This Issue Highlights
Last week, the AI and robotics primary market continued to maintain high enthusiasm, with funding mainly flowing to AI applications, security and agent infrastructure, as well as embodied intelligence and robot foundational models.
Large-scale financing in the AI field remains concentrated, with personal AI assistant Instinct completing a $250 million Series B financing, valuing the company at $2.5 billion; AI anti-fraud company Socure completed a $156 million strategic growth round financing, increasing its valuation to $5.2 billion; AI security company Alice raised $140 million, nearing a valuation of $1 billion.
The robotics and Physical AI sectors are equally active, with even larger financing scales. Xiaopeng Robotics completed its first round of over $900 million financing, with a post-investment valuation exceeding $6.3 billion; the general robotics company Sharpa disclosed that it has raised over 4.5 billion yuan, with a post-investment valuation of 22 billion yuan; the robot foundational model company Generalist completed nearly $200 million in new financing at a $3 billion valuation, bringing its Series B total financing to $600 million.
Moreover, mergers and acquisitions in the AI industry are continuing to heat up. Nvidia agreed to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, making it one of the most watched large transactions in the recent AI infrastructure field; AWS acquired the DuckDB development team DuckLabs, but the DuckDB open-source project will continue to be operated by an independent foundation.
In terms of cryptocurrency financing, according to incomplete statistics from PANews, last week (8.24-8.30) saw 9 investment events in the global blockchain sector, with a total funding scale exceeding $211 million. An overview is as follows:
- The on-chain private equity trading platform Entropy.io completed $14 million in financing, led by Ribbit Capital;
- The clearing and custody institution RQD Clearing raised $74 million, led by Bain Capital;
- The stablecoin-focused digital bank Fasset completed $68 million in financing led by Japan's SBI Group;
- Capital B raised €21 million and plans to acquire 270 bitcoins;
- In addition, YZi Labs announced 24 early projects for EASY Residency Q4, each receiving $500,000 in investment.
Cryptocurrency Financing
DeFi
The on-chain private equity trading platform Entropy.io announced that it has completed $14 million in financing, with Ribbit Capital as the lead investor, and obtained $40 million in HYPE staking support. The first market for Anthropics’ pre-IPO has already launched on Hyperliquid.
Entropy is an independent market deployer under the Hyperliquid HIP-3 framework, providing perpetual contract trading for global stocks, commodities, indices, and long-term pre-IPO stocks. The team consists of researchers and traders from Citadel Securities, Optiver, Polymarket, and Millennium, focusing on building a new type of liquidity-weighted oracle to address pain points in perpetual contract markets, such as liquidity shortages for pre-IPO assets and manipulation during non-trading periods, aiming to achieve "deep trading of all assets 7×24 hours in a single venue."
The AI-driven DeFi execution platform ORO (formerly Oroswap) announced that it completed $3 million in strategic financing, with this round being led by MH Ventures and Mapleblock Capital, and with participation from M2M Capital, Archer Capital, x21 Digital, BlockRise, Zerone Venture, Beenco Labs, Velion Venture, Disrupt.com, and ZIGChain. ORO can convert natural language commands into on-chain operations, supporting exchanges, staking, lending, cross-chain bridging, and multi-protocol asset management. The platform adopts a non-custodial architecture, with an in-built Shield Engine simulating transactions before execution for user confirmation, and providing an API for third-party application integration.
The fixed-rate lending protocol TermMax received strategic investment from YZi Labs
The fixed-rate lending protocol TermMax (parent company Term Structure Labs) announced it received strategic investment from YZi Labs, with the amount undisclosed. TermMax is part of the EASY Residency incubation plan from YZi Labs for the third quarter. The protocol has raised over $8 million, with previous investors including those leading the 2023 seed round, such as Cumberland DRW, and institutions like HashKey Capital, Decima Fund, Longling Capital, and MZ Web3 Fund.
TermMax's mainnet will launch in April 2025 and is currently deployed on 10 EVM-compatible chains, operating 60 fixed-rate markets and 40 strategy vaults, with a total locked value of tens of millions of dollars and over 1.5 million registered wallets. The protocol achieves fixed-rate lending by splitting debt into three tradeable tokens: FT (zero-coupon bonds), XT (interest and option value), and GT (leverage position tokens), with physical delivery for liquidation.
