financing

According to Decrypt, the privacy blockchain project Beldex announced the completion of an $8 million financing round, led by Sigma Capital, with participation from institutions such as NTC, Nxgen, Digital Consensus Fund, and EAK Ventures. The new funds will be used for developer tools, privacy applications, protocol security, AI infrastructure development, and ecosystem expansion.Beldex is exploring the use of its privacy technology to protect the identity, payments, communication, and data processing of AI entities, including privacy-preserving AI identities, encrypted AI communication, confidential payments, secure AI execution, as well as research on technologies such as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and secure memory.

According to Bloomberg, the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) stated that it will consider participating in the new round of financing for the prediction market platform Polymarket. ICE is the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and has previously invested over $1.6 billion in Polymarket.ICE CEO Jeff Sprecher, in an interview with Bloomberg Television, stated that if the company’s participation could help complete Polymarket's current round of financing, it would remain open to that possibility, adding that its investment endorsement could provide support for the financing.Analysts believe that ICE's previous large-scale investment in Polymarket is seen as an important attempt by traditional exchanges to lay out new market infrastructure. If it continues to participate in the financing, it may further strengthen the connection between prediction markets and the mainstream financial system.

The Frontier Data Research Laboratory idler announced the completion of a $9 million seed round financing, led by Alpo and Frankie from Paradigm, with participation from Y Combinator, Long Journey VC, as well as angel investors including marrc, catheryn_li, dcposch, Janine Leger, Lynett Capital, feross, and nur_daulet_.idler is positioned as a frontier data research laboratory, and this round of funding will be used to build evaluation systems, benchmark testing, and reinforcement learning environments for leading frontier laboratories worldwide to train and measure their model performance.

According to RootData, among 3,244 cryptocurrency projects with financing records spanning no more than four years and amounts that can be accounted for, 1,617 have a cumulative financing amount of no more than $5 million, accounting for 49.8%. The median financing for this batch of projects is $2.5 million, with about 96% recording only one round of financing.In terms of sectors, DeFi, infrastructure, and gaming projects together account for 59.2%, with small-scale financing mainly flowing to protocol development, underlying technology, and consumer applications. However, a quarter of the projects in the sample have already ceased operations, indicating that while lower regulatory thresholds can improve financing efficiency, they cannot replace product demand and sustainable operational capability.Institutional participation is also higher than the market's usual perception of "small projects": 92.9% of the sample has identifiable investor records, and 83.5% disclosed at least two investors. Among them, Animoca Brands, Shima Capital, and Big Brain Holdings participated in 84, 69, and 67 projects, respectively.It is reported that the U.S. SEC officially proposed the "Regulation Crypto Assets" on August 18. The proposal aims to set up two tiers of issuance exemptions: projects can raise no more than $5 million in a single instance within four years; projects with greater financing needs can raise up to $75 million within each 12-month period, but must submit financial statements and fulfill ongoing reporting obligations. The proposal is currently in a 60-day public comment period and has not yet officially taken effect.

According to Bloomberg, the multi-chip AI computing scheduling platform Callosum announced the completion of a $100 million financing round, led by Atomico, which had previously invested in the company along with Plural, DCVC, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund.The new funds will support the construction of a "smart scheduling layer" that connects AI applications with underlying computing power. By breaking down different tasks within AI workloads and automatically matching each task to the most suitable model and chip, businesses can reduce costs and improve performance without dealing with underlying complexities.

AI economic infrastructure NeoSoul announced the completion of a $11 million Pre-A round of financing, with participation from MH Ventures, Amber Group, ArkStream Capital, OG Foundation, Kirin Capital, CatcherVC, and New Oak International.NeoSoul stated that it will further develop NeoTrade to strengthen trading infrastructure and build underlying facilities for AI entities to participate in economic activities on a large scale.

According to the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, recently, the embodied intelligence company Zhongke Fifth Epoch has successfully completed Series A1 and A2 financing, with a total financing amount exceeding 1 billion yuan.The A1 round was jointly invested by Xigao Investment, Bank of China’s Zhongyin AIC Fund, and Sanfeng Investment; the A2 round was jointly invested by Xinneng Venture Capital, Zhongyin AIC Fund, Zhongshan Venture Capital, Hongruida Investment, Boyan Technology, and Jinchuang Investment (Zhejiang Province New Energy Vehicle Sub-fund).

According to reports from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, humanoid intelligence company Current Robotics has publicly disclosed its financing progress for the first time: the company has completed seed round, angel round, and Pre-A round financing, with a total financing amount of hundreds of millions of RMB. The company's investors include financial investment institutions such as BV Baidu Ventures, Hillhouse Capital, Oasis Capital, Monolith Capital, Qianhai Ark, Fosun Wealth, Junshan Capital, as well as industry players like Zhiyuan Robotics, Xinghai Map, and Jike Technology.The financing funds will mainly be used to promote the large-scale collection of human body data, with a focus on investing in the research and development of core technologies such as full-body dexterous operation models and interactive world models.

