financing

According to Business Insider, the American industrial robotics startup Avatar Robotics has completed a $6.5 million seed round of financing, led by AlleyCorp and Defy.vc, with participation from Headline and Henry Ford III.The company allows operators to remotely control robots through Meta Quest headsets and controllers to perform picking and packing tasks in warehouses, charging based on usage and at a cost lower than directly hiring warehouse workers. Avatar does not sell hardware but procures robot bodies from China, providing labor services through remote operation while recording the data of what the robots see and the operators' reactions, which is used to train AI models for more autonomous operations.

According to Business Wire, the AI agent infrastructure platform Sapiom has completed a $35 million Series A funding round, led by Dragonfly, with participation from Accel, Gradient, Coinbase Ventures, Operator Collective, Formus Capital, and VanEck Ventures. Existing investors Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Array Ventures continue to invest.Founded just 11 months ago, the company previously completed a $15 million seed round, bringing total funding to $50 million. Sapiom aims to eliminate infrastructure barriers for AI agents from demonstration to production environments. Sapiom simultaneously launched three products: Router, Agent Studio, and Runtime. Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi will join the Sapiom board.

According to Bloomberg, Sequoia Capital has completed its latest funding round, which amounts to $10 billion. So far this year, the firm has returned a total of $5 billion in profits to investors outside of SpaceX.Sequoia Capital's new co-leaders, Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, plan to invest $2.5 billion in the AI company Anthropic, which will become the largest investment in Sequoia's 54-year history. Previously, Sequoia had favored investments in OpenAI, xAI, etc., and only planned to invest in Anthropic for the first time in January 2025, but has now decided to significantly increase its stake, indicating a bold bet on the AI sector.

According to Techcrunch, the meteorological technology company WindBorne Systems has completed a $37 million Series B financing round, co-led by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize, with a post-money valuation of $250 million.The company uses long-duration balloons to collect meteorological data and integrates it into AI prediction models. Currently, there are 20 launch sites globally, with approximately 600 balloons operating in the air. The main clients are government agencies, and this round of funding will be used to expand the commercial team and develop business with private sector clients such as investment funds. Through AI-powered weather forecasting, it serves multiple industries including finance and agriculture.

Web3 game platform Yooldo announced that it has received a strategic investment of $1 million from FZF Ventures.The company stated that this financing will be used to further strengthen the Yooldo ecosystem and support long-term development plans. Currently, discussions about additional investments between the two parties are also underway.

According to exclusive reports from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, Moonshot AI's G round (Pre-IPO) financing has officially started, with this round's valuation reaching $50 billion. Insiders revealed that the financing amount became "suddenly tight" after the release of the K3 model, and multiple institutions have registered their investment intentions. Participants must complete their payments by August 15, and if they want to directly enter the shareholder register, their management scale must exceed $500 million. The company's previous F round financing (valuation of $35 billion) was just completed last week, raising a total of $3.5 billion. In April of this year, the company's valuation was approximately $18 billion, nearly tripling within three months.Sources say that the core driver behind this round's valuation surge is the release of the K3 model. On July 27, Moonshot AI officially open-sourced the complete model weights of Kimi K3, becoming the world's first large model with 30 trillion parameters to be implemented. Currently, the company's API revenue accounts for more than 70% of total revenue, with ARR achieving several times growth after the K3 release. In response to recent reports stating "the IPO application will be submitted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as early as this month," insiders stated that "the information is inaccurate, and the G round financing is still ongoing." As of the time of publication, Moonshot AI has not responded to this news.

HappyRobot, an enterprise-level AI intelligence company, announced the completion of a $150 million Series C financing round, led jointly by Prysm Capital and Eurazeo, with continued participation from a16z, Base10, and Y Combinator. Other strategic investors include Koch Disruptive Technologies, Orange, and T.Capital, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.HappyRobot focuses on using AI intelligence to automatically handle complex, multi-step business coordination tasks, reducing the costs of manual coordination. After this round of financing, its total funding amount is approximately $200 million, and the company's valuation has reached $1.2 billion, officially entering the "unicorn" ranks.