Infrastructure
The on-chain structured product infrastructure City Protocol announced the completion of seed and Pre-A round financing, totaling $11 million, with investors including Dragonfly, Jump Crypto, CMT Digital, Stratified Capital, Adaverse, and Mirana. City Protocol aims to bring structured products on-chain, providing integrated infrastructure for issuance, operation, and acquisition of structured products through tokenization layers, vault layers, and issuance operation layers. Its flagship product is the on-chain structured product platform Venzo, which currently features 4 strategy vaults with a TVL of $40 million, covering quantitative hedging, cross-exchange arbitrage, and private credit strategies predominantly aimed at institutional and professional investors in the past. Venzo will also soon launch themed vaults, categorized into person tracking and sector themes, to complete the buying and adjustment of a basket of targets directly in users' wallets based on open rules set by programs.
Centralized Finance
The clearing and custody institution RQD* Clearing raised $74 million, led by Bain Capital
The clearing and custody institution RQD* Clearing raised $74 million, led by Bain Capital, with participation from ABN AMRO Clearing Bank and Nyca Partners. The company plans to use this funding to expand into North America, Asia, and the Middle Eastern markets and develop products covering digital asset custody and tokenization. RQD* provides clearing and custody services for broker-dealers, investment advisors, and foreign financial institutions entering the U.S. market. The clearing company is responsible for tracking positions, transferring securities and cash, and managing risks during the period from trade completion to final settlement.
The new stablecoin bank Fasset completed $68 million in financing, led by Japan's SBI Group
The stablecoin-focused digital bank Fasset has completed $68 million in financing led by Japan's SBI Group, valuing the company at $1 billion. This financing follows the $51 million raised in May, bringing Fasset's total funding this year to $119 million.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, Fasset operates a financial platform that allows consumers and businesses to hold, send, consume, and invest in various currencies and assets, using stablecoins as part of its settlement infrastructure in the background. The company states that its business spans 125 countries with an annual trading volume exceeding $40 billion. CEO Mohammad Raafi Hossain noted that the company's business has expanded rapidly over the past year, with revenues growing approximately sixfold year-on-year, and that the company has achieved profitability for 12 consecutive months. Fasset has not disclosed its revenue or profit data.
The digital asset investment firm Hivemind Digital Group announced it raised $17 million in strategic financing, with the lead coming from the UK asset management firm M&G Investments, while CPIC Investment Management (Hong Kong), ZA Bank, FalconX, Sonic Boom Ventures, and other VCs participated. This round of financing will be used to advance infrastructure development for asset tokenization and explore blockchain technology applications in the management, issuance, and trading of traditional financial assets.
Others
YZi Labs announced its flagship incubation program EASY Residency's fourth season has selected 24 early-stage companies, each receiving $500,000 in investment. This season lasts for 10 weeks, initially starting online, followed by founders gathering in Bhutan. This season focuses on next-generation global financial infrastructure, covering stablecoin payments, on-chain foreign exchange, institutional-grade market infrastructure, privacy, credit, and AI-native execution, among other directions.
The themes of the selected teams include stablecoin payments and cross-border settlements, on-chain foreign exchange and credit and new banking, institutional-grade liquidity and market making, digital asset privacy compliance and financial operations, AI agents and automated execution, on-chain financial consumer and business interfaces, as well as AI-native security and creator infrastructure. YZi Labs manages assets exceeding $10 billion, with a portfolio covering over 300 projects in areas such as Web3, AI, and biotechnology.
The anonymous Q&A game Chomp completed $3.6 million in financing, with Jsquare and Blueyard jointly leading the round, and participation from Accomplice, Big Brain Holdings, No Limit holdings, Reverie, Caballeros, and other VCs.
