PANews counted nine blockchain financing deals globally last week, covering Sept. 14 to Sept. 20, with disclosed funding totaling more than $223 million. Within crypto, stablecoin payments drew the heaviest concentration of new capital. Velocity, dtcpay and Fin.com all raised fresh money, with investors including Visa, Circle, Ripple, Coinbase Ventures and SBI. The flow of capital continued to move beyond issuance and into settlement, fiat rails and banking backend infrastructure.
In AI, compute infrastructure kept attracting the biggest checks. Crusoe closed a $3.9 billion round at a $30.9 billion post-money valuation, while Nvidia committed $2 billion to Brookfield Asset Management’s global AI infrastructure fund. Robotics funding also clustered around core components and commercial deployment, with Qianjue Robotics raising new strategic capital and Hello Robotaxi securing about $100 million.
Crypto funding
Tenka raises $2 million in pre-seed funding
RWA-backed finance infrastructure company Tenka said it completed a $2 million pre-seed round led by Maven 11, with Gami Capital and several angel investors also participating. The company is building an institutional asset-backed finance trading platform that connects originators, investors and liquidity providers. It offers structured bookbuilding on the origination side and supports secondary trading, on-chain settlement, independent valuation and unified reporting.
Tenka said its goal is to ease liquidity constraints in private credit by making asset-backed finance instruments transferable in secondary markets without requiring early borrower repayment or fund-level redemptions. The platform is scheduled to launch later this year. CEO Emile Dubié leads the company.
tZERO closes a new financing round
Tokenized securities marketplace tZERO said it completed a new financing round led by Marc Cohodes and Max Cohodes. Existing investors Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, Bill Fleckenstein and partner Dinari took part, and Neighborhood Intelligence also committed to the round.
tZERO said the financing will support the continued expansion of its tokenized financial market infrastructure business and help the company move toward capital independence. It described the round as part of a long-term capital plan, with proceeds earmarked for operations, the next stage of growth and the buildout of its infrastructure-as-a-service business.
The company is building infrastructure across tokenization, trading, custody and asset servicing for tokenized securities and other assets, aiming to help financial institutions issue and trade assets through regulated blockchain infrastructure. It also plans to expand into tokenization and other derivatives, prediction markets and spot crypto infrastructure services, while pursuing strategic transactions to scale further.
Deadstock raises $2.5 million seed round
Tokenized collectibles liquidity marketplace Deadstock raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by Bullish Capital, the venture arm of Bullish, with a group of angel investors also participating. The company said the money will help move Deadstock into public beta and support the next phase of infrastructure development for the globally traded collectible card market.
Created by ATH Labs, Deadstock is an on-chain marketplace and liquidity layer for physical collectibles built on Arbitrum. It combines physical inventory, tokenization, market trading and redemption infrastructure to make traditionally illiquid collectibles easier to hold and trade.
Infrastructure
Kaiko expands latest round to $110 million with S&P Global leading
Digital asset data provider Kaiko completed a financing round led by S&P Global, bringing the total size of the round to $110 million. Other investors included DRW Holdings, Susquehanna, Royal Bank of Canada, Nasdaq, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Broadridge Financial Solutions, Canton Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Stellar.
Kaiko, founded in 2014 and headquartered in Paris, provides crypto market analytics and indices to financial institutions and digital asset companies. The company has about 120 employees globally and recently acquired U.S. digital asset data company Amberdata and crypto infrastructure provider Cometh. It said the new capital will go toward developing new products and services.
Tare raises $13.25 million seed round led by Blockchain Capital
Fintech company Tare raised $13.25 million in seed funding led by Blockchain Capital. Janus Henderson, Strobe Ventures, the Venture Dept, Neoclassic Capital and the Avalanche Foundation also joined the round. Individual backers included Aave CEO Stani Kulechov, Tether co-founder Phil Potter and Privy CEO Henri Stern.
The company said the funding will be used to build and expand its loan management software, hire staff and secure the licenses needed for nationwide operations of its lending arm, Tare Credit LLC. Tare was co-founded by Kevin Miao, Keerthi Moudgal and Lucas Vogelsang, and plans to build software on Avalanche to create digital records for loans and automate related administrative work.
Miao said the spread between what borrowers pay in interest and what investors receive is often absorbed by intermediaries, while blockchain systems can automate operations and remove extra costs.
Stablecoin payments
Velocity extends Series A to $48 million
London-based stablecoin payments infrastructure company Velocity completed a $10 million Series A extension, bringing the total round to $48 million at a $200 million post-money valuation. Investors included Visa Ventures, Circle Ventures, Haun Ventures, Ripple, Translink Capital and Mirana Ventures.
