valuation

BitMine Chairman Tom Lee stated on CNBC that after Nvidia announced strong performance, its stock price rose, breaking the previous trend where positive earnings reports struggled to drive stock prices, indicating that investors still value the company's fundamentals. Software stocks like Salesforce, CrowdStrike, and Okta also strengthened, reflecting a positive market response to downstream AI transactions, with an overall healthy market reaction.Regarding the weak performance of AI-related stocks such as Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, AMD, and Micron, Tom Lee believes that some investors may have previously underweighted Nvidia and might need to sell other tech stocks to raise funds for increasing their Nvidia holdings. He pointed out that Nvidia's earnings expectations have been significantly raised, but the stock price has not fully caught up, and the price-to-earnings ratio is still contracting, with the current valuation remaining relatively low.Tom Lee also mentioned that data center construction is gradually becoming a political issue in the U.S. midterm elections. Even some Republican-led states and states supporting data center development are beginning to consider pausing related projects, which may be one reason for the recent poor performance of AI infrastructure-related stocks, with more funds shifting towards downstream AI targets.

According to Morningstar, the AI platform Owner, aimed at local businesses, announced the completion of a $240 million financing round, with the company valuation reaching $2.3 billion. This round of financing was led by Growth Equity under Goldman Sachs Alternative Asset Management, with participation from existing investors Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, and Jack Altman.The company uses AI Agents to automatically complete marketing promotion, customer communication, and operational optimization services for local businesses. The new funds are intended to expand international operations and develop local business scenarios.

According to LatePost, 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, and Meituan Longzhu. The post-investment valuation is 22 billion yuan. This is the first time Sharpa has publicly disclosed its financing since its establishment.Sharpa was founded at the end of 2024 by He Sai Technology CEO Li Yifan, CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and Chief Scientist Sun Kai, focusing on developing general-purpose robots and components that specialize in dexterous operations. Co-founder Li Yifan stated that Sharpa's logic is to first "navigate" several real-world scenarios, accumulating generalized capabilities and real data on the "track," gradually entering households starting in 2028; real scenarios must meet three conditions: the environment is not specially modified for robots, operations are fully autonomous by robots, and complex tasks involving multiple steps are completed.

According to The Information, informed sources revealed that SoftBank is negotiating to acquire a majority stake in the startup 1X Technologies, which is a humanoid robot development company supported by OpenAI. This deal would value the company at approximately $6 billion. This investment will support SoftBank's ambitions in the robotics field while also providing 1X with more funding to bring its robots, designed with flexible bodies, into consumers' homes to help users with household chores. The startup, founded 12 years ago, attempted to raise $1 billion last fall at a valuation of $10 billion but reportedly ended up raising less than half of its target.SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has long been an investor and owner of robotics developers. He predicts that physical devices combining robotics technology and artificial intelligence will give rise to the next trillion-dollar company. Another sign is that OpenAI reportedly discussed the possibility of acquiring 1X last year, but negotiations ultimately broke down.

AI assistant startup Instinct announced the completion of a $250 million Series B financing round, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. After this round of financing, the company's total funding amount reached $350 million, with a valuation rising to $2.5 billion.Instinct was launched by Spear Street Technology, led by 23-year-old founder Noah Shinn. The product is still in private testing. Users can connect it to personal applications and devices, and interact with the AI assistant via text messages and phone calls for planning trips, purchasing goods, booking events, and managing subscriptions among other daily tasks.

Indian enterprise voice AI startup Ringg announced that it has secured a $10 million investment from Peak XV Partners, as an extension of its Series A funding; the company had previously completed a $5.5 million Series A funding earlier this year, bringing the total funding to $15.5 million.Ringg initially started with text-to-speech technology and has now shifted to providing AI agent services for enterprises, with clients including Cred, Flipkart, Practo, Groww, and PolicyBazaar. Its voice AI has been integrated into approximately 1,200 clinics of Practo for patient appointments and post-visit follow-ups.

According to a report by Reuters, AI data center power infrastructure company Emerald AI announced the completion of a $150 million Series A funding round, with the company's valuation reaching $1.05 billion. This round of financing was co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC, and to date, its total financing has exceeded $220 million.Emerald AI is committed to transforming AI data centers into flexible grid resources, addressing one of the biggest bottlenecks facing AI development, which is the power supply issue. The new funds will be used to expand global commercial deployments with AI companies, data center operators, and power companies.

According to TechCrunch, the robotics startup Generalist has secured nearly $200 million in additional funding led by 8VC, bringing its post-money valuation to approximately $3 billion. This funding is an extension of the $400 million Series B round led by Radical Ventures in June, increasing the total amount raised in this round to $600 million.Founded in 2024, Generalist's founding team includes former Google DeepMind researcher Pete Florence, Andy Zeng, and former Boston Dynamics engineer Andrew Barry. The company is developing AI foundational models adaptable to various robots; its latest Gen 1.5 model claims to enable robots to learn and complete new tasks through video demonstrations lasting only 3 to 12 seconds.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas stated that gold and Bitcoin ETFs have returned to the top ten funds by trading volume, which may indicate that "devaluation trades" are replacing the AI craze.Balchunas pointed out that this phenomenon reflects the market's capital flow shifting from AI-related assets to asset classes like gold and Bitcoin, which are seen as hedges against currency devaluation.