Chomp is a social game based on anonymous Q&A and prediction mechanisms, tapping into the real thoughts of the public by letting users answer questions and predict others' answers, as well as their own biases in perceiving others. In addition to consumer-grade products, Chomp will also apply these anonymous, well-labeled opinion data in AI model training and consumer research scenarios. The company believes that such data can capture subjective opinions that are difficult to obtain from the public internet and provide high-context data for AI models. Founder and CEO Kiko previously served as COO of the decentralized trading platform Orca in the Solana ecosystem.
Cryptocurrency Treasury Company
Capital B completed €21 million in financing, planning to increase its bitcoin holdings by 270
French bitcoin treasury company Capital B announced it has secured €21 million in financing, with investors including Adam Back and TOBAM, and the net fundraising is expected to be €19.9 million, mainly used for its bitcoin reserve strategy. Combined with its existing business capital, the company expects to acquire another 270 BTC, increasing potential total holdings to 3,415 BTC. If all warrants attached to this financing are fully exercised, it could raise an additional €135.8 million.
Mergers and Acquisitions
SBI acquires 20% of Indonesian brokerage Ajaib for $270 million, expanding the yen stablecoin
Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings plans to acquire 20% of the Indonesian online brokerage Ajaib Group for $270 million, aiming to expand the circulation of its yen stablecoin JPYSC in Southeast Asia and utilize blockchain technology to build cross-border settlement infrastructure.
Ajaib provides a foothold for SBI's entry into the Indonesian market. Indonesia is one of the largest retail investment markets in ASEAN, with over 20 million retail investors, and the consumer retail market size is estimated to reach $375 billion. Ajaib operates businesses for online brokerage, forex margin trading, cryptocurrencies, and asset management in Indonesia, and this $270 million transaction is also the largest tech financing in Indonesia in years.
RockawayX acquires crypto hedge fund Relayer Capital, expanding into the U.S. market
Cryptocurrency venture capital RockawayX announced on Tuesday its acquisition of the crypto hedge fund Relayer Capital to expand its cryptocurrency business in the U.S. The latter will be renamed RockawayX Liquid Opportunities Fund, focusing on discovering investment opportunities in "undervalued liquid tokens and crypto-related stocks."
BitGo announces acquisition of NYDIG institutional trading business for $42.5 million
BitGo announced it has completed the acquisition of NYDIG's institutional trading business for around $42.5 million in cash and stock, adding derivatives, structured product, and capital market services capabilities, with about 30 NYDIG employees and institutional client relationships joining BitGo. The transaction is structured in two phases: $7 million in cash and about $35.5 million in BitGo stock, along with an additional $10 million cash payment based on revenue milestones and up to $5 million in additional contingencies. After selling its trading division, NYDIG will focus on its power, bitcoin mining, and HPC data center businesses.
AI & Robot Financing Highlights
Models & Infrastructure
AI security startup Alice completed $140 million in financing, with a valuation nearing $1 billion
AI security startup Alice announced that it has completed $140 million in financing, with the fund Apax Digital from the private equity firm Apax Partners as the lead investor. Cybersecurity company SentinelOne and Samsung Electronics participated in this round of investment, bringing the company's valuation close to $1 billion. Alice primarily provides security protection for AI models, helping businesses reduce the risk of AI systems being abused, under attack, or exhibiting abnormal behavior. The company has formed partnerships with top AI industry firms, including Anthropic and Google.
AI image generation model developer Stability AI completed $76 million in Series B financing
AI image generation model developer Stability AI completed $76 million in Series B financing, bringing its total funding to $232 million. This round's investors include Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, and game giant EA, as well as AMD Ventures and Pacific Alliance Ventures. Since last year, Stability AI has collaborated with companies like Universal Music, EA, and Warner Music to jointly develop generative AI tools. CEO Prem Akkaraju stated that this round of financing affirms the vision of empowering creators with generative AI. The new funds will be used to expand the creative product suite and professional service business.
AI Applications & Agents
AI assistant startup Instinct completed $250 million in Series B financing, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, raising a total of $350 million and valuing the company at $2.5 billion. Founded in 2024 by 23-year-old Noah Shinn, its AI assistant connects user applications and devices, helping plan trips, shopping, cancel subscriptions, and other life tasks through text and voice interactions. Currently in the internal testing phase, the company has sparked controversy due to excessive permission requests and privacy terms.