Velocity provides payment companies and banks with backend systems for stablecoin settlement, liquidity management and treasury operations without requiring them to replace existing infrastructure. The company had already closed a $38 million Series A in July, and that round was oversubscribed. Co-founder and CEO Eric Queathem said, 「No one had fixed the backend layer before.」
dtcpay adds SBI Group strategic investment, Series A reaches $25 million
Stablecoin payments company dtcpay said it received a strategic investment from Japan’s SBI Group, bringing its Series A total to $25 million. The round had been led in April by Vertex Ventures, backed by Temasek, with Genedant Capital, which manages more than $2 billion in assets, also participating. Capella Hotel Group founder Kwek Leng Beng continued to add capital.
SBI Group said the investment opens a strategic partnership between the two sides, with plans to expand a digital asset corridor linking Japan and Southeast Asia. dtcpay is an official Visa member and has issued a compliant stablecoin Visa card. Its licensed footprint covers Singapore, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Australia, the United States and Canada, and the company said it is still expanding to provide compliant infrastructure for global stablecoin payments.
Fin.com emerges from stealth with $20 million seed round
New York-based payments infrastructure company Fin.com came out of stealth and announced a $20 million seed round led by Expa and Uber co-founder Garrett Camp. Coinbase Ventures, Tenet Fund, the founding team of Figure, Mesh founder Bam Azizi, Second Sight Ventures, and sovereign funds and royal family offices from the Gulf and Africa also participated. The company did not disclose its valuation.
Fin.com offers white-label payments infrastructure for financial services companies, consumer platforms and prediction markets, with a focus on the “last mile” of converting stablecoins into local bank accounts or wallets.
DePIN
Tina secures $3 million investment
Decentralized geospatial data network Tina said it raised a total of $3 million from Thinkware, Gemhead Capital, Archer Capital and Mayer Venture. Built on Solana, TINA is a geospatial DePIN network that turns community-contributed geospatial information into real-world datasets.
Through its mobile ecosystem, users collect and verify points of interest, roads, traffic and other location data during everyday driving while earning token rewards.
Selected AI and robotics funding
Crusoe closes $3.9 billion Series F at $30.9 billion valuation
AI compute infrastructure startup Crusoe is in talks with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley about an IPO. At the same time, the company has completed a $3.9 billion Series F that values it at about $30.9 billion post-money. The round was jointly led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala Investment, with Founders Fund, TPG and the Qatar Investment Authority also participating.
Founded in 2018, Crusoe initially served cryptocurrency miners before shifting into AI compute infrastructure. The company spent two years building a large AI data center in Abilene, Texas, to provide compute for OpenAI and Microsoft. It is now moving toward production of compact data centers called Spark, loading prefabricated facilities onto trucks and deploying them to locations with spare power in order to meet AI inference demand more quickly.
Nvidia commits $2 billion to Brookfield global AI infrastructure fund
Nvidia has committed $2 billion to Brookfield Asset Management’s global artificial intelligence infrastructure fund. The two companies had previously disclosed their partnership, but this filing was the first to show the size of Nvidia’s commitment. Nvidia and the Kuwait Investment Authority are both cornerstone investors in the fund, which focuses on AI factories, off-balance-sheet power solutions and compute infrastructure.
Brookfield is currently raising $10 billion for the AI infrastructure fund and plans to raise about $50 billion for its infrastructure business over the next two years. The company is also part of Nvidia’s AI compute infrastructure financing alliance, which aims to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital.
EVAS Intelligence raises nearly RMB 2 billion
General-purpose AI compute chip unicorn EVAS Intelligence said it completed a new financing round worth nearly RMB 2 billion, with its post-money valuation estimated at close to RMB 15 billion. More than 20 investment institutions joined the round, including Huatai Innovation, CD Capital, SMIC Juyuan, Jiuan Medical, Renai Capital, Tongfu Microelectronics, Saiyi Industry Fund, Heli Capital, Xinxin Leasing, Hengxu Capital, Shangqi Capital, Jian Guang Zhanlu and Rongyi Capital.
EVAS Intelligence focuses on efficient and scalable AI compute acceleration solutions aimed at broader industry adoption of AI technology.
Temporal raises $550 million at $12.55 billion valuation
AI startup Temporal announced a $550 million late-stage financing round that more than doubled its valuation in seven months to $12.55 billion. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, while Wellington Management, Growth Equity under Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Tiger Global joined as co-lead investors. SV Angel and advisory accounts of T. Rowe Price Associates also participated, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and GIC added more capital.
The company said the funding will support global expansion and deeper platform development. Founded in 2019, Temporal develops open-source software that helps applications, including AI agents, recover from failures and reduces the need for engineers to write custom recovery code. Its customers include OpenAI, Snap, Nvidia, Netflix and JPMorgan Chase.
