financing

According to The Information, AI infrastructure startup Trajectory announced the completion of a $40 million financing round, with a post-money valuation of $300 million, co-invested by Sequoia Capital. The specific financing round and other investors have not been disclosed.Trajectory was founded by researchers from tech companies such as Google and Apple, and primarily helps businesses customize open-source AI models for specific business needs, as well as optimize the software toolchain that supports AI Agent operations (referred to as "Agent Harness"). As the costs of using closed-source large models continue to rise, more and more companies are looking for alternatives: on one hand, they are reducing costs by fine-tuning and customizing open-source models, and on the other hand, they are improving the Agent execution framework to enable AI models to more effectively call tools and execute tasks.This trend is driving a new wave of entrepreneurial enthusiasm around model adaptation and Agent infrastructure. Trajectory aims to address key issues faced by enterprises in deploying AI Agents, including model performance optimization, task execution reliability, and adaptation to enterprise scenarios. The company hopes to help businesses build more efficient and cost-effective AI applications by providing model customization and Agent operation infrastructure.Investors believe that as AI evolves from simple chatbots to Agents capable of autonomously executing complex tasks, a new layer of infrastructure around model optimization and Agent engineering will become an important market. In recent years, Sequoia has also continued to increase its investment in the AI infrastructure sector, including investments in AI Agents and enterprise AI applications.

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. defense technology startup Neros has completed a $250 million equity financing, raising its post-money valuation to $2.5 billion, led by Sequoia Capital and the American Strategic Technology Fund, with participation from existing investors such as Thiel Capital.Neros plans to accelerate the research and development and mass production of the attack drone Archer and the interceptor drone Bandit, and promote localized manufacturing among allies. The company's current annual production capacity is about 14,000 units, with a goal to increase Archer's annual production capacity to 1 million units by 2028.This round of funding will also be used to expand the employee count from about 200 to 350 and upgrade the handheld terminals used to control the drones and the Archer AI model, enabling it to maintain target lock in GPS-denied environments and coordinate with other drones.

According to Bloomberg, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), has launched the issuance of U.S. investment-grade bonds, just two weeks after the company announced its acquisition of the bond electronic trading platform MarketAxess for approximately $6 billion.Insiders revealed that ICE's bond issuance plan is divided into up to five parts, with maturities ranging from 3 to 10 years. The preliminary pricing guidance for the longest maturity bonds is about 1.15 percentage points above U.S. Treasury yields. ICE previously announced that it would acquire MarketAxess Holdings for approximately $6 billion to further expand its presence in the fixed income trading market. MarketAxess is one of the world's leading electronic bond trading platforms, primarily serving institutional investors and providing trading services for fixed income products such as corporate bonds and government bonds.This acquisition is seen as an important move by ICE to strengthen the infrastructure of the bond market. ICE currently owns the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), futures exchanges, clearinghouses, and data services, while MarketAxess's electronic bond trading network will help ICE further expand its ecosystem for trading fixed income assets.Market participants indicate that as bond trading gradually becomes electronic, traditional exchange operators are competing for institutional investment market share by acquiring trading platforms and data companies. This financing also reflects the trend of large financial infrastructure companies supporting strategic mergers and acquisitions through the debt market.

According to Fortune, the prediction market trading infrastructure startup River Markets announced the completion of a $8.5 million seed round financing, led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, and Qube Research Technologies.The new funds will primarily be used to expand the engineering team, enhance the speed and security of the trading system, and grow institutional clients, while also developing new tools to support large-scale fund management and cross-platform trading.In recent years, prediction markets have attracted the attention of institutional investors. Industry platform data shows that institutional trading demand is rapidly increasing. For example, the prediction market platform Kalshi previously stated that its institutional trading volume grew by approximately 800% within six months. Meanwhile, market participants have begun to hedge risks through prediction markets, including establishing trading positions around real economic variables such as carbon emission allowances and GPU rental prices.

According to the Financial Times, Erebor Bank, a crypto-friendly bank co-founded by Oculus founder and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, is seeking $1.5 billion in funding, with a pre-money valuation target of $8 billion. This valuation is nearly double the company's valuation of $435 million when it completed a $350 million funding round in December 2025.Currently, Erebor has received support from investment firms such as 8VC and Haun Ventures, and the new funding round is expected to attract participation from institutions like Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Human Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and SV Angel.As investment in AI infrastructure enters a phase of rapid expansion, Erebor is targeting the financing needs of AI companies. AI firms require substantial funds to procure GPUs, build data centers, and secure energy supplies, while traditional financial institutions are gradually exploring financing models for AI infrastructure assets. However, whether Erebor can maintain rapid growth after the cooling of cycles in the AI and crypto industries remains a key focus for the market. This funding round has not yet been finalized and is expected to be completed in the coming weeks.

According to the official announcement, River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has completed a $1.1 billion financing round, led by General Catalyst and AMP, with strategic investments from NVIDIA and AMD. Other investors include Y Combinator and Temasek.River AI stated that the current financing will be used to accelerate the development of its personal AI technology stack. The company also revealed that its training API has been launched and is now in practical use.

According to a report by Fortune, the cybersecurity startup Corma, established in 2025, announced the completion of a $60 million seed round financing, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Coatue.Corma is headquartered in Tel Aviv and San Francisco, and six weeks ago, it deployed its first AI model to several Fortune 100 and 500 companies across various industries (covering healthcare, financial services, energy, critical infrastructure, and retail).Unlike current cybersecurity models primarily trained by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc., for "offensive" purposes, Corma's trained model focuses on "defensive" strategies, concentrating on log and audit data analysis, identifying threats among massive events, and maintaining consistent strategies across thousands of operations. According to the company, its model has helped clients reduce threat response times by 94%.

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.