The AI native business platform Owner completed $240 million in financing at a $2.3 billion valuation, led by Goldman Sachs
According to Morningstar report, the AI platform Owner for local businesses announced that it completed $240 million in financing, bringing the company's valuation to $2.3 billion. This round of financing was led by Goldman Sachs Alternative Asset Management’s Growth Equity, with existing investors Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, and Jack Altman also participating. The company uses AI agents to automate marketing, customer communication, and operational optimization tasks for local businesses, and the new funds are planned to be used to expand international operations and enhance local business scenarios.
AI anti-fraud company Socure completed $156 million in financing, led by Summit Partners
AI anti-fraud company Socure announced the completion of $156 million in strategic growth financing, with the company valued at $5.2 billion. Summit Partners led this round, with participation from Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs alternatives, Docusign, and others. Currently, its anti-fraud services are applied to cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase, stablecoin issuer Circle, digital banks like Revolut, and Robinhood, among others. Additionally, the company announced the acquisition of the AI startup Fravity, aiming to leverage AI agents for fraud, risk, and compliance investigations, though the specific acquisition amount has not been disclosed.
South Korean AI startup Wrtn completed financing at a valuation of $870 million
South Korean AI service platform Wrtn Technologies secured financing at a valuation of 1.2 trillion won (approximately $870 million) to support its global expansion. The startup, headquartered in Seoul, stated in a press release that its Series C financing raised about 100 billion won. After this round, Wrtn's total fundraising reached approximately 230 billion won. The notice highlighted that Wrtn's North American AI narrative platform OOC has exceeded 10 billion won in monthly revenue since its launch in May. The platform allows users to create or enter fictional worlds and interact with AI characters. Riding on this momentum, Wrtn expects to surpass 200 billion won in annual revenue this year, a significant increase from last year's roughly 47 billion won.
AI search company Keenable completed $26 million in seed financing
The AI search infrastructure startup Keenable completed $26 million in seed financing, led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and several angel investors. Keenable was co-founded by Andrey Styskin, the former head of search, AI, and cloud at Yandex, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri, and is building a web search index for AI agents, having already indexed over 10 billion documents. Its Web Search API and AI-directed Web Query Language are now live and will be free until the end of September.
AI agent development company Runable announced it has completed $21 million in Series A financing, with this round co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, alongside Together Fund and Array VC as participants. The company is currently developing an AI agent that can generate websites, applications, and presentations through natural language, while also handling basic tasks such as deployment and data analysis. The new funds will be used to optimize AI inference costs and integrate infrastructure, marketing, and distribution capabilities.
The enterprise AI agent training platform Arga Labs announced the completion of $10 million in seed financing, with General Catalyst as the lead investor, and Box Group, Emergence, Gradient, and SV Angel participating. Arga Labs builds a full-scale digital twin training environment for enterprise software like Salesforce, Workday, and email clients, fully replicating permission systems and webhooks, addressing the challenges enterprises face in resetting software to conduct large-scale reinforcement learning training, and supporting training for agents in complex interactions across multiple systems. CEO and co-founder Philip Li stated that the agent systems still struggle with cross-system information ambiguities, and Arga's reproducible sandbox environment is crucial.
Ringg completed $10 million Series A financing extension, led by Peak XV Partners
Indian enterprise voice AI startup Ringg announced it obtained a $10 million investment from Peak XV Partners as an extension of its Series A financing; the company had previously completed $5.5 million in Series A financing earlier this year, bringing the cumulative financing to $15.5 million. Ringg initially started with text-to-speech technology and has now shifted to providing AI agent services for enterprises, serving clients such as Cred, Flipkart, Practo, Groww, and PolicyBazaar. Its voice AI is integrated into about 1,200 clinics associated with Practo for patient appointments and follow-ups.
