AI and robotics continued to draw heavy primary-market funding last week, with capital flowing mainly into AI chips, data centers, compute infrastructure, and fast-growing AI applications, according to a weekly funding roundup published by PANews. M&A activity also picked up, led by Stripe’s planned acquisition of OpenRouter for more than $7 billion and OpenAI’s acquisition of the InstantDB team.
In crypto, PANews said it counted five blockchain funding deals globally during Aug. 10-16, with total disclosed funding of more than $27.5 million.
Crypto funding activity
The five crypto financings highlighted in the report covered DeFi lending, privacy infrastructure, institutional on-chain finance, Web3 AI infrastructure, and prediction markets.
twyne raises $2.5 million seed round
DeFi lending credit delegation layer protocol twyne closed a $2.5 million seed round co-led by cyber Fund and Ethereal Ventures, with Euler, Daedalus, and multiple angel investors also participating.
The project focuses on what it describes as idle credit in lending markets. It aims to build a credit delegation layer that lets borrowing capacity tied to a collateral depositor be delegated to a party with real borrowing demand, with the stated goal of lifting credit utilization and capital efficiency across DeFi lending markets. The protocol is designed to bridge the gap between collateral providers and credit users and improve how credit is allocated in DeFi lending.
Beldex secures $8 million
Privacy blockchain project Beldex said it has raised $8 million in a round led by Sigma Capital, with NTC, Nxgen, Digital Consensus Fund, and EAK Ventures among the participating investors.
Beldex said it is exploring how its privacy stack can be used to protect AI agents across identity, payments, communications, and data processing. The work includes private AI identity, encrypted AI communications, confidential payments, secure AI execution, and research into fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, and secure memory. The new capital will be used for developer tools, privacy applications, protocol security, AI infrastructure, and ecosystem expansion.
Blueprint Finance announces strategic financing
Institutional-grade on-chain financial infrastructure developer Blueprint Finance announced a strategic financing round led by Polychain Capital. Participants included Bullish, Keyrock, BitGo, FalconX, G-20, Flowdesk, JPEG Trading, Sentient Capital, Andes, and 2Square.
Blueprint Finance is the core developer behind Concrete, which the company describes as a full-stack vault infrastructure for institutions, protocols, and asset managers. It is built to launch, manage, and allocate capital through complex on-chain strategies while placing execution, accounting, risk controls, rebalancing, and protocol integrations inside one vault framework.
The company said the financing will help it expand Concrete and deepen cooperation with protocols, asset issuers, networks, and institutional allocators to build vaults that support on-chain yield products and serve as core liquidity infrastructure. Beyond vault infrastructure, Blueprint Finance has also expanded the Concrete ecosystem with on-chain financial primitives including AssetCX and concUSD.
NeoSoul closes $11 million Pre-A round
NeoSoul said it has completed an $11 million Pre-A financing. Investors in the round included MH Ventures, Amber Group, ArkStream Capital, 0G Foundation, Kirin Capital, CatcherVC, and New Oak International.
The company said the proceeds will go toward building agent trading products and AI economic infrastructure. According to the project description in the report, NeoSoul is an emerging AI economic commercialization infrastructure project in the BNB Chain and 0G ecosystems, with a focus on accelerating the construction of an AI economy. NeoSoul said it uses harness engineer so agents can collaborate, compete, and create value.
The financing came after the launch of NeoTrade, an agent trading workstation introduced by NeoSoul. The product allows traders to configure AI trading agents that can make decisions and execute trades autonomously.
Fortune Protocol says cumulative funding exceeds $4 million
AI and prediction market project Fortune Protocol disclosed updated fundraising details, saying it has completed several rounds including a seed round and a Pre-A round, with cumulative funding of more than $4 million.
Investors mentioned in the report included K24 Ventures, CGV FoF, MH Ventures, and Mapleblock Capital. Fortune Protocol said the latest funding will be used mainly for upgrades to Fortune AI Agent, integration and expansion of prediction market liquidity, and ecosystem development.
Cypherpunk Mining acquires Winklevoss assets
On the M&A side within the crypto section, Cypherpunk Mining said it has officially launched and that its 4.2 Gsol/s of Equihash hashrate deployed in the U.S. has made it the world’s largest Zcash miner.
The company said it signed a $33.333333 million asset acquisition agreement with Winklevoss Capital, taking over a fleet of Bitmain Z15 Pro mining machines previously deployed across multiple U.S. locations. The company said the fleet currently produces about 7,800 ZEC per month and is already cash-flow positive.
