PANews counted 12 disclosed blockchain financing events worldwide between Aug. 3 and Aug. 9, with total funding above $94.9 million. Capital was mainly directed toward infrastructure, stablecoins, real-world assets and centralized finance, while DePIN, GameFi and loyalty or rewards platforms also recorded new deals.
The main corporate transaction in the period came from Mastercard, which said it had completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK to strengthen its global stablecoin service capabilities.
PANews said four deals were disclosed in infrastructure and tools, two in Web3 and AI, two in centralized finance and one in RWA. A report in March had said Mastercard was seeking to acquire BVNK for as much as $1.8 billion.
Infrastructure and tools
Stablecoin infrastructure company Yellow Card said it raised $40 million in a strategic financing round. Investors included SC Ventures, the venture arm of Standard Chartered, Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital and Blockchain Capital. The company said the proceeds will be used to expand its Global USD Accounts service and widen the stablecoin payments infrastructure connecting global markets.
Yellow Card said its cumulative equity financing has now topped $120 million. CEO and co-founder Chris Maurice said the company is building infrastructure that allows businesses around the world to move money without relying on traditional correspondent banking rails. He added that a larger opportunity lies in connecting banks to stablecoin payment networks and improving access to U.S. dollar liquidity for businesses that have historically struggled to obtain dollar services.
Ethereum infrastructure company Blockspace said it has formally launched and closed a financing round led by BlueYard, with etherfi Ventures, Sharplink, Breed VC, Luganodes and Stakely participating. The amount was not disclosed. Blockspace described itself as a for-profit company focused on building out-of-protocol Ethereum infrastructure to improve the economics, performance and resilience of transaction pipelines and the services around them.
The company said its business model depends entirely on the Ethereum ecosystem, generating ETH yield through staking and infrastructure operations and recycling that yield back into staking.
Laser Digital, the digital asset arm of Japan’s Nomura, announced a strategic investment in UAE-based Layer 1 blockchain project ZIGChain. The two sides plan to work on bringing private credit markets in the Gulf region on-chain, including Sharia-compliant asset products. They did not disclose the size of the investment, though the report cited market talk placing it in the high single-digit millions of dollars.
ZIGChain is already working with Standard Chartered and crypto-friendly fund services provider Apex Group, with a focus on on-chain asset management and private credit infrastructure.
Ripple said it made strategic investments in U.K. asset transfer agent Zilo and FCA-regulated tokenization solutions provider Licuido to support the use of tokenized financial assets on the XRP Ledger, or XRPL. Ripple said the investments are intended to bring regulated transfer agency, asset issuance and collateral mobility capabilities into XRPL infrastructure, addressing idle collateral in traditional financial markets and allowing tokenized funds to be used as collateral from issuance.
Zilo provides global transfer agency and asset solutions for wealth managers and has raised about $58.7 million to date. Licuido focuses on institutional asset tokenization. Neither investment amount was disclosed. The move came after Aviva Investors launched tokenized U.S. dollar liquidity fund shares on XRPL. Ripple had also previously introduced Ripple Mint to help institutions issue, redeem and manage its U.S. dollar stablecoin Ripple USD, or RLUSD.
Web3 and AI
Decentralized AI and on-chain intelligence infrastructure developer MAGNE.AI said it completed a new $2.64 million strategic financing round backed by GAEA Ventures, Titans Ventures and Go2Mars Labs. Combined with an earlier disclosed $10 million round, the company’s publicly disclosed funding now stands at $12.64 million.
According to the company, the new capital will be used to accelerate engineering validation and commercial delivery of its core hardware and software product MAGNE AI BOX, deepen integration with MAGNE L1 and MHash L2, and develop MAGNE Agent Pay and an AI agent payment protocol compatible with the x402 standard. MAGNE AI BOX supports local model inference, private RAG, multimodal processing and private AI agent execution, with the company positioning it as an integrated stack spanning edge AI, agent payments and on-chain intelligence for individual and enterprise users.
AI-driven predictive derivatives protocol Fortune Protocol also said it completed a Pre-A round with strategic backing from MH Ventures, Mapleblock Capital, NewTribe Capital, Basics Capital and Everwood Capital, among others. The company said the funds will support upgrades to Fortune Agent, expansion of prediction market liquidity and build-out of ecosystem infrastructure.
Fortune Protocol said the financing marks a new stage of ecosystem expansion and that it will keep working on AI agent capabilities, broader prediction market integrations and global community development ahead of a future TGE. The project describes itself as an AI-driven predictive derivatives protocol that aggregates prediction market liquidity, offers a unified trading entry point for predictive assets and uses AI agents for market analysis, opportunity discovery and strategy execution.
Centralized finance
Digital investment services platform InvestiFi said it raised $20 million in a round led by Vibe Credit Union, with BankTech Ventures, ICCU, United Financial Credit Union and Coastal Credit Union among the participating U.S. credit unions.
InvestiFi allows traditional financial institutions to offer crypto trading, as well as stablecoins, stocks and ETF investing, directly inside their existing online banking systems. Users can invest straight from checking or savings accounts without moving funds between bank accounts and outside brokerage or crypto platforms. The company said the new funding will be used to scale the platform.
