financing

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.

According to Bitcoin Magazine, Bitcoin financial services company Onramp has launched Onramp Business, a corporate account that supports named users, role-based permissions, and dual withdrawal approvals. This product is aimed at companies that wish to incorporate Bitcoin into their balance sheets but are reluctant to have it managed by a single login, single custodian, or single private key holder.The base account transaction fee is 0.85%, with Bitcoin stored at qualified custodians, typically completing verification within one business day. It supports up to three users, including the owner, administrator, and read-only roles, and provides audit trails. Onramp Treasury and Onramp Enterprise are being launched simultaneously at higher tiers.Onramp founder and CEO Michael Tanguma stated that he has seen companies decide to incorporate Bitcoin into their balance sheets over the years, but stall when the board asks who holds the private keys; Onramp Business allows companies to have the same control as a bank account, including named users, withdrawal approvals, and complete records. As holdings grow, Onramp Treasury stores them in vaults protected by three independent institutions, with no single party (including Onramp) able to transfer or access them.Bitcoin in free accounts is stored in cold storage at qualified custodians; multi-institution custody is provided by Onramp Treasury, starting at $375 per month, with transaction fees reduced to 0.65%. Bitcoin is moved into vaults held in the company's name, protected by a 2-of-3 multi-signature arrangement consisting of Onramp, Tetra Trust, and CoinCover.Onramp Enterprise is aimed at funds, miners, and large corporate treasuries, priced on a consulting basis. Onramp has been offering multi-institution custody since 2023, completing a $12.5 million Series A funding round in May, with a valuation of $135 million.

According to Bloomberg Technology, Path Robotics has secured $300 million in new funding, raising the company's valuation to $2.45 billion, nearly four times its previous valuation.The company develops software for autonomous manufacturing robots.

According to Fortune magazine, Layer 1 blockchain development company Alta, aimed at banks and large financial institutions, announced on Tuesday the completion of a $47.5 million Series A funding round, but did not disclose the company's valuation. This round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from GV (Google Ventures), Blackbird Ventures, Square Peg, and Capital49.Previously, the company had completed a $32.5 million seed funding round, primarily supported by Australian fintech giant Airwallex. Airwallex is currently competing in the global payments market with companies like Stripe.Alta's CEO Loong Wang previously founded a cryptocurrency startup, which he sold in 2021, and then turned to a second startup that uses quantum computing technology to assist in drug development. After that, Wang returned to the cryptocurrency field and co-founded Alta with former Meta executive Catherine Porter. The company was recently renamed from its original name Metal. Porter was involved in Meta's later abandoned cryptocurrency business.In an interview, Wang stated that despite the presence of many so-called Layer 1 blockchains in the market, he still decided to develop a new blockchain because he believes it is the best technology for transferring funds. He also pointed out that existing blockchains do not provide a complete set of privacy protection and compliance tools specifically designed for banks and other large financial institutions.

According to TNW, the German AI chip and systems company Sparxity based in Dresden has completed its Series A financing, bringing its total funding to 90 million USD.Sparxity did not disclose the specific amount of the Series A financing. This round was led by the ICM HPQC Fund, which focuses on investment computing and quantum infrastructure.

According to PR Newswire, Marble, an institutional multi-asset trading and computing credit company founded by former BitGo and Galaxy Digital executives Matt Ballensweig and Leon Marshall, has announced its launch and completed a $11 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from institutions such as Maven 11, Ripple, Susquehanna Crypto, Lattice, Blockwall, and several angel investors in the AI field.Marble operates through two business lines. Marble Compute focuses on building private credit channels for AI infrastructure, connecting institutional lenders with neoclouds and GPU operators; Marble Markets builds an institutional trading platform covering digital assets, real-world assets, prediction markets, and computing power.The two founders serve as co-CEOs: Ballensweig was the global trading head at BitGo, and Marshall was the CEO of Galaxy Digital's European operations.