financing

According to Jiemian News, the embodied base model company LatentVerse announced the completion of hundreds of millions in seed round financing. Investors include Hillhouse Venture Capital, Qingliu Capital, Inno Fund, Zhiyuan, and Star Motion Era.It is understood that LatentVerse was established in May 2026 by an embodied intelligence research team from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University.

According to reports from the investment community, Daimon Robotics announced the completion of a strategic round of financing worth hundreds of millions, led by Ant Group, with existing shareholders participating in the oversubscription. Two months ago, Daimon completed a Series A financing of hundreds of millions. Along with this round led by Ant Group, Daimon has gathered a group of leading industrial capital including China Merchants Venture Capital, Lenovo Capital, Huichuan Industrial Investment, China Mobile, and China Telecom.It is reported that Daimon recently officially launched the world's first tactile anchoring world model, Daimon-TWM, which integrates native tactile perception throughout understanding, reasoning, prediction, and verification, thereby constructing a "tactile nervous system" that connects fingertip perception to brain reasoning and back to action control, promoting embodied intelligence from "seeing the world" to "understanding the world" and "interacting with the world." Based on the widely deployed tactile perception devices and collection systems, Daimon has built the world's largest tactile multimodal physical world dataset, Daimon-Infinity.

Solana ecosystem social application Memebook has completed a $1 million seed round financing, with investors TOF and Ventures.According to reports, Memebook is a social application similar to Instagram built on Solana, where users can register using a Solana wallet and share photos, videos, and text posts. It includes a wallet-based authentication system, as well as a verification system for Solana Mobile users and other Solana wallets.

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently issued an internal letter that explicitly exempts asset-backed securities (ABS) related to AI data centers from the core investor protection regulations established after the 2008 financial crisis, including the "risk retention" requirement that issuers retain a portion of the debt. The SEC determined that data centers are not financial assets that are liquidated over time, and therefore the securities linked to them should not be subject to the same regulatory constraints as ABS related to auto loans or mortgage loans.Although this move is not an official amendment to the law, the substantial impact should not be underestimated, as companies have previously adhered to relevant regulations out of compliance prudence. In terms of market size, the annual issuance of data center ABS has surged from $2.4 billion in 2020 to $15.5 billion in 2025, growing more than sixfold over five years, with the potential to set a new historical high in 2026.

U.S. AI data center startup Global AI announced the completion of $441 million (approximately 626 billion Korean won) in funding, led by JPMorgan Chase.Founded in 2024, Global AI positions itself as "the world's first sovereign AI hyperscale service provider," specifically designing, building, and operating dedicated AI data centers that are physically isolated (Air-gapped) from external networks for national and enterprise clients, focusing on high-security sensitive task processing scenarios.

According to The Information, citing informed sources, the AI startup Applied Compute, founded by former OpenAI researchers, is discussing a new round of financing, with a valuation expected to reach around $3 billion, more than doubling the valuation announced four months ago during the last financing round. The company is dedicated to helping businesses utilize their own data to run and customize open-source models.This financing is taking place against the backdrop of the company's recent strong revenue growth. Informed sources indicate that Applied Compute's current annualized revenue is approximately $50 million, nearly quadrupling the revenue level disclosed by its CEO Yash Patil last November. According to the sources, investor Elad Gil is negotiating to lead this round of financing, with the expected amount reaching several hundred million dollars. It is still unclear whether this valuation includes the newly injected funds. This round of financing has not yet been finalized, and specific terms may still change.

According to the Financial Times, several Wall Street giants are collaborating with Nvidia to jointly advance a $500 billion artificial intelligence financing plan.

Lambda, an AI cloud computing service provider supported by Nvidia, is financing $917 million through the leveraged loan market to procure AI chips. As the construction of artificial intelligence infrastructure accelerates, chip financing is becoming a new way for capital investment in the AI industry. Lambda belongs to the rapidly developing "new cloud vendor" camp in recent years, with its main business being to provide GPU computing power and AI infrastructure services to enterprises and developers.This financing plan will be completed through a loan based on GPU asset-related rights, aimed at supporting the company's expansion of AI computing resources. Reports indicate that AI infrastructure companies are actively exploring new financing methods to meet the enormous capital investment required for building large-scale computing clusters. Previously, AI cloud service provider CoreWeave completed the first transaction in the institutional leveraged loan market for chip financing, providing a new financing model for the industry. As the demand for generative AI continues to grow, Nvidia's GPU supply has become a core resource for AI companies' expansion. By using GPU assets as the basis for financing, AI cloud service providers can rapidly scale their computing power without fully relying on equity financing, while also allowing the traditional credit market to participate in the wave of AI infrastructure investment.

Discovered Materials completed a $9 million seed round financing, with investors including Lightspeed India Partners, Peak XV Partners, and several angel investors.

