Enterprise AI company Clay has raised $115 million in a Series D round led by Wellington, according to Reuters. The financing brought the company’s post-money valuation to $7.1 billion. Other investors in the round included Sequoia Capital, StepStone, Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, Perennial, Meritech, DST and CapitalG. Clay said its AI agents can use external data sources such as CRM systems to build real-time business and customer profiles, then automatically create and carry out workflows based on a company’s goals. The company also said its product is already used by Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Stripe. The announcement adds another large funding round to the enterprise AI sector, with Clay positioning its product around workflow automation and customer data-driven operations.

A busy news cycle from Aug. 6 to Aug. 7 brought a mix of crypto regulation, market structure, corporate disclosures, and AI-linked developments. Dow Protocol said claims that OKX Ventures had invested in the project were false and said a list of investors would be released this week without OKX Ventures on it. The U.S. Senate, meanwhile, decided to delay a vote on the Clarity Act until September, extending uncertainty around a major federal crypto bill. Outside Washington, Thailand confirmed a five-year capital gains tax exemption on crypto trades executed through Thai SEC-licensed venues from Jan. 1, 2025 through Dec. 31, 2029. MetaMask introduced a self-custodial AI wallet that lets agents execute on-chain transactions within user-defined limits, and Wintermute registered a broker-dealer subsidiary with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA. The update set also included Binance Alpha’s AGT and AIA blind box airdrop, Cipher Digital’s sale of 1,619 BTC at a realized loss, a Chainalysis report on more than $30 million in violent robbery losses targeting crypto holders in the first half of 2026, Bernstein’s renewed $140 target on Circle, and several funding, hardware, and security stories tied to the broader AI sector.

The reported talks between Stripe and OpenRouter have revived scrutiny of Alex Atallah’s second major startup after OpenSea. According to earlier reporting by The Wall Street Journal cited in the source article, Stripe is discussing an acquisition of OpenRouter at roughly $10 billion. That figure stands in sharp contrast to OpenRouter’s post-money valuation of $1.3 billion in May and its annualized revenue of about $50 million as of March 2026. The article argues that Atallah has not fundamentally changed his entrepreneurial playbook from Web3 to AI. OpenSea aggregated NFT listings and took a cut of each transaction without minting NFTs itself. OpenRouter follows the same structure in AI: it does not train models or own data centers, but aggregates access to more than 400 models from over 70 providers behind a single API and charges roughly 5% on inference spend. The piece frames the central question around supplier power. OpenSea’s upstream market was fragmented, while OpenRouter faces dominant AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. In that sense, the reported price is presented less as a cash-flow multiple and more as a bet on whether AI models become interchangeable infrastructure. The source also notes that the deal may still fall apart or attract competing bidders.

A long list of companies and founders now tied to AI can trace part of their edge back to the last crypto cycle. In PANews’ account, the connection is not that mining rigs somehow became AI servers. The real handoff happened through three assets crypto had already accumulated before AI demand exploded: access to power, land and grid permits; engineers and operators trained in distributed systems and global internet products; and capital built during the last bull market. The piece starts with Crusoe, once known for using stranded natural gas at oil fields to mine Bitcoin and now involved in OpenAI’s Stargate buildout in Abilene, Texas. It then moves through mining companies signing multibillion-dollar AI and high-performance computing deals, former crypto builders launching AI infrastructure businesses such as OpenRouter and Fal.ai, and crypto fortunes backing GPU fleets, model companies and decentralized training experiments. Examples in the article range from Jed McCaleb’s Voltage Park to FTX-era investments in Anthropic and Anysphere, and from Paradigm-backed Nous Research to OpenAI’s own early internal discussion of a token-based funding structure. The article’s central point is narrow but clear: crypto did not simply turn into AI. It transferred resources from one cycle into the next industry that needed them more urgently.

OpenRouter has raised $113 million in a Series B led by Alphabet's CapitalG, reaching a post-money valuation of about $1.3 billion, more than 2.4 times its level a year earlier.

Crypto did not suddenly become AI. What changed is where the assets from the last cycle ended up. In Abilene, Texas, the first large site under OpenAI’s Stargate plan is being operated by Oracle and developed by Crusoe, a company that started in bitcoin mining and later sold more than 425 modular bitcoin data centers to NYDIG to focus on AI. That arc captures a broader shift now visible across the industry. Mining companies are not repurposing ASIC rigs into AI servers. Their real value lies in grid-connected sites, power access, land, substations and permits that took years to assemble. As bitcoin mining economics weakened and AI tenants signed long, expensive contracts, companies such as CoreWeave, TeraWulf, Cipher Mining, Core Scientific, Hut 8 and IREN moved data center capacity toward AI and high-performance computing. The same pattern appears in people and capital. OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah built OpenRouter after leaving the NFT marketplace. Former Coinbase machine learning engineer Burkay Gur built Fal.ai into a generative media inference company. Crypto fortunes and venture networks also flowed into AI through Jed McCaleb’s Voltage Park, FTX-era bets on Anthropic and Anysphere, and Paradigm-backed Nous Research. Across these examples, the through line is not ideology. It is the transfer of infrastructure, operators and money from crypto into AI.

VAST Data is reportedly discussing a new funding round that could raise about $5 billion and value the AI infrastructure firm at up to $30 billion, with Nvidia and Alphabet’s CapitalG among potential investors.

VAST Data is reportedly discussing a new funding round with CapitalG and Nvidia that could raise about $5 billion and value the AI infrastructure startup at up to $30 billion, underscoring strong investor appetite for AI data center and storage plays.