Temporal has 570 employees and an annualized revenue run rate above $250 million, up more than threefold year over year. In February, the company raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Cornelis raises $205 million
AI networking company Cornelis said it raised $205 million in a round led by IAG Capital Partners. Spun out of Intel in 2020, the company develops networking technology that helps AI chips communicate more efficiently. It has launched a product called Active Compute Fabric, designed to address the problem of GPU time being wasted while waiting for data by allowing chips to process and send information at the same time.
Cornelis is competing with Nvidia through an open architecture that lets customers use multiple GPU and accelerator hardware options on its network stack. Nvidia chips can technically run on other network architectures, but their optimization for Nvidia’s own software tends to push customers toward the company’s full GPU stack. Cornelis has already started shipping products and is developing a next-generation release expected later this year.
Arcee AI raises $150 million Series B
U.S. enterprise AI startup Arcee AI completed a $150 million Series B round at a $1 billion pre-money valuation. The round was led by Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital and Emergence Capital, with participation from Microsoft’s M12, AI10 Ventures, Hitachi, IAG, P7 and Wipro.
Founded in 2023, Arcee AI initially focused on fine-tuning and optimizing existing models before shifting to building open-weight models from scratch. Founder Mark McQuade was an early employee at Hugging Face. The company said the capital will be used to develop new open-weight models and products, expand cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy and work with Vista portfolio companies.
Nuance raises $50 million Series A
Seattle-based AI company Nuance announced a $50 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Accel, Nvidia’s NVentures, South Park Commons and Define Ventures also participating.
Nuance was founded last year by three former Apple researchers and is working on multimodal AI models with stronger emotional understanding. The company previously raised a $10 million seed round led by Accel in July last year.
Factory raises $200 million at $5 billion valuation
Enterprise software company Factory, which describes itself as building self-improving software development systems, said it raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation. Total funding has now exceeded $400 million, more than tripling from its $1.5 billion valuation in April this year. The company said the new capital will accelerate research and development, product work and global market expansion.
Factory said its backers include Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, Evantic Capital, Sound Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Mantis VC and Clearlake, along with individuals such as Nico Rosberg, Brad Gerstner and Marc Benioff. The company said hundreds of thousands of developers already use its products, including teams at NVIDIA, Blackstone, Royal Bank of Canada, Palo Alto Networks and Adobe.
Profound raises $180 million Series D at $1.8 billion valuation
AI marketing startup Profound completed a $180 million Series D round at a $1.8 billion post-money valuation, led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Founded in 2024 and based in New York, Profound has now raised more than $335 million in total. The company helps brands adapt to a shift in user behavior as searches increasingly begin through AI chatbots such as OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Gemini rather than traditional search engines.
Its software tracks how often brands are mentioned in responses generated by different AI models, the contexts in which they appear and the way they are described.
ANEW LABS raises $290 million after ByteDance spinout
ANEW LABS, an AI drug discovery unit spun out from ByteDance, completed a $290 million financing round after the separation.
Qianjue Robotics completes strategic financing worth several hundred million yuan
Shanghai-based embodied tactile technology company Qianjue Robotics said it completed two consecutive rounds of strategic financing worth several hundred million yuan. The company had previously disclosed a financing round worth more than RMB 100 million, backed by embodied intelligence industry investors, Tianji Capital and Jide Electric.
Its shareholder base includes financial investors such as GL Ventures, Yuanhe Origin and Futeng Capital, as well as industrial backers in embodied intelligence and manufacturing including Li Auto, AgiBot and Jide Electric. The new capital will be used for product upgrades, business expansion and industrial deployment, with a focus on faster iteration and scaled delivery of high-precision vision-tactile sensors, better real-world interaction data collection, tactile simulation and dataset construction, and continued work on tactile embodied models and tactile world models.
Hello Robotaxi raises about $100 million
Shanghai Guotou Xiandao recently led a new financing round of about $100 million for Hello Robotaxi, with Minjin Investment and Creation Venture Partners also participating. After the round, Hello Robotaxi’s business valuation was close to $3 billion.
Investment firms
Cosmos Ventures launches $77.6 million debut fund
Venture firm Cosmos Ventures said it has launched to back founders who are both philosophers and builders and are working to create institutions for the AI era. The firm was founded by Brendan McCord and Matt Mandel, who also launched a $77.6 million debut vehicle, Fund I.
Its existing investments include AIUC, Prime Intellect, Workshop Labs, which has been acquired by Thinking Machines, and an undisclosed education company. Limited partners include Reid Hoffman, Joe Liemandt, Stand Together, Fred Wilson, Micky Malka and Astera Institute.