ventures

JoinCare announced the completion of a new round of strategic seed funding, with participation from Titans Ventures, DI Foundation, and Candaq Ventures.This round of financing will be used to upgrade JoinCare's core infrastructure and the CareAgents AI-assisted research system, expand the global early-stage biopharmaceutical projects and the network of scientific and medical advisors, and promote the ecological applications and Launchpad construction of JoinCare.JoinCare is building an open DeSci incubation network aimed at early biopharmaceutical innovation, providing support for projects from discovery and scientific evaluation to collaborative incubation by connecting research teams, scientific and medical experts, ecological builders, and communities. In the future, JoinCare plans to expand this system to global research institutions and innovation teams, creating an AI-driven distributed biopharmaceutical innovation network.

According to Gate Ventures' latest weekly report, influenced by the escalation of geopolitical risks and changes in the AI competitive landscape, all three major U.S. stock indices fell last week, energy prices rose significantly, and the trends of safe-haven assets like gold and U.S. Treasuries diverged. The cryptocurrency market continued its structural trend, with Bitcoin and Ethereum rising by 1.5% and 3.6%, respectively, while both spot BTC and ETH ETFs maintained net inflows.In terms of industry development, regulation and real-world applications continued to be the focus this week. Japanese convenience store giant Lawson, in collaboration with Netstars, is advancing a stablecoin payment pilot, further promoting the use of stablecoins in everyday consumption scenarios; South Korea plans to officially incorporate digital assets into its national asset management framework and explore the tokenization of government bonds and state-owned assets, with the construction of RWA infrastructure continuing to accelerate. In Europe, after the transition period of MiCA ended, the total number of licensed institutions increased to 294, although the number of new licenses has slowed down, institutional participation remains strong.In terms of investment and financing, the cryptocurrency industry recorded a total of 16 financing events last week, highly concentrated in the infrastructure sector: among them, Alpaca completed a $135 million financing to enhance tokenized securities and AI financial infrastructure; Flex completed a $70 million financing to further expand its stablecoin cross-border payment network, continuously confirming the capital market's long-term optimism towards digital financial infrastructure. Gate Ventures believes that as the global regulatory framework gradually improves and the integration of traditional finance and blockchain deepens, the digital asset ecosystem is expected to enter a more mature and diverse development stage.

According to Bloomberg, Venezuela's largest fintech company Cashea recently completed two rounds of financing totaling $100 million, including a $60 million Series B round led by FinSight Ventures in June this year, and a $40 million Series A round completed in March led by Spice Expeditions, which included $20 million in debt provided by Architect Capital. Several U.S. donor funds and Latin American investment institutions participated.Founded in 2022, Cashea provides "buy now, pay later" services for Venezuelan consumers who have long been credit-constrained. Users can make a down payment via the app or by scanning a code offline and then pay in interest-free installments. The company claims to have processed over 110 million transactions, serving more than 10 million accounts, with partnerships reaching 40,000 merchants. The new funds will be used to expand credit products and support post-disaster reconstruction.

According to CNBC, AI infrastructure startup Fireworks AI announced the completion of a $1.5 billion financing round, with the company's valuation reaching $17.5 billion. The company had previously received support from NVIDIA and primarily provides cloud-based services for open-source AI model deployment, helping businesses deploy artificial intelligence applications at a lower cost.This round of financing was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from institutions such as NVIDIA, Evantic, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Currently, Fireworks processes approximately 400 trillion AI tokens daily. The company's clients include businesses such as Elastic, GitLab, and MongoDB. Previously, more than half of its revenue came from the AI programming tool Cursor, but the client base has now become more diversified.

Miami-based payment infrastructure startup Cyclops announced the completion of a $20 million Series A funding round, led by Nava Ventures, with participation from Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Lasagna Ventures, and GPT Ventures.

According to official news, Coinvestor Ventures announced a strategic investment in the decentralized on-chain trading platform Universe Pro.It is reported that Universe Pro is an on-chain trading platform powered by the UNAI engine. The platform aims to optimize and enhance users' capital efficiency by integrating core functions such as MEV (Maximum Extractable Value), market-making scheduling, and smart routing.

According to Bloomberg, Brinc, an AI drone company supported by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, announced the completion of a $125 million financing round, led by existing investor Motorola Solutions, with participation from Index Ventures and previous investors such as Dylan Field.It is reported that the company focuses on applying AI-based drone technology in the field of public safety, including replacing some high-risk manual response tasks.

According to Techcrunch, Nous Research, the developer of the open-source agent Hermes, is finalizing a new round of financing, expected to be led by Robot Ventures, with participation from institutions like USV. The company's valuation is approximately $1.5 billion. Sources indicate that the scale of this round of financing is at least $75 million.Its core product, Hermes, as an open-source local AI agent, has accumulated 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on the GitHub platform. It supports users in deploying and running locally on personal computers and virtual servers, with autonomous execution capabilities such as web retrieval and code generation.

