financing

The AI writing startup Marker, co-founded by the former creative head of DeepMind and based in London, announced the completion of a $13 million seed round financing. This round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Local Globe. Angel investors involved include: Writely co-founder Steve Newman, Slack co-founder Cal Henderson, and Thomas Wolf from Hugging Face.According to reports, early testing users of Marker have utilized the platform to write various types of content, including blog posts, Substack newsletters, business documents, memos, and novels. Marker’s CEO Steinback stated, "We are at a critical moment where people can choose the future of writing; I believe people will choose solutions that value writing techniques rather than those that produce shoddy content that seriously erodes the essence of writing."

According to TechCrunch, Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium has completed a $100 million seed round of financing, with new investors including Nvidia. Gradium was spun off from the Kyutai AI Lab and co-founded by researcher Neil Zeghidour, who has worked at Google Brain, DeepMind, and Facebook, focusing on ultra-low latency voice AI models.The company emerged from stealth mode last December with $70 million in funding, with investors including FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, DST Global Partners, Eric Schmidt, and French telecom magnate Xavier Niel. The company plans to use the new funds to open an office in the Bay Area to compete for AI talent and has signed clients including French automaker Renault.

According to BBX data, yesterday the global US stock market and companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange made significant moves in the accumulation of digital asset reserves. The latest updates from two core companies are as follows:GPUS core treasury breaks the 1,000 mark: Artificial intelligence data center company Hyperscale Data, Inc. (NYSE American: $GPUS) officially announced that the number of bitcoins held in its treasury has officially exceeded 1,000. Management stated that the company will continue to closely align with market conditions and existing capital allocation opportunities, supported by its core data center business, to continuously manage and expand its bitcoin reserve scale.Metaplanet raises $137 million through targeted private placement: Metaplanet Inc. (TSE: $3350) announced that it will issue new shares to specific institutional investors through the Third-Party Allotment mechanism under Japanese securities law, aiming to raise approximately $137 million (equivalent to 21.4 billion yen), with all funds to be used for purchasing bitcoin. The company accumulated 2,823 BTC in Q2 this year, and as of June 30, its total holdings have reached 43,000 BTC (valued at approximately $2.67 billion). Based on the current market price of about $62,000 per coin, this lightning private placement is expected to add approximately 2,210 BTC to its reserves, helping it strive towards its ultimate goal of 100,000 BTC by the end of the year.

According to official news, the privacy public chain project MOBLUS STRIP (MS) announced the completion of a $50 million strategic financing round, led by Ventures. It is reported that this financing round was successfully closed after a six-month technical due diligence, and due to oversubscription, the project has officially launched a new round of institutional financing.It is reported that MOBLUS STRIP is a vertical field project under the global Web3 industry ecosystem alliance Crypto Oasis (Dubai Crypto Valley), mainly dedicated to developing a full-spectrum privacy public chain. This underlying blockchain natively integrates zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), ring signatures, and distributed mixing protocols, while equipped with five sets of closed-loop decentralized application solutions, capable of providing security guarantees for any EVM-compatible blockchain or enterprise system without the need for hard forks.

According to PR Newswire, QIZ Security announced the completion of a $17 million seed round financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, Qino Cyber Capital, and others.The company positions itself as a management platform for crypto assets and post-quantum cryptography (PQC), providing continuous crypto asset discovery, risk modeling, and governance, helping large clients in finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure achieve "crypto agility" to address the risk of "Q-Day," when quantum computing capable of breaking existing encryption systems may emerge as early as 2029, and collaborates with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, IBM, and others to promote enterprise quantum security migration planning.

According to BBX data, yesterday the global publicly listed companies in the U.S. stock market and the proposed listing of crypto giants faced severe differentiation in capital operations, with the core dynamics as follows:The plan for 30,000 BTC giant to go public has collapsed: Cantor Equity Partners I (NASDAQ: $CEPO) and Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company (BSTR) jointly announced through BusinessWire yesterday that they will no longer proceed with the transaction according to the original business combination agreement signed in July 2025. The core reason is that the $1.5 billion PIPE financing has completely failed to materialize. Against the backdrop of Bitcoin dropping about 50% from its historical high, investor interest in the new Bitcoin treasury company has significantly cooled. The shareholder meeting originally scheduled for July 10 has been indefinitely postponed. BSTR originally planned to carry 30,021 BTC to list on Nasdaq and become the world's fourth-largest publicly listed company holding Bitcoin, and this collapse means that its listing path needs to be redesigned.American Bitcoin Corp. completes 1-for-15 reverse stock split and increases holdings: American Bitcoin Corp. (NASDAQ: $ABTC) recently completed a 1-for-15 reverse stock split to meet Nasdaq's minimum stock price listing maintenance requirements. While consolidating shares to maintain its listing, the company announced that it purchased 500 BTC in the secondary market against the trend, increasing its total holdings to 8,000 BTC (fair value of approximately $496 million), ranking 16th globally among publicly listed companies in terms of Bitcoin holdings. The company is approximately 44% owned by Hut 8, and Eric Trump, the second son of Trump, serves as Chief Strategy Officer.