Robots & Physical AI
Xiaopeng Group's humanoid robot business signed equity financing agreements with multiple investors, raising over $900 million, with a post-investment valuation exceeding $6.3 billion, setting a new record for a single round of private equity financing in China's embodied intelligence industry. This round of financing was led by IDG Capital, with Gao Rong Ventures participating, and also received support from strategic investors Tencent and Alibaba. The funds raised will primarily be used for the software and hardware R&D of Xiaopeng Robotics, physical AI model training iterations, high-quality data collection, full-chain mass production base construction, and global commercialization expansion.
The general robotics company Sharpa has completed over 4.5 billion yuan in financing, with investors including Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com, and other industrial capital as well as Sequoia China, Qiming Venture Partners, Meituan Longzhu, and other investment institutions, valuing the company at 22 billion yuan post-investment. This is the first time Sharpa has publicly disclosed its financing since its establishment. Sharpa was founded at the end of 2024 by Li Yifan, CEO of Hesai Technology, CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and chief scientist Sun Kai, focusing on developing general-purpose robots and components for dexterous operations. Co-founder Li Yifan mentioned that Sharpa’s strategy is first to “achieve proximity” in several real-world scenarios, accumulating generalization ability and real data on the "track," and gradually entering households starting from 2028; the real scenarios must meet three conditions: no modifications specifically for robots, fully autonomous operation by the robots, and completion of complex tasks involving multiple steps.
The robotics startup Generalist has completed new financing at a $3 billion valuation, led by 8VC, with the new funds amounting to nearly $200 million, extending the $400 million Series B financing led by Radical Ventures in June, bringing the total financing to $600 million. Generalist was founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Pete Florence and Andy Zeng and former Boston Dynamics engineer Andrew Barry, with early investors including 8VC, Radical Ventures, Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, and AI researcher Fei-Fei Li. The company develops an AI foundational model that can be used for various robots, with its Gen 1.5 model enabling robots to learn new tasks through video demonstrations of 3 to 12 seconds. Competitors Physical Intelligence and Skild AI are valued at about $11 billion and $14 billion respectively, while Genesis AI is negotiating financing at a $3 billion valuation.
The Physical AI company Transfyr completed $25 million in seed financing, led by General Catalyst
The Physical AI company Transfyr announced the completion of $25 million in seed financing, led by General Catalyst, with participation from Lux Capital, Breakout Ventures, Factory, Neo, SV Angel, MVP Ventures, Underscore VC, Lyda Hill, and several angel investors. The company aims to bridge the gap between physical and digital by converting scientific operational data into machine-readable data, achieving a real closed-loop system driven by AI and automation.
Mergers and Acquisitions
Nvidia agrees to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
Insiders revealed that Nvidia agreed to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Earlier information indicated that Nvidia was reportedly considering acquiring Hugging Face for over $13 billion. NBA star Kevin Durant's early $250,000 investment in Hugging Face may now be valued at over $60 million.
AWS acquires DuckLabs, DuckDB open-source project remains independent
AWS announced it will acquire Amsterdam-based DuckLabs, the development team behind the open-source analytical database DuckDB. The transaction is expected to be completed by early September 2026. The DuckLabs team will remain in Amsterdam, with founders Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt continuing to lead the technical direction. AWS has made it clear that it will not acquire the DuckDB open-source project, which will continue to be governed by the independent DuckDB Foundation, maintaining its free open-source nature under the MIT license. Projects like DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack will not be affected. The two parties have already been collaborating since 2024.
Fund
a16z announces an $1.1 billion Machine Age Fund to invest in AI hardware infrastructure
a16z announced it has raised $1.1 billion for its latest fund, the Machine Age Fund, with a focus on investing in hardware and infrastructure that supports AI operations, including chips, memory, networking, storage, as well as data centers, robotics, and home AI devices as complete systems. a16z indicated that the current surge in AI demand and computational density is pushing existing supply chains, physical, and computing architectures to their limits, with rack power increasing from 5-10 kW to 100-250 kW, projected to rise to 1 MW within three years, and data center sizes expanding to hundreds of MW and even GW-scale parks. The fund will invest in higher computational density, cheaper high-bandwidth memory, faster interconnects, and low-power edge devices along with supporting cooling, power, and real estate infrastructure to support a new generation of AI hardware startups.
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