According to Gate Ventures' latest weekly report, the global market continued to be influenced by high interest rate expectations and geopolitical factors last week, with the cryptocurrency market overall maintaining volatility. BTC rose 0.2% over the week, ETH increased by 1.2%, and market sentiment saw a slight recovery. Meanwhile, BTC spot ETFs ended eight consecutive weeks of net outflows, recording a net inflow of approximately $197 million, and ETH spot ETFs also resumed net inflows, with institutional allocation demand showing marginal improvement.On the industry front, traditional financial institutions are continuing to accelerate the construction of on-chain infrastructure. Swift officially launched a blockchain-based shared ledger and partnered with 17 global banks to initiate a tokenized deposit pilot; fintech platform Toss is collaborating with Optimism to advance the infrastructure development for the Korean won stablecoin; Robinhood Chain, which launched only two weeks ago, has surpassed a total locked value (TVL) of $132 million.In terms of investment and financing, a total of 8 financing deals were disclosed last week, amounting to $381 million, with the infrastructure (Infra) sector dominating. Prime Intellect completed a $130 million financing round to accelerate the construction of enterprise-level AI infrastructure; Gauntlet received a $125 million strategic investment from Japan's SBI Holdings to further expand its institutional-level DeFi treasury business. Gate Ventures believes that stablecoins, on-chain finance, and institutional-level infrastructure are continuing to become important development directions for the industry, with institutional capital further increasing its investment in digital asset infrastructure.

According to PR Newswire, QIZ Security announced the completion of a $17 million seed round financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, Qino Cyber Capital, and others.The company positions itself as a management platform for crypto assets and post-quantum cryptography (PQC), providing continuous crypto asset discovery, risk modeling, and governance, helping large clients in finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure achieve "crypto agility" to address the risk of "Q-Day," when quantum computing capable of breaking existing encryption systems may emerge as early as 2029, and collaborates with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, IBM, and others to promote enterprise quantum security migration planning.

Blockchain analysis company Elliptic announced that it has received a strategic investment from Circle Ventures. Previously, the company completed a $120 million Series D funding round in May this year, led by One Peak, with participation from Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank, and the British Business Bank.At the same time, Circle officially joined Elliptic's Agentic Design Partner Program, which brings together infrastructure providers, compliance agencies, and technology teams to collaboratively develop compliance solutions for AI agents. Elliptic pointed out that AI agents are different from traditional bots, as they can autonomously set goals and make independent decisions. Their operational speed and scale have far exceeded the carrying capacity of human compliance systems, necessitating specialized solutions to address this.

The decentralized AI protocol Prime Intellect has completed a $130 million Series A financing round, led by Radical Ventures, with participation from NVIDIA Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and existing investors, bringing the total funding to over $150 million to build an open superintelligent stack.Founded in 2024, Prime Intellect is dedicated to building an "open superintelligent stack" that provides enterprises with a full-stack AI agent development infrastructure covering computing, large-scale reinforcement learning, sandboxing, evaluation, and deployment. Its clients include over 6,000 enterprises and startups such as Ramp and Zapier, with an annual revenue exceeding $100 million. The company plans to expand its computing clusters and reinforcement learning scale, and is betting on cutting-edge directions such as long-cycle agents, recursive language models, and continuous learning.

According to TechCrunch, well-known investor Ashton Kutcher will leave the venture capital firm Sound Ventures, which he co-founded, and will co-found a new venture capital fund with former NFX partner Morgan Beller (who co-led Meta's Libra crypto project and served as a partner at a16z).It is reported that this departure is mainly due to differences in investment stage preferences. Sound Ventures tends to support more mature leading AI companies (such as OpenAI and Anthropic), while Kutcher's new fund will shift its strategic focus to underlying technologies, concentrating on early-stage investments in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech. The split is amicable, and Kutcher will continue to serve as an advisor to Sound Ventures in the future.