Japanese yen stablecoin issuer JPYC said it completed an additional B-round financing, bringing total Series B funding to about $38 million. The new investor was Japanese logistics group AZ-COM Maruwa Holdings, which invested about $6.3 million. The company said the proceeds will be used to expand its financial and Web3 ecosystem and advance real-world use of the JPYC stablecoin.
RWA
RWA e-commerce financing platform Dow Protocol said it raised $10.5 million in a seed round with participation from MH Ventures, Mapleblock, Animoca Brands, Arcane Group, HSKChain, Essentia Partners and Quartet Group.
The company said it is building a PayFi RWA structure for e-commerce working capital, focused on merchants’ financing needs. Asset service providers can advance funds based on merchants’ accounts receivable and credit risk data, allowing merchants to receive capital within seconds. Repayment and risk systems are natively integrated into e-commerce platforms, with repayments automatically deducted from merchant platform balances.
GameFi, DePIN and consumer applications
GameFi project Yooldo said it received a $1 million strategic investment from FZF Ventures to strengthen its game and ecosystem development and support the project’s long-term growth. Yooldo added that it is in discussions on possible follow-on investment, though the amount and timing have not been disclosed.
DePIN project Vangrid said it raised $9 million in a seed round with backing from HashKey, Borderless, Crypto.com Capital, Animoca Brands, Gate Labs and Mapleblock Capital. The project focuses on collecting spatial data. Users gather geolocation data with smartphones and receive compensation, and the data is then sold to Physical AI developers, including builders of robots, autonomous agents and digital models, after 3D modeling and on-chain verification.
Vangrid said its network is built on Base and uses Ethereum attestation services to verify data batches. Its public explorer shows nearly 100,000 verified collections and more than 1,300 proof batches. The company is headquartered in Amsterdam and has a 14-person team.
Blockchain rewards platform Bundle said it raised $5.5 million in a Pre-Seed round co-led by Ethereal Ventures, founded by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, and Further Ventures. Other participants included Nascent, GSR, Scenius Capital, Anchorage Digital and Nuwa Capital.
M&A
Mastercard said it has completed its acquisition of BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure company, in a move aimed at strengthening its global stablecoin service capabilities. Mastercard’s chief product officer said that in a multi-currency world where fiat, stablecoins and tokenized deposits coexist, the next generation of payments will be defined by how efficiently different rails connect. He said BVNK’s on-chain infrastructure and stablecoin-native technology will help financial institutions, fintech firms and enterprises expand stablecoin use cases across cross-border B2B payments, remittances, settlement and treasury flows.
A March report had said Mastercard was seeking to buy BVNK for as much as $1.8 billion.
AI and robotics funding tracked by PANews
PANews also highlighted funding activity in AI and robotics. It said large checks in AI continued to cluster around infrastructure such as data centers, GPU interconnects, computing capacity and cloud services, while enterprise agent platforms were becoming another major investment track.
AI infrastructure company Firmus raised $2 billion in equity financing at a post-money valuation above $10.5 billion, nearly doubling from its $5.5 billion valuation in April. Nvidia and Coatue Management continued to participate, while Blackstone funds and Jane Street also joined the round. The funds will be used to accelerate construction of an AI factory in Australia and expand to other Asian markets. Firmus builds on Nvidia’s DSX AI factory reference architecture, and the two companies reached an agreement in late June under which Firmus would buy Nvidia infrastructure and sell Nvidia-supported cloud services.
AI optical networking startup Lumilens said it raised more than $700 million in Series C funding at a post-money valuation of $5.51 billion. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures and Spark Capital, bringing total funding to more than $900 million.
Lumilens focuses on high-speed, low-power optical networking products for AI data centers. The company said it has already shipped to a hyperscale cloud provider under a multibillion-dollar agreement, though it did not name the customer. The new capital will go toward engineering, manufacturing and additional hiring in photonics and large-scale networking.
AI cloud infrastructure startup Volta Infra announced a $300 million financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital, with Nvidia and Dell founder Michael Dell participating, at a valuation of $2.4 billion. The company also secured a $5 billion customer financing pool to help small and mid-sized AI companies buy advanced Nvidia chips.
Volta said it had signed a six-year cloud services contract worth $10 billion with a leading AI developer, to be delivered through Bit Mining’s 133-megawatt data center in Norway. Founded by a former Brookfield executive, the company said it has locked in 1 gigawatt of power resources, plans to expand in Texas and Wyoming, and is targeting multi-gigawatt compute deployment before 2030.
Singapore-based AI infrastructure startup Acrab said it raised $130 million in Series B funding with participation from Vertex Growth and others, taking total disclosed financing above $480 million. The company builds a full-stack AI computing platform spanning in-house chips, edge AI models and software orchestration to support real-time AI agent operation and task execution. It said the fresh capital will expand manufacturing capacity, broaden the technology ecosystem and accelerate development of its next-generation AI computing platform.
South Korean AI chip design company DeepX completed the first close of its Series D round, raising 4.2 billion won from existing investors BNW Investment and DS Asset Management. Its latest valuation was about 3.14 trillion won, or roughly $2.2 billion, around four times the valuation in the prior round.
