financing

According to Reuters, private equity giant Apollo Global Management and Blackstone Group are bringing in more investors for a debt financing deal worth approximately $36 billion to help Anthropic build its artificial intelligence infrastructure.Insiders revealed that this debt financing will be used to purchase Google-customized TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) chips, which will then be leased by Anthropic. Broadcom, which assisted Google in developing the chips, will provide guarantees for the majority of the funds in this transaction.This move is expected to become one of the largest private credit transactions in history and may also be the largest chip financing debt transaction to date. The plan aims to provide computational power support for Anthropic by leveraging Broadcom's creditworthiness.

According to official news, the AI Agent platform HolmesAI announced that its registered users have officially surpassed 4 million, and simultaneously launched a new product form called Coding Agent. This product aims to expand the application scenarios of "digital avatars" from social interactions to coding and development fields. Users can generate their own Coding Persona by importing Markdown documents and attach it to the Agent to execute development tasks.It is reported that HolmesAI has accumulated a total of $8 million in financing to date, with investors including well-known institutions such as Bitrise Capital, IBG Capital, Generative Ventures, Waterdrip Capital, and CGV Fund. HashKey Group also participated in early incubation support.The official stated that with the launch of the new product, HolmesAI has officially entered the Pre-TGE stage. From now until June 30, the platform will offer free creation benefits for Coding Agent and provide a daily quota of 100,000 Tokens for calls. In addition, HolmesAI will collaborate with Web3 ecosystem partners in the coming weeks to continuously launch multiple rounds of airdrops and limited-time benefits as part of Pre-TGE community incentive activities.

According to the official announcement, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has completed a $65 billion Series H financing round, with a post-money valuation reaching $965 billion, surpassing its competitor OpenAI for the first time, becoming the highest-valued AI startup in the world.This financing round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks Capital, and Sequoia Capital. In addition, the company plans to expand its computing power to meet the growing demand for its Claude product and to promote the scaling of its products.

According to The Block, the self-trading platform Hypernova built on Hyperliquid has completed a $3 million pre-seed funding round, led by Lemniscap, with participation from Very Early Ventures, CMS Holdings, and Pivot Global. Several angel investors from the Hyperliquid ecosystem also participated in this funding round.The platform automates trader payments using smart contracts, aiming to address issues such as the lack of transparency in payment processes and profitable traders becoming liabilities for traditional proprietary trading firms. Hypernova can dynamically decide whether to push positions to the market based on the quality of traders. The platform is currently in a closed alpha phase and plans to publicly launch within the next two months.

According to official news, the smart DeFi assistant Otomato announced the completion of a $2 million financing led by Improbable. Otomato is a no-code Web3 automation protocol and DeFi assistant that allows users to create, monitor, and automate on-chain operations, with over 3,000 users currently.

ClawCivi.ai has completed a multi-million dollar seed round financing, supported by Trump-related funds, the Draper family fund, and others. The product enables multiple AI Agents to collaborate on tasks through the shared Skills capabilities of Agents (OpenClaw, Hermes, Manus). Its token $CLAW will officially launch on PancakeSwap at 3:00 AM (UTC+8).

Smart ring manufacturer Oura Health Oy officially submitted a confidential S-1 registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 21, planning to go public on the U.S. stock market later this year, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan serving as the lead underwriters for the IPO.Ōura was founded in 2013 in Oulu, Finland, by three co-founders Petteri Lahtela, Kari Kivelä, and Markku Koskela, all of whom came from the R&D background of Nokia and global heart rate monitoring pioneer Polar. In October 2025, the company completed an E round of financing led by Fidelity Investments, raising $875 million, with a post-money valuation reaching $11 billion. Previously, the company had raised over $1.5 billion in total financing.

The European Central Bank (ECB) rejected the proposal to relax regulations on euro stablecoins, believing that such measures are too risky and could undermine financial stability and the transmission of monetary policy.Bruegel suggested at the informal meeting of EU finance ministers held in Nicosia, Cyprus, that liquidity requirements for stablecoin issuers should be lowered and that they should be allowed to access ECB funding support when necessary to combat a market dominated by dollar stablecoins and to avoid "digital dollarization." However, officials, including central bank president Lagarde, strongly opposed this, arguing that stablecoins could destabilize bank deposits, increase banks' funding costs, weaken lending capacity, and interfere with interest rate control.Although some finance ministers had mixed feelings about the proposal, several central bank officials questioned the idea of making the ECB the "lender of last resort" for stablecoin issuers. The EU is currently implementing strict regulations on stablecoins under the MiCAR framework, while the GENIUS Act passed in the U.S. in 2025 adopts more lenient rules. Currently, euro stablecoins account for only 0.3% of the global stablecoin supply, while Europe is advancing the digital euro project to enhance payment sovereignty.

Japanese yen stablecoin issuer JPYC announced that its Series B round of financing is about to be completed, with a total financing amount expected to reach approximately 5 billion yen. New investors in this round include Life Design Fund, IHD STRATEGY FUND, a fund under Awa Bank, and Meiji Yasuda Future Co-Creation Fund, among others.JPYC stated that the new financing will mainly be used for system and application development, recruitment of business expansion talent, promotion of stablecoin payment and management business, as well as the construction of M2M (machine-to-machine) payment scenarios for AI Agents. JPYC obtained a license for Japanese money transfer operators in 2025 and began issuing the stablecoin JPYC, which is pegged to the yen at a 1:1 ratio, in the same year. The company reported that within about 7 months of issuance, the number of accounts reached 18,000, with a cumulative issuance exceeding 2.5 billion yen and a total transaction volume exceeding 35 billion yen. Currently, JPYC has been deployed on four chains: Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, and Kaia, and has integrated with the LINE ecosystem Web3 wallet Unifi, aiming to promote the adoption of stablecoins among ordinary users in Japan.