According to the latest weekly report from Gate Ventures, market risk appetite has further cooled, leading to an overall correction in the cryptocurrency market. BTC fell 6.4% over the week, ETH fell 7.9%, and the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies declined by 5.4%, with the Fear and Greed Index dropping into the "Extreme Fear" range.In terms of capital flow, the spot BTC ETF saw a net outflow of $1.79 billion in a single week, setting a record for the largest single-week net outflow in history, and has recorded outflows for seven consecutive weeks; the spot ETH ETF experienced a net outflow of $273.3 million during the same period, putting continued pressure on market liquidity. Meanwhile, STRC under Strategy has traded below par value for the sixth consecutive week, with the market continuing to focus on its dividend rate adjustments and capital operation progress.In terms of industry development, RWA applications and blockchain infrastructure construction are continuing to advance. Enso launched an RWA application supporting the trading of over 500 tokenized assets, further promoting the development of the tokenized asset trading ecosystem; the SEC and CFTC are coordinating to publicly solicit market opinions on the portfolio margin system, continuously improving market infrastructure.In terms of investment and financing, a total of 18 financing deals were completed last week, with a disclosed total financing amount of $210.3 million. Among them, the DeFi sector had the highest financing scale, raising a total of $114 million, indicating that market funds continue to focus on on-chain financial innovation and infrastructure construction.

Early space fintech company Nebex, founded by former Axiom Space CEO Tejpaul Bhatia, announced the completion of a $30,000,000 seed round financing, led by Google Ventures, a subsidiary of Alphabet.

According to official news, the BNB Chain ecological autonomous AI economic infrastructure Astarter announced strategic support from institutions such as Vega Ventures, UZ Capital, Go2Mars, and BitBT Ventures, further strengthening the AI ecological layout. Astarter had previously received investment led by EMURGO, with strategic support from other institutions including MH Ventures, Avstar Capital, 316VC, CRT Labs, and Megala Ventures.It is reported that Astarter aims to build a full-stack infrastructure for AI intelligences on the BNB Chain, providing proprietary computing power, runtime execution, on-chain settlement, and identity capabilities for on-chain AI intelligences. The products include AI computing power nodes ABox, a decentralized exchange (DEX), Launchpad, and CORE intelligence layer, with the native token being AST. The Astarter mainnet and TGE are planned to launch in the third quarter of 2026. This strategic cooperation will further promote Astarter's development in computing power networks, products, and ecological aspects.

According to Fortune, the crypto venture capital firm Framework Ventures announced the completion of its fourth fundraise, totaling $400 million. The investors include endowment funds from Ivy League schools, sovereign wealth funds, and non-profit organizations, though the specific names have not been disclosed. Framework co-founders Vance Spencer and Michael Anderson stated that the new fund will invest in the field of "cutting-edge technology," which includes not only crypto but also areas such as AI, robotics, and energy. Currently, about half of the funds from the fourth fund have been deployed.Framework Ventures was established in 2019 and initially focused on investments in the DeFi sector, participating in early rounds of leading protocols such as Aave and Chainlink. Previously, it completed fundraises of $100 million and $400 million for its second and third funds in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

According to the latest weekly report from Gate Ventures, market risk appetite continues to be under pressure, and the overall cryptocurrency market is experiencing a pullback. BTC fell 3.7% over the week, ETH fell 1.2%, and the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies declined by 3.1%, with the Fear and Greed Index remaining in the "Extreme Fear" range. In terms of capital flow, digital asset investment products continued to see net outflows, with the spot BTC ETF experiencing a net outflow of $226.8 million in a single week, and the spot ETH ETF seeing a net outflow of $10 million, reflecting ongoing market hesitation. Meanwhile, STRC under Strategy has traded below par for the fifth consecutive week, and the market continues to pay attention to its subsequent capital operations and yield adjustment space.In terms of industry development, stablecoin payments and RWA infrastructure construction are being continuously advanced. Trace Finance has completed $32 million in financing to expand its compliant stablecoin payment network and cross-border settlement infrastructure; Philippine regulators have released positive signals supporting the development of RWA tokenization, with related explorations further deepening. In terms of investment and financing, four financing transactions were disclosed last week, with a total financing amount of $39.5 million, of which the DeFi sector accounted for the majority. Overall, although the market is still in a correction phase in the short term, stablecoin payments, RWA, and underlying infrastructure construction remain important directions of ongoing industry focus.

According to official news, the "social wallet" project ANT.Fun announced the completion of approximately $5 million in strategic financing through the AntFun token, with investors including multiple Web3 institutions such as MH Ventures, Zerra Venture, Zuala Capital, X21 Digital, and Becker Ventures.The project is building a mobile application on the Solana public chain that integrates "social + Alpha trading," supporting voice discussions, opportunity discovery, and one-click trading. The team claims that its protocol has consistently ranked in the top ten for revenue on Solana, and will accelerate the development of social financial infrastructure, cross-community functions, and an artificial intelligence Alpha strategy discovery engine.

According to Fortune, cryptocurrency trading startup Fomo announced the completion of a $75 million Series B funding round, led by Index Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini, and Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, among others. The company's valuation has reached $550 million.Fomo was founded in 2025 by former dYdX team members Paul Erlanger, Se Yong Park, and Prashan Dharmasena.