Cypherpunk said revenue per unit of electricity in Zcash mining is currently about twice that of AI data center hosting and three times that of Bitcoin mining, while equipment capital expenditure is far below AI infrastructure. It added that it has no debt and plans to integrate vertically over time into data center and power assets.
Selected AI and robotics financings
Etched raises $700 million at a $21 billion valuation
AI chip company Etched raised $700 million in a round led by Jane Street, bringing its valuation to $21 billion. The company has signed Jane Street as its first customer and has already started shipping chips.
DataVita raises £300 million
AI data center operator DataVita announced a £300 million financing, or about $406 million. Investors included ING, ABN AMRO, Banco Santander, the Scottish National Investment Bank, and Siemens Financial Services.
The capital will be used for AI data center campuses. DataVita also signed a 15-year data center lease with AI cloud provider CoreWeave.
Groq raises $350 million at a reduced valuation
AI chip startup Groq raised $350 million, but at a valuation of $3.5 billion, roughly half of what it was valued at close to a year earlier. The round was led by Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive, and Nvidia is also set to participate.
Founded in 2016, Groq had been viewed as one of Nvidia’s notable challengers in AI chips. The company focuses on specialized hardware for AI computing and is now shifting toward becoming an AI data center operator focused on model inference demand.
Starcloud closes $250 million round
Space compute startup Starcloud announced a new $250 million financing led by Manhattan West Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Cisco, Benchmark, and EQT. Nvidia invested about $25 million in the round, according to the report.
The money will be used to expand satellite manufacturing facilities and advance development of the next-generation orbital data center satellite, Starcloud-3. The company said it has already operated Nvidia H100 data center GPUs in orbit and completed model training based on those GPUs.
Most space computing projects currently rely on edge-computing chips, the report said. Starcloud is working with Nvidia to provide test data for the future Vera Rubin Space-1 GPU, which is being designed for space environments. The report also noted that CEO Philip Johnston had previously said the company planned to mine Bitcoin in space.
Muon Space raises $250 million Series C
AI space technology company Muon Space announced a $250 million Series C round led by Eclipse Capital. Investors included Google, Salesforce Ventures, Galvanize, Wellington Management, I Squared Capital, Woven Capital, Radical Ventures, and Congruent Ventures.
The company said the proceeds will be used to speed up large-scale satellite constellation production, expand a dual-use spacecraft platform, and increase in-orbit AI compute capacity, together with real-time ultra-high-bandwidth satellite connectivity provided through cooperation with SpaceX Starlink.
Velaura AI reaches unicorn valuation
AI chip design company Velaura AI announced a $110 million Series A round at a valuation above $1 billion. The round was led by Seligman Ventures, with Capricorn Investment Group, Samsung Catalyst Fund, StepStone Group, and Maverick Silicon participating.
The company develops low-power chips and software for data centers and physical AI applications, including robotics and autonomous systems. It said the funding will support faster product development and deployment, as well as hiring engineers and customer support staff. The report said Velaura AI is in talks with three of the four largest cloud service providers but did not disclose which three.
Callosum raises $100 million
Multi-chip AI compute scheduling platform Callosum announced a $100 million financing led by Atomico, with earlier backer Plural, as well as DCVC and the UK sovereign AI fund, also participating.
The company said the capital will help it build an intelligent scheduling layer linking AI applications to underlying compute. Its approach breaks AI workloads into different tasks and automatically matches each task with the most suitable model and chip so enterprises can cut costs and improve performance without handling the complexity underneath.
Prevalent AI and idler disclose new rounds
Enterprise AI data platform Prevalent AI announced a $22 million financing with participation from Los Angeles-based Integrity Growth Partners, or IGP. Founded in 2017, the company develops AI-driven data infrastructure that connects and integrates data from multiple internal enterprise systems to help build continuously updated sovereign knowledge graphs and support deployment of AI agents and automation systems.
Frontier data research lab idler announced a $9 million seed round led by Paradigm’s Alpo and Frankie, with Y Combinator, Long Journey VC, and angel investors including marrc, catheryn_li, dcposch, Janine Leger, Lynett Capital, feross, and nur_daulet_ taking part. The funding will go toward evaluation systems, benchmarks, and reinforcement learning environments for leading frontier labs to train and measure model performance.
Higgsfield raises $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation
AI video generation platform Higgsfield has raised $400 million from investors including DST Global, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, and Intel, reaching a valuation of $5.4 billion.