According to ThePayPers, the digital investment service platform InvestiFi has completed a $20 million financing round, led by Vibe Credit Union, with participation from several U.S. credit unions including BankTech Ventures, ICCU (Idaho Central Credit Union), United Financial Credit Union, and Coastal Credit Union.InvestiFi enables traditional financial institutions to directly offer cryptocurrency trading, as well as investment services for stablecoins, stocks, ETFs, etc., within their existing online banking systems, allowing users to invest directly through checking or savings accounts without the need to transfer funds between bank accounts and external brokers or crypto platforms. The new funding will be used to scale the platform.

Decentralized AI and on-chain smart infrastructure developer MAGNE.AI officially announced the completion of a new round of strategic financing totaling $2.64 million, with investors including GAEA Ventures, Titans Ventures, and Go2Mars Labs. Combined with the previously announced $10 million financing, the total amount of financing disclosed by MAGNE.AI to date has reached $12.64 million.According to the official introduction, this round of funding will primarily be used to accelerate the engineering validation and commercial delivery of the core hardware/software product MAGNE AI BOX, promote its technical integration with the MAGNE L1 and MHash L2 networks, and focus on the development of MAGNE Agent Pay and the AI Agent payment protocol compatible with the x402 standard. MAGNE AI BOX features local model inference, privatized RAG, multimodal processing, and private AI Agent execution capabilities, aiming to build an integrated technology stack covering edge AI, Agent payments, and on-chain intelligence for individual and enterprise users.

According to a report by a financial magazine, multiple trading insiders revealed that the large model company DeepSeek has restarted its second round of financing, planning to raise 50 billion yuan, with a pre-investment valuation of approximately 500 billion yuan, and plans to complete the signing by late August.Several investors mentioned that DeepSeek's second round of financing had at least started in mid-July, but was suddenly paused at the end of July. At that time, some investors on the negotiation standby list were informed that the plan to sign the financing agreement was postponed. According to media reports on July 26, DeepSeek paused its second round of financing, one reason being that DeepSeek's founder Liang Wenfeng was dissatisfied with widely circulated comments online, which mainly revolved around the suspected leak of the "transcript of the investor meeting."DeepSeek and the investors at the negotiation table hope that this financing can proceed discreetly after the restart. Currently, some investment institutions that had previously been actively in contact have stated that they have not received news of DeepSeek restarting the financing, and the channel remains in a paused state.

According to Bloomberg, Blackstone Inc. is in preliminary discussions with investors to assess the feasibility of raising a second large-scale debt financing for Anthropic to support its plan to procure Google AI chips. Sources revealed that a preliminary proposal put forward by Blackstone had a scale of at least $36 billion.The scale, structure of the financing, and whether Blackstone will ultimately lead the deal are still under discussion, and relevant details may change. This financing plan reflects that AI companies are acquiring computing resources through large-scale capital operations. As the demand for training and inference of large models continues to grow, AI companies are seeking new financing methods to support the construction of expensive computing infrastructure.

According to official news, the stablecoin infrastructure provider Yellow Card has completed a strategic financing of $40 million, with participants including SC Ventures under Standard Chartered Bank, Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital, and Blockchain Capital.This round of financing will be used to expand Yellow Card's end-to-end dollar account service for enterprises, "Global Dollar Account," and to expand stablecoin channels connecting global markets.

According to official news, the Ethereum infrastructure company Blockspace has been established, aiming to improve the off-chain protocol infrastructure of Ethereum and promote more global applications to access Ethereum's block space.Blockspace stated that the core business of Ethereum is to provide block space, and currently, over 90% of Ethereum block space traffic relies on infrastructure outside the protocol, which still has gaps in economic models, reliability, performance, and service capabilities.Blockspace recently completed a round of financing, led by BlueYard Capital, with participation from ether.fi Ventures, Quasar, SharpLink Gaming, and other institutions.Blockspace indicated that in the future, it will collaborate with the Blockspace Forum and the broader Ethereum community to accelerate the construction of off-chain infrastructure in Ethereum's transaction processes, with its business model entirely relying on ETH.The company will operate and support Ethereum infrastructure, including staking services, and will earn transaction fee rewards by generating blocks through its staked ETH, with the proceeds continuing to be used for staking.

