seed

According to LatePost, ByteDance is discussing a large model with training parameters exceeding 50 trillion, surpassing Alibaba's Qwen 3.8-Max (24 trillion) and Moonlight K3 (28 trillion), making it the largest known plan in the country so far. This plan is still in its early stages and does not guarantee a final release. The new model is intended to be led by Xiang Liang, head of Seed Foundation, in collaboration with Shen Ke, who is responsible for the pre-training data of large language models. Seed is reorganizing, dividing responsibilities, and allocating resources based on this.Two weeks ago, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming held a company-wide meeting with Seed head Wu Yonghui. Zhang reassured the team that training large models is inherently difficult and that it is acceptable to lag behind for a period of time, hoping to aim for the upper limits of intelligence and join the world's top tier. He acknowledged that programming is a key direction at present, advocating for the integration of Volcano Engine, Feishu, and Doubao resources to build computational power and data advantages, while reminding not to be led by a single hot topic. He praised Seedance's differentiated leadership and clearly opposed distillation, believing it is difficult to truly surpass and that AGI barriers should be built from a more fundamental level, stating that the company will continue to increase investment in AI.In the past six months, Seed's multimodal performance has been outstanding, with Seedance 2.0, Seedream, and others driving Volcano Engine MaaS, but the market response to the language model Seed 2.0 has been limited, and its lagging coding capabilities have affected the revenue structure. ByteDance has hired Guo Daye at a high salary to specialize in coding and has consolidated related resources. In the face of the industry's general trend of increasing model sizes, ByteDance hopes to achieve a leapfrog advantage with a larger scale while promoting the elimination of horse racing and breaking down departmental walls to concentrate efforts on tackling challenges.

According to official news, the credit delegation layer project Twyne announced the completion of its seed round financing, which was co-led by Cyber Fund and Ethereal Ventures. Twyne aims to build a Credit Delegation Layer that connects idle credit in the lending market with parties in need of credit, addressing the issue of collateral depositors' credit being locked and half of the market's credit being idle while the other half urgently needs credit.Twyne stated that in the current lending market, credit often remains with the party depositing collateral, leading to a mismatch between supply and demand. The project will promote the flow and efficient allocation of credit through the credit delegation layer.

According to Fintechnews, Malaysian stablecoin company BLOX announced the completion of a $1 million seed round financing, led by the technology investment division of Singapore's venture capital fund Kivo Technology. The new funds will be used to expand the development of its Malaysia Ringgit (MYR) backed stablecoin MYRC.It is reported that BLOX has participated in a domestic blockchain payment proof-of-concept project in Malaysia, exploring blockchain-based local payment scenarios through MYRC.

Investment firm Neoclassic Capital announced on X that it will co-lead the seed round financing for the tokenized real-world asset (RWA) data platform RWA.xyz. RWA.xyz has not yet disclosed further details about this round of financing.RWA.xyz is building an industry-standard data platform and real data source for tokenized real-world assets. According to RootData, previous investors in RWA.xyz also include Nascent, Archetype, The Venture Dept., and others.

According to monitoring by Bitcoin News, new research published by @PraveenPerera shows that Coldcard attackers seem to first identify addresses with vulnerabilities, then sort them by the amount of Bitcoin held, starting to transfer in batches from the addresses with the highest holdings. The transfer software used was relatively crude.One address had 225 spendable UTXOs, and the attackers extracted exactly the latest 200, leaving the earliest 25, which included a UTXO worth 0.16 BTC. This aligns perfectly with the limitation of a blockchain API investigated by researchers, which defaults to returning 200 records, indicating that the attackers may have failed to load the next page of data. The software even spent a UTXO of 294 satoshis, reportedly increasing the transaction fee by about 2040 satoshis, with the spent amount significantly higher than the value of the UTXO itself.The authors of the study believe that the builders of this tool may have a better understanding of the account balance system than of the Bitcoin UTXO model. Although the attackers seem to have obtained the complete seed of the victims, at least 75 BTC still remain in other addresses derived from the same seed. The biggest suspicion currently is that among the 153 stolen addresses, there are still 132.95 BTC, and researchers have been unable to reproduce the seed behind these addresses, so it cannot be ruled out that the attackers obtained undisclosed private device data or candidate data.

According to Finsmes, AI architecture development company Pathway announced the completion of a $30 million seed round financing, with participation from Id4 Ventures, TQ Ventures, Red Bridge Ventures, Kadmos Capital, and WS Investment, an investment institution under Wilson Sonsini. Databricks Chief AI Scientist Jonathan Frankle also joined as an angel investor.Pathway is developing the "Post-Transformer" architecture called BDH (Biologically-inspired Dynamic Hierarchy), aiming to address the limitations of current Transformer models that continuously rely on more data, GPUs, energy, and capital expansion. Unlike traditional large models that require periodic retraining, BDH can continuously learn with less data and achieve ongoing adaptation.It is reported that the company has appointed former Google DeepMind Gemini product head Adam Kurzrok as Chief Product Officer, responsible for the product direction based on the BDH model, including model packaging, evaluation systems, and commercial deployment.