The report said the company, founded two years ago, is accelerating commercialization as it expands its enterprise subscription business. The financing came just eight months after its previous round. Higgsfield was founded by former Snapchat executive Alex Mashrabov. In the previous round, the company raised $80 million at a $1.3 billion valuation as enterprise adoption of its AI technology was rising.
PANews said Higgsfield launched in 2025 and had reached $700 million in annualized revenue by August this year, up from $20 million roughly a year earlier. The platform now has more than 30 million users across 238 countries and regions, with the U.S. as its largest market.
Wispr completes $280 million Series B
AI voice tool Wispr raised $280 million in a Series B round at a post-money valuation of $2 billion. Menlo Ventures led the financing. Existing investors including Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, and MVP Ventures followed on, while new investors including Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund, and PLUS Capital joined.
The company’s cumulative funding has now reached $361 million. Wispr said the capital will support expansion of products such as speech transcription and meeting notes, as well as rollout of a new speech model, Canto. The company said the model reduces the error rate from about 30% to below 10%, while it also plans to expand in markets including India and the UK and deepen hardware partnerships.
Rillet raises $100 million Series C
AI-native accounting platform Rillet announced a $100 million Series C round at a $1 billion valuation. ICONIQ led the round. Existing investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Oak HC/FT participated again, alongside new investors such as Bain Capital Ventures and Battery Ventures. The company said its total funding has now exceeded $200 million.
Rillet describes itself as the first truly AI-native accounting platform. It uses AI agents to replace traditional manual accounting workflows, can process hundreds of operations in parallel, and produces a full audit trail. The company said it now serves more than 600 customers, including AI companies such as Neuralink and Mercor, and that about 40% of its customers come from outside the technology sector.
Robotics deals remain active
SoftBank Group invested $200 million in Swiss construction robotics startup Gravis Robotics, completing its Series A financing. Spun out of ETH Zurich, Gravis develops autonomous driving hardware and software for earthmoving equipment, enabling autonomous heavy machinery operation and remote supervision of robot fleets.
According to a report cited from Kechuangban Daily, embodied intelligence company Zhongke Diwuji completed consecutive A1 and A2 rounds, with total financing exceeding RMB 1 billion. The A1 round was jointly funded by Xigaotou, BOC AIC Fund under Bank of China, and Sanfeng Investment. The A2 round included Xinneng Venture Capital, BOC AIC Fund, Zhongshan Venture Capital, Hongruida Investment, Beyondsoft, and Jinchuangtou, the Zhejiang new energy vehicle sub-fund.
Embodied intelligence company Moushen Intelligence completed a Pre-A+ round of nearly RMB 500 million. Investors included Shenbao Yiben Fund, Orient Securities, Shaanxi High-tech Industry Investment Co., Ltd., industry investors Anyu Fund, Tianmeng Investment, and Jianyuan Tianhua, while existing shareholders Chuanghehui Capital, Xuhui Capital, and Gengxin Capital increased their positions. The company said its valuation rose more than tenfold in the first half of the year.
Humanoid intelligence company Current Robotics, also known as Yuanliu, disclosed its fundraising progress for the first time, saying it had completed seed, angel, and Pre-A rounds, with cumulative financing amounting to several hundred million yuan. Investors included BV Baidu Ventures, GL Ventures, Oasis Capital, Monolith, Qianhai Ark, Fosun Capital, and Junshan Capital on the financial side, as well as strategic backers including AgiBot, Xinghaitu, and Jike Technology. The funding will mainly be used to advance large-scale collection of full-body human data and to invest in core technologies including full-body dexterous manipulation foundation models and interactive world models.
M&A developments
Stripe to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion
People familiar with the matter said payment services provider Stripe has finalized an agreement to acquire AI startup OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, though the final price could still change.
OpenRouter provides developers with a unified API aggregation platform that allows access through one interface to hundreds of open-source and closed-source large language models around the world.
OpenAI acquires InstantDB team
OpenAI has acquired the team behind real-time database platform InstantDB. Before the acquisition, InstantDB served more than 17,000 users and 400,000 applications and handled about 2.5 billion transactions.
InstantDB offers backend-as-a-service products to help developers manage real-time data synchronization. Existing users need to migrate hosted cloud applications by Aug. 31, 2027, while the open-source codebase will remain available for self-hosting.
InstantDB was part of Y Combinator’s 2022 batch. Its founding team will join OpenAI to strengthen infrastructure for AI agent applications. The report said AI agents require persistent state management, real-time reads and writes, and concurrent conflict handling, which aligns with InstantDB’s focus on real-time synchronization infrastructure.