DeepSeek's parent company, DeepSeek, completed the first round of signing for a new financing round on August 10 in Hangzhou. This round of financing has a scale of 50 billion yuan, corresponding to a pre-investment valuation of about 500 billion yuan, which is an increase of over 40% compared to the first round of financing completed in June (with a valuation of about 350 billion yuan). The earliest deadline for the first batch of fund delivery is August 30.This round of financing has a minimum investment threshold of 5 billion yuan, and the funds will mainly be used for computing power investment, model research, human resource expansion, and potential preparations for domestic listing. The fund entry paths are divided into two: part will directly enter DeepSeek's parent company, and part will enter a limited partnership controlled by founder Liang Wenfeng. Previously, DeepSeek briefly paused financing contacts at the end of July and resumed in early August. The new version of the model, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, was officially launched on July 31. According to OpenRouter data, the model reached a call volume of 72.2 trillion tokens in its first week, topping the global charts. The company has recently announced plans to raise API pricing and introduce a peak and off-peak pricing mechanism.

Bloomberg data shows that Asian companies raised over $83 billion through IPOs, private placements, and block trades in July, setting a record for the highest monthly total. Among them, South Korean chip giant SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion through its U.S. listing, becoming the largest financing project.In August, Asian stock financing activities remained active, with the Indian government selling shares of state-owned insurance giant LIC, raising $3.3 billion. Cathy Zhang, head of Morgan Stanley's Asia-Pacific ECM, stated, "We remain optimistic about the capital market outlook for the second half of this year, especially in Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan." She expects multiple transactions exceeding $1 billion to be initiated in the coming months, primarily focused on consumer internet, industrial technology, and AI-related fields.

Cyprus-based enterprise AI customer service company Omilia announced the completion of a $67 million Series B funding round, led by Expedition Growth Capital. The funds will be used to accelerate business expansion in North America and globally, with plans to open its first U.S. office in the second half of 2026.Omilia was founded in 2002 and focuses on providing self-learning agent CX solutions for enterprise call centers using its proprietary voice AI technology. The platform supports compliance standards such as FedRAMP, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR.

RWA e-commerce financing platform Dow Protocol announced the completion of a $10.5 million seed round financing, with participation from MH Ventures, Mapleblock, Animoca Brands, Arcane Group, HSKChain, Essentia Partners, and Quartet Group.According to reports, Dow Protocol builds a PayFi RWA structure for e-commerce operating capital, specifically addressing the working capital needs of e-commerce merchants. Dow Protocol allows merchants to receive funds within seconds by providing loans in advance based on the merchants' accounts receivable and credit risk data through asset service providers. The repayment and risk system is natively integrated into the e-commerce platform, with funds automatically deducted from the merchant's platform balance.

AI infrastructure company Firmus announced on August 7 that it has completed a $2 billion equity financing, with a post-money valuation exceeding $10.5 billion, nearly doubling the $5.5 billion valuation from the previous round in April. This round of financing saw additional investments from NVIDIA and Coatue Management, with funds from Blackstone and Jane Street also participating.Firmus is building its infrastructure based on the NVIDIA DSX AI Factory reference architecture, with an agreement reached at the end of June for Firmus to purchase NVIDIA equipment and sell its supported cloud services. The funds from this round will be used to accelerate the Project Southgate initiative in Australia and expand in the Asia-Pacific region, including the recently announced project in Indonesia. Firmus co-CEO Oliver Curtis stated that the new funds will support the company's simultaneous advancement in the Australian and Asia-Pacific markets.

Vangrid announced the completion of a $9 million seed round financing, with participation from HashKey, Borderless, Crypto.com Capital, Animoca Brands, Gate Labs, and Mapleblock Capital.The main business of the project is to collect spatial data, where users collect geographic location data through smartphones and receive rewards. The data is sold to Physical AI developers, including robotics, autonomous agents, and digital model developers, after being 3D modeled and verified on-chain. Vangrid stated that its network is built on Base and uses Ethereum proof services to verify data batches, with public browsers showing that it has completed nearly 100,000 verification collections and over 1,300 batches of proof.

AI personal assistant startup Pally announced the completion of a $5.2 million financing round, led by Cyber Fund and Y Combinator, with participation from Pioneer Fund, Founders Inc, 468 Capital, and angel investors. The company is valued at $30 million, and its main business is providing AI personal assistant services through a messaging interface.Pally was launched in 2025, with the latest version going live in June, capable of syncing with platforms like Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Granola, and Notion. After user authorization, Pally can book flights, manage inboxes, reply to messages, and make restaurant reservations. Pally utilizes Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, as well as open-source models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2. Co-founder Haz Hubble stated that the company will not sell user data and will not use related data to train models.

According to Financewire, AI-native startup studio Inevitable AI Group (IAIG) announced the completion of a $6 million Pre-Seed funding round, led by Aleph. IAIG plans to reshape the software development model using artificial intelligence, creating and launching dozens of AI-native SaaS companies.IAIG was founded by tech entrepreneurs Nimrod Lehavi and Ofer Bar-Or, with the core philosophy that as AI technology rapidly evolves, small teams can develop, launch, and scale software products at lower costs and with higher efficiency.Since its establishment in January this year, IAIG has incubated and launched 5 companies and plans to roll out dozens of AI-native software projects by the end of this year. The company focuses on software areas with validated market demand, enhancing product efficiency, accessibility, and pricing competitiveness through AI.