AI security startup Attestable has officially announced its establishment and completed a $20 million seed round financing. This round of financing was led by Jamin Ball of Altimeter Capital and Yonatan Mandelbaum of TLV Partners, with participation from institutions such as Halcyon Futures, Cerca Partners, and several investors.Attestable founder Yogi stated that as AI gradually enters critical infrastructure, national security, and large enterprise systems, how to verify the credibility of AI operations has become an important issue faced globally. The company aims to build a universal verification layer for cutting-edge AI laboratories, critical infrastructure, and national-level applications.According to reports, Attestable uses Zero-Knowledge Proof technology to shift trust in AI systems from data centers to mathematical verification mechanisms. This technology can prove that a certain approved model, model weights, input data, and operational strategies indeed generated specific outputs, while not disclosing model parameters or user privacy data, and without needing to rerun the model for verification.Attestable stated that its technology has currently achieved verification inference of the Meta Muse Glimmer 30B model on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU, reaching a speed of 85 tokens per second. The generated proof documents are small and possess quantum-resistant characteristics, allowing for rapid verification.In response, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin commented, stating that this achievement means the performance loss of Zero-Knowledge Proofs for large language models is approaching single-digit levels. He noted that the next challenge is to further reduce the performance overhead of technologies such as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).

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 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.

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.

Base announces the launch of the Builder Grant Program, providing up to $5,000 in seed funding for projects actively building on Base, along with GTM and product support.Areas of interest include prediction markets, token launch platforms, new asset creation, consumer applications, agents (business, x402 implementation, autonomous trading), and DeFi (lending, looping, yield generation, vaults, tokenized stocks), among others. The application requirements are to have a launched product, build exclusively on Base, and need product and GTM assistance. Applications are now open.

Discovered Materials completed a $9 million seed round financing, with investors including Lightspeed India Partners, Peak XV Partners, and several angel investors.

RWA e-commerce financing platform Dow Protocol announced the completion of a $10.5 million seed round financing, with participation from MH Ventures, Mapleblock, Animoca Brands, Arcane Group, HSKChain, Essentia Partners, and Quartet Group.According to reports, Dow Protocol builds a PayFi RWA structure for e-commerce operating capital, specifically addressing the working capital needs of e-commerce merchants. Dow Protocol allows merchants to receive funds within seconds by providing loans in advance based on the merchants' accounts receivable and credit risk data through asset service providers. The repayment and risk system is natively integrated into the e-commerce platform, with funds automatically deducted from the merchant's platform balance.

The Volcano Engine officially launched the Seedance 2.5 API. Compared to Seedance 2, the new version has significantly improved in areas such as instruction adherence, long narratives, character consistency, realism, lighting and shadow quality, and sound effects. It natively supports 30-second video output, a maximum of 50 multimodal material references, and is compatible with more than a dozen languages.

Vangrid announced the completion of a $9 million seed round financing, with participation from HashKey, Borderless, Crypto.com Capital, Animoca Brands, Gate Labs, and Mapleblock Capital.The main business of the project is to collect spatial data, where users collect geographic location data through smartphones and receive rewards. The data is sold to Physical AI developers, including robotics, autonomous agents, and digital model developers, after being 3D modeled and verified on-chain. Vangrid stated that its network is built on Base and uses Ethereum proof services to verify data batches, with public browsers showing that it has completed nearly 100,000 verification collections and over 1,300 batches of proof.

According to Financewire, AI-native startup studio Inevitable AI Group (IAIG) announced the completion of a $6 million Pre-Seed funding round, led by Aleph. IAIG plans to reshape the software development model using artificial intelligence, creating and launching dozens of AI-native SaaS companies.IAIG was founded by tech entrepreneurs Nimrod Lehavi and Ofer Bar-Or, with the core philosophy that as AI technology rapidly evolves, small teams can develop, launch, and scale software products at lower costs and with higher efficiency.Since its establishment in January this year, IAIG has incubated and launched 5 companies and plans to roll out dozens of AI-native software projects by the end of this year. The company focuses on software areas with validated market demand, enhancing product efficiency, accessibility, and pricing competitiveness through AI.

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.

Robinhood's Robinhood Ventures announced the launch of its second venture capital fund RVII, aiming to raise $200 million, primarily investing in current or past incubated projects from Y Combinator. The fund will be listed on the NYSE, priced at $25 per share, and is expected to start trading on August 13. Unlike the previous first fund (RVI) which had zero performance fees, RVII will charge a 2% management fee and a 20% performance fee, with an annual total expense ratio of approximately 4.18%. Robinhood describes the fund as a "speculative" investment, "with significant loss risks" and no shareholder redemption rights.The first fund was launched in March, raising $658.4 million, primarily targeting late-stage companies such as Databricks, Stripe, OpenAI, and SpaceX, which fell 16% on its first trading day before rebounding about 30%. RVII will shift its focus to seed-stage projects. Sarah Pinto, head of Robinhood Ventures, stated that retail investors "do not need to wait for a company IPO to participate in early growth." Goldman Sachs serves as the lead underwriter, with Citigroup, JPMorgan, UBS, and Wells Fargo as co-managers, and the subscription window will close on August 12.