According to Bloomberg, AI cloud infrastructure company Volta Infra Holdings announced the completion of $300 million in venture financing, with a valuation of $2.4 billion, led jointly by Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital, with participation from Nvidia and Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell.In addition, Volta has also secured a $5 billion customer financing pool to help small and medium-sized AI companies lower the threshold for purchasing Nvidia's high-end chips.The company simultaneously disclosed that it has signed a $10 billion, six-year cloud computing services contract with an unnamed leading AI developer, which will collaborate with Bitdeer to deliver services based on its 133-megawatt data center located in Norway.Volta was co-founded earlier this year by former Brookfield Asset Management infrastructure executive Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, and has currently secured 1 gigawatt of data center power resources, with plans to develop new sites in Texas and Wyoming, aiming to deploy multi-gigawatt computing capacity before 2030.

The blockchain rewards platform Bundle announced the completion of a $5.5 million Pre-Seed round of financing, co-led by Ethereal Ventures and Further Ventures, both founded by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, with participation from institutions such as Nascent, GSR, Scenius Capital, Anchorage Digital, and Nuwa Capital.

According to Reuters, informed sources say that Changxin Storage is considering building a second 12-inch DRAM wafer fab in Beijing's Yizhuang and is negotiating financing with the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone and several state-owned technology companies. The company is seeking at least 60 million yuan (approximately 8.9 million USD) in support, but negotiations are still in the early stages, and the scale and structure of the financing may be adjusted.The proposed factory will be located at the site of Changxin Storage's existing DRAM wafer fab in Beijing. The planned production capacity and total investment for the project have not yet been determined, while building a fab capable of producing advanced DRAM typically requires over 10 billion USD. Currently, Changxin Storage operates two 12-inch DRAM wafer fabs in Hefei and one in Beijing, each with a monthly production capacity of about 100,000 wafers. Changxin Storage is also building new factories in Shanghai and Hefei, and once the related projects are fully operational, the company's monthly production capacity could double to over 600,000 wafers.This expansion comes as demand for storage chips is driven by AI infrastructure, data centers, and consumer electronics entering an upward cycle. The company completed an 8.6 billion USD IPO last month, marking the largest fundraising for a semiconductor company listed in mainland China, and its stock price has risen by 13% since going public. Changxin Storage is currently the fourth largest DRAM manufacturer in the world, but Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron together still account for nearly 90% of the global market share in the first quarter. Beijing and Shanghai are also providing funding and other support to Changxin Storage to gain economic and strategic benefits from its expansion.

According to Jinshi, the U.S. Treasury Department expects that in the quarter from July to September 2026, the net marketable debt financing held by the private sector will reach $739 billion, assuming a cash balance of $950 billion at the end of September. This estimate is $68 billion higher than the data released in May, primarily due to a projected decrease in net cash inflows.The U.S. Treasury Department expects to finance $628 billion in the quarter from October to December 2026, assuming a cash balance of $850 billion at the end of December.

According to Techcrunch, AI startup June officially announced its emergence from stealth mode, completing a $20 million seed pre-financing round led by Time Ventures, a firm owned by Marc Benioff, with follow-on investments from notable figures in the tech industry such as Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz.June was co-founded by former Salesforce executive Efrat Rapoport and three co-founders, who previously established the voice-to-text company Bonobo AI, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2019.June's core product automatically scans existing systems within enterprises, identifies bottlenecks in business processes, and generates a comprehensive roadmap for the gradual deployment of AI Agents, helping businesses implement AI in complex legacy system environments like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday, without relying on high-cost Front Deployment Engineers (FDE).

South Korean AI chip design company DeepX has completed the first transaction of its Series D financing, raising 4.2 billion won from existing investors BNW Investment Co. and DS Asset Management Co. The latest valuation is approximately 3.14 trillion won (about 2.2 billion USD), which is an increase of about 4 times compared to the previous round's valuation.