According to Techcrunch, the Swedish AI application building platform Lovable is in talks to raise $300 million at a valuation of $13.2 billion. Menlo Ventures is expected to lead this round, having just announced its latest $3 billion fund last month.This startup, which was founded less than three years ago, achieved an annualized revenue run rate of $500 million in June. Lovable's users include founders, independent designers, and salespeople who use its tools to build websites and e-commerce stores. The company also sells its ambient programming tools to large enterprises, with clients including Workday, Asana, and Nvidia.

According to Cryptobriefing, AI chip startup Positron is negotiating a two-round financing of approximately $750 million. The first round is expected to be valued at $3.5 billion, while the second round is valued at around $5 billion.Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Reno, Nevada, the company has raised approximately $309 million in total funding, with a valuation exceeding $1 billion after completing a $230 million Series B financing in February 2026. Investors include the Qatar Investment Authority and Arm Holdings. Positron emphasizes energy efficiency advantages, and its Atlas inference system has already been shipped to customers, with Cloudflare being one of its buyers. The company claims that its hardware outperforms Nvidia products by more than 3.5 times in terms of performance per watt under certain AI inference loads. The next-generation chip, Asimov, is planned to finalize its design by the end of 2026 and enter mass production in early 2027.

According to reports, three informed sources revealed that the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip. This chip is primarily designed for the inference stage of AI computing, rather than for training new models. This move aims to reduce the company's reliance on chips from Nvidia and Huawei.The report noted that the chip development plan began about a year ago and is still in the early stages. DeepSeek is discussing with external partners such as chip design firms, foundries, and storage companies, and has increased its recruitment of chip design engineers through private channels in recent months. Additionally, following the news, Nvidia's pre-market stock price fell slightly by about 1.6%.Analysts believe that if the development is successful, it will mark a significant strategic shift for DeepSeek, aligning with the global trend of leading AI developers seeking hardware autonomy, and may also pose a challenge to Huawei's position in the domestic AI chip market. However, the project still faces challenges such as long design cycles, high funding requirements, and manufacturing barriers like U.S. export restrictions on advanced processes and high-bandwidth memory (HBM). This chip development initiative also aligns with recent reports about DeepSeek's plan to raise $7 billion in its first round of financing.

According to The Block, the entertainment sector on-chain clearinghouse KOR Protocol announced the completion of a $7.5 million Series A financing round, with a valuation of $100 million. Investors include 1kx, Blockchain Capital, as well as previous investors Republic Crypto, Sfermion, Alumni Ventures, and SevenX.KOR Protocol is building an on-chain creative asset clearing platform for the registration, verification, and settlement of creative works such as music and film, and will provide programmable revenue sharing to creators and rights holders through stablecoins like USDC.KOR stated that this round of funding will be used for platform development, ecosystem growth, and partner integration, and plans to launch a token.

Grayscale Research stated that Strategy sold a portion of Bitcoin last week, which may help reduce financing risks and provide support for Bitcoin price stability.The sale of approximately $216 million increased its dollar reserves, which is expected to cover about 17 months of dividend payment needs. Meanwhile, the STRC price rebounded, indicating that investors reacted positively to this decision.

Tokenized sovereign debt startup M1X Global has completed a $5.5 million seed round financing, led by Paradigm, with participation from Breed VC and others.M1X Global previously collaborated with the Republic of the Marshall Islands to assist in issuing the on-chain sovereign debt instrument USDM1. This product is dollar-denominated, backed 1:1 by U.S. Treasury bonds, and is a tokenized sovereign debt instrument natively issued by sovereign nations on public blockchains. USDM1 was initially issued on Stellar and is now also available on Canton and Solana.Jordan Goldman, President and COO of M1X, stated that sovereign debt is one of the largest asset classes globally, but prior to USDM1, it did not exist in a native on-chain form. The company aims to establish USDM1 as on-chain sovereign collateral and expand its use in regulated financial markets. The initial application scenario for USDM1 is domestic government aid disbursement. Citizens of the Marshall Islands can receive funds through the Lomalo wallet, allowing payments to be completed in seconds without relying on traditional banking networks. M1X also stated that recent integration with the U.S. FDIC-insured Bank of Guam further connects USDM1 to regulated banking infrastructure.