Two informed sources revealed that CATL plans to participate in the financing activities of the domestic artificial intelligence company DeepSeek. DeepSeek's first round of financing aims for approximately 50 billion yuan, which may be completed as early as next month, and after the transaction, the company's valuation may exceed 350 billion yuan. JD.com and NetEase have also been reported to be in talks to invest, but the final investors and amounts may still be adjusted.In recent years, CATL has been accelerating its layout in the AI data center infrastructure business. In addition to power batteries, it also provides backup power batteries and energy storage systems for data centers. Earlier this month, a CATL affiliate invested $942 million in GDS Holdings and invested in the power supply system manufacturer Zhongheng Electric.Reports indicate that DeepSeek has built its own data center in Inner Mongolia and is currently recruiting data center operations and maintenance personnel in Inner Mongolia. Due to the rapid growth in AI computing power demand, the demand for energy storage and stable power supply in data centers has also increased, allowing CATL to further enter the AI infrastructure track.Previous reports stated that DeepSeek's current round of financing has attracted attention from several Chinese capital sources, including the national AI investment fund and technology giants. DeepSeek has not yet achieved large-scale revenue, but its low-cost open-source model has already created competitive pressure on companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The cross-chain infrastructure platform Squid has completed a $6 million strategic financing round, led by North Island Ventures, with participation from Ripple, Dialectic, Borderless, and others.It is reported that Squid was initially incubated within the Axelar ecosystem and later developed into an independent platform. Since its launch in 2023, Squid claims to have processed over $6 billion in cross-chain transaction volume, covering more than 100 blockchains, with a total of over 4 million transactions and more than 1 million users. After this round of financing, Squid's total funding amount has reached $13.5 million. The company plans to use the new funds to launch new consumer-facing products, further simplifying the process for users to access, manage, and use crypto assets across chains.

The new generation Perp DEX PopDEX has announced the completion of a $30 million financing round, led by Foresight Ventures. PopDEX is a trader-centric decentralized perpetual contract trading platform that focuses on capital efficiency, trading experience, and value distribution mechanisms, aiming to build an on-chain derivatives trading platform driven by contributions from real trading.

Web3 fintech startup Jia announced the completion of a $3 million seed round financing, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, A100x Ventures, TCG, and Hashed Emergent. So far, Jia has raised a total of $7.3 million.Jia currently operates multiple decentralized lending pools and introduces liquidity through networks such as Base, Stellar, Arbitrum, and Polygon, while using stablecoins for cross-border settlements to reduce the cost and time of cross-border remittances. The new funding will be used to expand features such as business bank accounts and cash flow management.

AI startup Hark announced the completion of a $700 million financing round, with a post-money valuation of $6 billion. This round is Series A financing, led by Parkway Venture Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and others.Hark stated that it will use the funds to expand GPU infrastructure, accelerate the development of large models, grow its team from about 70 people to 200 engineers, and develop next-generation AI hardware, aiming to create a personal intelligent system capable of voice interaction, visual understanding, persistent memory, and high personalization.

According to The Block, the RWA yield protocol TownSquare announced the completion of its Pre-A round financing, bringing its total financing to approximately $16.25 million. The funds will be used to advance yield products based on institutional strategies and cross-chain brokerage services.The protocol focuses on bringing yield from institution-backed on-chain assets to ordinary users. Currently, the scale of institution-backed assets on-chain is approximately $36 billion, with yields exceeding the traditional 3%-5% level of U.S. Treasury bonds. TownSquare will build yield vaults around stablecoin USD1, tokenized gold, USDC, cbBTC, and other RWA, and will work with partners like World Liberty Financial to advance a USD1 pipeline plan with a scale of about $100 million.

According to The Block, Bitcoin hardware wallet manufacturer Foundation has completed a new round of financing of $6.4 million, led by Fulgur Ventures with participation from Arche Capital and others, aimed at expanding from Bitcoin self-custody wallets to scenarios such as identity, multi-factor authentication, and AI agent authorization. This round of financing brings the company's total funding to $16.5 million, with valuation and round structure undisclosed.Foundation also announced that its flagship device, Passport Prime, is now available for sale to all users, integrating a Bitcoin hardware wallet, FIDO security key, 2FA storage, confidential information vault, and 50 GB of encrypted storage, emphasizing "human authorization" through dedicated hardware. In addition, the company is expanding the scope of the KeyOS developer platform and plans to launch the KeyOS app store by the end of the second quarter, with initial partners including Cake Wallet.

Crypto financial infrastructure Cycles announced the completion of a $6.4 million seed round financing, led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Compound VC, Primitive Ventures, and others. After this round of financing, the total amount raised has reached $8.7 million.The company aims to build a private clearing network for the crypto market and seeks to enhance capital utilization through a "clearing network" mechanism, achieving multi-party net settlement through zero-knowledge proofs and trusted execution environments, thereby reducing counterparty risk and minimizing liquidity consumption.