Israeli AI security startup Zenity raised $125 million in Series C funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Hitachi Ventures and LG Technology Ventures. The company’s core product monitors AI agent activity in enterprise environments in real time, determines whether behavior has deviated from preset objectives and blocks or adjusts actions that could threaten company data, customer assets or system security.
Cyprus-based enterprise intelligent customer experience company Omilia raised 58.1 million euros, or $67 million, in Series B funding led by Expedition Growth Capital. The company said it will use the proceeds to speed expansion in North America and globally, and plans to open its first U.S. office in the second half of 2026.
Founded in 2002, Omilia provides self-learning CX agents and a voice-first AI platform for regulated sectors including banking, insurance and healthcare. It said it has obtained FedRAMP, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR certifications. Omilia said its systems now handle more than 1 million calls a day at one top-tier U.S. bank, provide real-time agent assist for 600,000 calls per day at a multinational U.S. insurer, have grown annual recurring revenue to more than 52 million euros, and have deployed voice AI at more than 1,000 Taco Bell drive-thru locations across the United States. Named customers include Capital One, Discover, Taco Bell, RBC, DWP, First Financial Bank, Purolator and PSEG.
AI agent infrastructure platform Sapiom said it raised $35 million in Series A funding led by Dragonfly, with Accel, Gradient, Coinbase Ventures, Operator Collective, Formus Capital and VanEck Ventures participating. Existing investors Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic and Array Ventures also followed on. The company is only 11 months old and had previously raised a $15 million seed round, bringing total funding to $50 million.
Sapiom said it aims to remove infrastructure barriers that keep AI agents from moving from demo environments into production. It also launched three products at the same time: Router, Agent Studio and Runtime. Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi will join the company’s board.
AI startup June said it raised $20 million in Pre-Seed financing led by Time Ventures, with participation from Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. June was founded by former Salesforce executive Efrat Rapoport and focuses on helping enterprises deploy and manage AI agents. The company said the biggest obstacle to enterprise AI adoption is not model capability but getting AI agents to work with complex legacy systems, fragmented data and existing business processes.
AI personal assistant startup Pally said it raised $5.2 million in funding led by Cyber Fund and Y Combinator, with Pioneer Fund, Founders Inc, 468 Capital and angel investors also participating. The company was valued at $30 million. Pally provides AI personal assistant services through an SMS interface. Launched in 2025, its latest version went live in June and can sync with Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Granola and Notion. After authorization, users can have Pally book flights, manage inboxes, reply to messages and reserve restaurants.
Pally uses Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and open-source models including Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2. Co-founder Haz Hubble said the company does not sell user data and does not use that data to train models.
In robotics, U.S. industrial robotics startup Avatar Robotics raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by AlleyCorp and Defy.vc, with Headline and Henry Ford III among the investors. The company lets operators remotely control robots using Meta Quest headsets and controllers to carry out picking and packing in warehouses. It charges by usage and says the cost is below that of directly employing warehouse workers.
Avatar Robotics does not sell hardware. Instead, it sources robot bodies from China and delivers labor as a remote-operation service while recording what the robots see and how operators respond, creating data for training AI models that can support more autonomous operation over time.
Zurich-based robotics startup Exclaim Robotics announced a $4.95 million seed round. The proceeds will be used to develop robots for routine repair and maintenance work in hyperscale data centers. The company is led by robotics expert Helen Oleynikova, and the investors include well-known European early-stage firms.
Investor moves
Sequoia Capital completed a new $10 billion fundraising and has already returned $5 billion this year to investors excluding SpaceX. New co-heads Alfred Lin and Pat Grady plan to invest $2.5 billion in Anthropic, which would be the largest single investment in Sequoia’s 54-year history. The report said Sequoia had previously leaned toward OpenAI and xAI, only making its first Anthropic investment in January 2025 before deciding to increase that position sharply.
European venture capital firm Index Ventures said it has raised $2 billion in new capital, bringing investable assets under management to $3.5 billion. The raise includes a $400 million seed fund, a $900 million early-stage venture fund and a $700 million addition to its existing growth-stage fund. Index said the new money will continue supporting founders from first financing through IPO and beyond across Europe, Israel and the United States.
The report said AI is a central focus for Index Ventures, which has backed Mistral, Cohere and Ineffable Intelligence, founded by former DeepMind researcher David Silver. It also pointed to portfolio outcomes including Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz, Figma’s IPO and Revolut’s secondary share sale at a $115 billion valuation.
Shaun Johnson, co-founder of AIX Ventures, announced the launch of 224 Ventures, a $100 million AI fund with about $100 million in assets under management. The fund plans to invest between $1 million and $5 million in AI-native teams across applications, robotics, infrastructure and core intelligence. It has 244 limited partners, most of them from the AI industry, including researchers, product and engineering leaders, and enterprise AI and data executives.
Former Meta chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun and former Google DeepMind researcher Oriol Vinyals have also joined to co-lead the fund. The report added that LeCun is executive chairman of AI startup AMI Labs, which focuses on world models and has raised more than $1 billion in seed funding.