EthLabs founder Barnabé Monnot (barnabé.eth) released the Week 2 update, summarizing the team's latest progress in the launch and financing phase as well as the direction of ecological discussions. In terms of interoperability (Interop), the team stated that they are enhancing confidence in asynchronous interoperability based on zero-knowledge proofs (zk), believing this will help build safer cross-chain bridges and improve the native distribution capabilities of assets in Ethereum's multi-layer network.Currently, some cross-chain paths still experience delays, especially in the L2 → L1 direction; in this context, the intents mechanism can serve as a transitional solution, while sufficient L1 liquidity also helps match cross-chain executors (solvers). At the same time, the L1 → L2 path is expected to significantly reduce confirmation delays through the Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR), with clients already beginning to integrate this mechanism.In terms of ecological discussions, PropAMMs (Proposal-based AMM) have become a recent focus for multiple teams and researchers, with the core being the potential optimization space between L1 execution efficiency and transaction building (block building). Meanwhile, ENS is emphasized as a key infrastructure for Ethereum, and the team is continuously communicating with relevant stakeholders to advance its development direction. Regarding team building, Ethlabs has currently received over 300 applications, processed about 20%, with a short-term goal of expanding to around 10 people and a mid-term goal of expanding to about 20 people, focusing on recruiting talents with engineering capabilities and domain expertise.In terms of financing, Ethlabs stated that the current financing is nearing completion and has received early support from BitMNR, Sharplink, and Ethereum Joseph, planning to bring in 1-2 core investors before entering the next phase.

According to Reuters, AI data center Crusoe Energy Systems is negotiating a new round of financing of approximately $3 billion. After this round of financing is completed, the company's valuation is expected to triple compared to the previous round, reaching around $30 billion.Crusoe was founded in 2018, initially starting with cryptocurrency-related business, and later transformed into a provider of AI infrastructure and data center services. It is currently classified as one of the "neocloud" new cloud computing enterprises, focusing on providing computing power support for generative AI. The company has signed computing power supply contracts with tech giants including Meta and Oracle, and as the demand for AI infrastructure construction surges, its computing power business continues to expand.Previous public information shows that Crusoe completed approximately $1.38 billion in financing last year, with a valuation exceeding $10 billion. If this round of financing is successfully completed, it will become another large-scale capital move in the AI infrastructure sector. Market participants expect that the final valuation of this round of financing may fall around $30 billion, but the transaction is still ongoing and has not yet been finalized.

The New York AI investment research platform LinqAlpha announced the completion of a $22 million Series A financing round, led by AVP, Atinum Investment, and GFT Ventures, with participation from several financial and venture capital institutions from Asia, Europe, and the United States, including Mirae Asset Venture Investment, Hana Ventures, and Shinhan Venture Investment. To date, its total financing has reached $28.6 million. The company provides an AI market intelligence platform for institutional investors, helping investment teams process complex market information through dedicated AI agents. The new funds will be used to enhance market data integration and expand application scenarios for stock, macro, credit, and multi-asset investment strategies.

According to Axios, the cryptocurrency payment company Mesh is undergoing a new round of financing, led by Binance, with a post-investment valuation of up to $2 billion.

The predictive behavior AI network THEA, focused on risk markets, has completed a $8 million financing round to build its coordination layer based on Solana and expand its AI infrastructure. This round of financing was led by Maven11 Capital, Spartan Group, Manifold Trading, Hack VC, and Fisher8 Capital.Founded in 2024 and headquartered in the Cayman Islands, THEA's AI model is trained on over 35 billion real-world decision data, with its core product providing predictive behavior AI for risk markets. The company plans to launch THEA Network—a coordination layer that routes inference requests and settles transactions on Solana while keeping large-scale data processing off-chain. THEA also plans to introduce a utility token to tokenize access to its autonomous system.

According to The Block, the on-chain perpetual contract exchange Extended announced the completion of a $12.5 million strategic financing round. This round was led by multi-asset trading platform eToro, with participation from Jump Crypto.It is reported that this investment is closely related to eToro's earlier acquisition of the self-custody wallet Zengo this year. eToro stated that both parties will work together to expand access to global financial markets through next-generation on-chain infrastructure and explore integration opportunities between traditional financial assets and decentralized trading environments.Extended was founded by former Revolut employees and is built on StarkWare's scaling engine StarkEx, which is set to launch by the end of 2024. Currently, eToro is integrating Zengo's multi-party computation (MPC) based non-custodial wallet technology into its brokerage platform to further expand its digital asset technology ecosystem.