arrangements last week but may adjust the plan in the future or incorporate it into other projects.A Nvidia spokesperson stated that the new business model aimed at the rapidly growing AI ecosystem and open computing power access is still progressing and continues to evolve due to strong demand. The plan was announced less than two months ago, intending to support the financing needs of small AI cloud companies: if customers cannot sell computing power, Nvidia can lease back the relevant computing power, acting as a guarantee buyer, thereby facilitating companies in raising funds to purchase Nvidia AI chips; Nvidia would then share cloud revenue generated by customers based on its chips, in addition to hardware sales.Nvidia stated in this week's earnings call that this model is expected to contribute billions of dollars in revenue in the medium to long term. However, recent investor scrutiny regarding its capital flow back to the AI ecosystem has increased, raising concerns that so-called circular transactions may inflate demand. Reports indicate that some employees had expressed antitrust concerns to customers; in the early stages of the plan, Nvidia also faced dissatisfaction from some potential partners due to attempts to limit chip rental targets, preferring to distribute to multiple small customers rather than a single large customer, and requiring a 50% revenue share after reaching a certain threshold.

According to Bloomberg, informed sources revealed that JPMorgan Chase has begun preliminary discussions with potential lenders to seek a $5 billion debt financing plan to support Volta Infra Holdings Ltd. in building artificial intelligence data centers.Volta AI completed a $300 million venture capital financing earlier this month, with a valuation of $2.4 billion, aiming to help more tech companies access the costly resources of artificial intelligence chips.