According to Bloomberg, AI security startup Alice announced the completion of a $140 million financing round, led by the private equity firm Apax Partners through its fund Apax Digital, with investments from cybersecurity company SentinelOne and Samsung Electronics. After this round of financing, the company's valuation is close to $1 billion.Alice primarily provides security protection for AI models, helping enterprises reduce the risks of AI systems being abused, attacked, and exhibiting abnormal behavior. Currently, the company has partnered with leading AI industry firms including Anthropic and Google.

Xpeng Motors (NYSE: XPEV) robotics subsidiary has signed a share purchase agreement with investors, aiming to raise over $900 million, with a post-investment valuation exceeding $6.3 billion. Xpeng stated that this is the largest single financing completed by a Chinese company in the robotics field to date. The financing round was led by IDG Capital, with strategic follow-on investments from Tencent and Alibaba, and participation from Gao Rong Capital and others.In terms of financing structure, external investors contributed approximately $600 million, Xpeng's subsidiary contributed about $200 million, and CEO He Xiaopeng along with co-president Gu Hongdi's related entities contributed around $100 million. Xpeng will retain about 82% of the controlling stake and consolidate this business. The funds will be used for the research and development of the flagship humanoid robot IRON, the construction of embodied intelligence and data capabilities, as well as mass production and business expansion aimed for the end of 2026. IRON is equipped with Xpeng's self-developed robotics and AI-specific chips.This subsidiary is part of Xpeng's robotics platform Dogotix (Xpeng robotic dog/humanoid robot related entities). Alibaba and Tencent had previously participated as Pre-IPO investors in the financing of the Chinese humanoid robotics company Yushu Technology.

According to market news, New York AI startup General Intuition is in talks to raise funding at a pre-money valuation of $6 billion, with new investors including Valor Equity Partners, Point72 Ventures, and Seven Seven Six, while existing investors Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst are also participating in this round of financing.The company is building foundational models to train general AI agents to move through space and time. This financing comes just weeks after General Intuition completed a $320 million funding round at a valuation of $2.3 billion. CEO Pim de Witte spun it out from the video game clip sharing platform Medal last October, leveraging hundreds of millions of hours of gaming data and player operation records as the initial training dataset. The company is becoming one of the hottest startups in the field of physical AI.

According to Reuters, Xiaopeng Group's humanoid robot business has signed equity financing agreements with multiple investors, raising over $900 million, with a post-investment valuation exceeding $6.3 billion, setting a record for single-round private equity financing in China's embodied intelligence industry.This round of financing was led by IDG Capital, with participation from Gao Rong Capital, and received support from two strategic investors, Tencent and Alibaba. The funds raised in this round will primarily be used for software and hardware research and development of Xiaopeng's robot business, physical AI model training and iteration, high-quality data collection, construction of a full-chain mass production base, and global commercialization expansion.

According to CoinDesk, the new stablecoin bank Fasset has raised $68 million in funding led by the SBI Group, with a valuation of $1 billion. The company's annual trading volume exceeds $40 billion, covering 125 countries, with revenue growing approximately six times year-on-year, and it has been profitable for 12 consecutive months.Fasset has built a proprietary Layer 2 network called OWN based on Arbitrum, providing cross-border payment services for stablecoin settlements to institutions and individuals, and has partnered with SBI Remit to access its remittance network covering 200 countries.

According to The Information, Nvidia is discussing an investment in Perplexity with a valuation of over $30 billion and is considering reaching a technology licensing agreement.

According to Criptonoticias, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated on August 23 that developing countries such as Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, and Turkey are increasingly using USDT, primarily for domestic and cross-border trade, and as a digital dollar and value storage tool in situations of rapid depreciation of local currencies, cash shortages in dollars, or restricted financial systems.Among them, small and medium-sized enterprises in Venezuela use USDT to settle import and export businesses, Bolivia has used it for commercial transactions including fuel procurement, Argentina's street economy and peer-to-peer markets widely use USDT for value preservation and exchange, and residents in Turkey also use USDT to cope with ongoing inflation.

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.

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.

AI chip startup Etched recently completed a $700 million financing round at a valuation of $21 billion, but its technology claims are facing industry skepticism. The well-known hacker George Hotz's AI computing team, the tiny corp, publicly criticized Etched's marketing approach: there are many investors, orders, and hardware photos, but there is too little third-party data to truly verify performance.Etched's core selling point is LVI (Low Voltage Inference) technology, claiming it allows trillion-parameter sparse MoE chips to run at over 80% of theoretical peak computing power (MFU). Chip design professional Wesley Yue raised technical doubts about this: high MFU does not necessarily represent absolute performance—if the chip's peak computing power is low, even with an 80% utilization rate, actual performance may still lag behind competitors. Yue believes that Etched's design "does not make sense from first principles" and may be a result of repackaging after its early Transformer ASIC faced power consumption issues.Etched has not yet disclosed complete computing power, power consumption, and third-party benchmark data; the official website only states that "early customer tests have reached leading levels," and detailed performance data will be "released later." There is currently no evidence to prove that Etched is fraudulent. Etched has not publicly responded to this matter.