Institutional-level on-chain financial infrastructure developer Blueprint Finance announced the completion of strategic financing, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Bullish, Keyrock, BitGo, FalconX, G-20, Flowdesk, JPEG Trading, Sentient Capital, Andes, and 2Square. Blueprint Finance is the core developer of Concrete, a full-stack treasury infrastructure aimed at institutions, protocols, and asset managers, used to launch, manage, and allocate capital through complex on-chain strategy configurations, integrating execution, accounting, risk control, rebalancing, and protocols into a unified treasury system.This round of financing will support its continued expansion of Concrete and promote collaboration with protocols, asset issuers, networks, and institutional allocators to build a treasury that supports on-chain yield products and acts as core liquidity infrastructure. In addition to treasury infrastructure, Blueprint Finance is also expanding the Concrete ecosystem, launching on-chain financial primitives such as AssetCX and concUSD.Blueprint Finance CEO and co-founder Nic Roberts-Huntley stated that DeFi is moving beyond merely chasing the highest advertised yields; the next phase concerns infrastructure, providing professional allocators with control, transparency, automation, and risk management while retaining on-chain market advantages.

According to Bloomberg, the startup Fractile, which develops chips specifically for artificial intelligence, is in deep discussions for a new round of financing, with a pre-money valuation of approximately $6.5 billion and expected fundraising of about $600 million. This valuation is more than six times higher than the valuation it received during its financing in May 2026, with some of this round's funds entering at a lower valuation.Fractile focuses on customizing chips for artificial intelligence scenarios and has reached a chip supply agreement with AI company Anthropic. Insiders disclosed the above financing arrangements to Bloomberg, and the related transactions are still in progress.

Base officially announced that its accelerator program Base Batches 004 is now open for applications, targeting the Fall 2026 batch, with a deadline of September 9. The program is jointly operated by Base and the Base Ecosystem Fund, aiming to help early teams building on Base to launch, fundraise, and achieve growth. Selected teams will receive a $100,000 investment offer from the Base Ecosystem Fund (subject to due diligence) and participate in an 8-week hands-on support program to refine their product and narrative, culminating in a Demo Day in November in New York to present to selected investors.Applicant teams must meet the following criteria: be in the early stage (from having a founder-market fit product to post-MVP), be in the pre-seed stage without completing a formal seed round, prefer Base as their primary network, and focus on driving on-chain economic development, covering areas such as transactions, payments, smart contracts, or financing. Selected teams will also receive exclusive advisor guidance, weekly support, cross-domain expert resources, content exposure, and opportunities to showcase to investors. Base stated that applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis and encourages early submission, with the application address being base.org/batches.

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Frier stated that OpenAI plans to become a publicly traded company by 2027, but may go public earlier if business growth accelerates. Frier mentioned that the IPO is a milestone and a means of financing. In March of this year, the company completed a $122 billion financing round, providing greater flexibility for future development.

According to Bloomberg, Prosus NV plans to invest $100 million in Indian fintech company Navi Ltd., marking Navi's first introduction of institutional capital. This round of investment requires regulatory approval, including from the Competition Commission of India, to be completed.Navi is headquartered in Bangalore and operates in payments, credit, insurance, and mutual funds. Its UPI payment application ranked fourth in India by scale for the fiscal year ending in March; its subsidiary Navi Finserv has surpassed an asset management scale of approximately 130 billion rupees.

According to PR Newswire, cryptocurrency institutional broker FalconX announced a $1 billion secured loan financing mechanism in collaboration with the stablecoin protocol Ethena. The two parties will utilize Ethena USDe reserve assets through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to provide over-collateralized credit services to institutional clients.According to the announcement, this financing mechanism will connect Ethena's on-chain liquid assets with FalconX's institutional lending demand, driving on-chain capital into the traditional credit market. The loan assets will be held by qualified custodians, while FalconX will be responsible for asset origination, loan servicing, and collateral management.Ethena is the developer of the stablecoin protocol USDe. USDe maintains its dollar-pegged stability through crypto asset collateralization and hedging mechanisms, and has already partnered with several centralized exchanges and DeFi protocols. FalconX is a digital asset prime broker aimed at institutional investors, providing trading, financing, and liquidity services.

According to Bloomberg, AI data center operator DataVita announced the completion of a $406 million financing round, with participation from ING, ABN AMRO, Banco Santander, the Scottish National Investment Bank, and Siemens Financial Services.The new funds will be used for the AI data center park and a 15-year data center lease agreement with AI cloud service provider CoreWeave.

The enterprise-level AI data platform Prevalent AI announced the completion of a $22 million financing round, with participation from the Los Angeles investment firm Integrity Growth Partners (IGP).Founded in 2017, the company focuses on developing AI-driven data platforms that help businesses build continuously updated "sovereign knowledge graphs" by connecting and integrating data from multiple internal systems, and supports the deployment of AI Agents and automation systems.

According to Reuters, artificial intelligence chip design company Velaura AI announced the completion of a $110 million Series A financing round, with a valuation exceeding $1 billion. Seligman Ventures led the investment, with participation from Capricorn Investment Group, Samsung Catalyst Fund, StepStone Group, and Maverick Silicon.The company primarily develops low-power chips and software technologies for data centers and physical AI applications, including robotics and autonomous systems. The new funds will be used to accelerate the development and deployment of its AI products and to hire engineers and customer service personnel. It is reported that the company is in talks with three of the four major cloud service providers and hopes to develop them into potential clients, but declined to disclose which three they are.