PANews’ latest funding roundup shows capital in crypto continued to cluster around stablecoin payments, compliance tooling, and the convergence of traditional finance with digital assets, while AI dealmaking stayed centered on infrastructure. In crypto, Nasdaq invested $100 million in Payward, the parent company of Kraken, valuing the company at $21 billion. Latitude raised a $35 million Series A for cross-border stablecoin payment infrastructure, and TRM Labs’ valuation doubled to $2 billion after another follow-on investment from existing backers. Circle also said it plans to acquire cross-border payments platform Tazapay in an all-stock deal valued at about $400 million, pending regulatory approval and expected to close in 2027. PANews said that from Sept. 7 to Sept. 13, the global blockchain sector recorded eight disclosed financing events with total funding of more than $158 million. Elsewhere, Antarctic Exchange, Agentum, RealGo, and TINA all announced fresh raises, while Sei Labs acquired Bilinear Labs. In AI, infrastructure remained the dominant theme. French startup Mistral AI closed a €3 billion Series D at a post-money valuation above €21 billion. Positron raised $875 million at a $5 billion valuation, Celero Communications secured $275 million at a valuation above $3 billion, and Cognition raised $2 billion, lifting its valuation to $48 billion. Additional rounds went to Clay, Savvy Wealth, Lightfield, and Herdr, while Meta acquired Sweden-based Stilla.ai.

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 wide set of crypto, regulatory and corporate developments landed over the past 24 hours, led by a new post from U.S. President Donald Trump, fresh family-office investment data, enforcement action in Australia, and a string of market and infrastructure updates across Bitcoin, DeFi and payments. Trump said on Truth Social that he had made "hundreds of billions of dollars" for the United States through stocks and other assets and added that he was doing it "for our country, not for myself." Reuters had previously reported that ethics filings showed Trump disclosed at least $220 million and as much as roughly $750 million in personal securities trades in the first three months of 2026. On the investment side, FINTRX data cited by Jiaoban Xinzhi Dian showed that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao’s YZi Labs ranked as the world’s second-most active family office in August, taking part in 10 funding rounds with a combined disclosed round size of $42.1 million. The same dataset showed family offices participated in 109 deals during the month, with disclosed financing totaling $16.9 billion. Elsewhere, Australia’s AUSTRAC said it had canceled, suspended or refused to renew registrations for 45 crypto and remittance businesses over the past year. Market commentary from Two Prime and Wintermute focused on Bitcoin’s rebound, ETF inflows and key price levels, while other developments included Liquid Network fund returns, Cronos’ rollback after the Tectonic exploit, Circle’s deal for Tazapay, and broader stablecoin and banking moves in Brazil, Switzerland and South Korea.

Conveo, a startup moving AI from chatbots into qualitative fieldwork, has raised $50 million in a Series A round. DST Global Partners, Balderton, Visionaries, 6 Degrees Capital and Y Combinator took part, lifting cumulative funding to $55.8 million. The company plans to put the fresh capital mainly into U.S. expansion. Its platform lets consumers respond by video, voice or text, while the AI asks follow-up questions based on each answer. Hundreds of interviews can run in parallel, and the system then organizes themes, direct quotes and conclusions automatically. Research that traditionally stretched over weeks can now be returned within days in some cases. Conveo says the product has entered the research workflow of big companies: more than 400 businesses are on the platform, over 50 of them Fortune 500 names, including customers such as Google, Unilever, AB InBev and Canva. It is also turning one-off studies into an ongoing service by letting AI interview consumers continuously and stack each round’s results in one knowledge base.

A new venture capital ranking built by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Ilya Strebulaev and Blake Jackson argues that founders should look past brand names and focus on actual value creation. Using more than 230,000 investments made over nearly 30 years by close to 13,000 investors across more than 5,000 companies, the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson ranking places Sequoia first with 10,158 points and Andreessen Horowitz second with 8,292. Accel, DST Global and Tiger Global round out the top five. The study claims roughly 5% of venture investors generated about 90% of the industry’s profits, making investor selection a decision with outsized consequences for founders. It also challenges familiar shortcuts: unicorn counts do not necessarily map to performance, younger firms can break into the top ranks, specialist investors can outperform household names in their verticals, and a firm’s brand may say less than the individual partner who will actually sit on a board. The article also notes that crypto-native firms including Paradigm, Pantera, Multicoin and Polychain made the top 100, while AI deals are already reshaping the top of the table.

PANews’ latest weekly funding roundup shows two tracks moving at speed at the same time: AI and robotics continued to attract large checks in the primary market, while crypto funding stayed active across DeFi, privacy infrastructure, on-chain finance, Web3 AI, and prediction markets. In crypto alone, PANews counted five disclosed blockchain financing events worldwide during Aug. 10-16, with aggregate funding of more than $27.5 million. Among the crypto deals, twyne raised a $2.5 million seed round for its DeFi credit delegation layer, Beldex secured $8 million for privacy infrastructure, Blueprint Finance announced a strategic round led by Polychain Capital, NeoSoul closed an $11 million Pre-A round tied to AI economic infrastructure, and Fortune Protocol said its cumulative fundraising has exceeded $4 million. Outside crypto, the biggest headline in the report was M&A: Stripe has finalized an agreement to acquire AI startup OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, though the final price may still change, according to people familiar with the matter cited in the source. The report also noted that OpenAI acquired the InstantDB team. In the broader AI market, Etched raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, while companies including DataVita, Groq, Starcloud, Muon Space, Higgsfield, Wispr, and Rillet also announced major financings.

Aave said on X that Securitize has submitted an ARFC proposal on the Aave governance forum to onboard tokenized shares of the Neuberger Securitize High Income Tokenized Fund, or HINC, to Aave Horizon as collateral. If the proposal moves forward, users would be able to borrow USDC, GHO, and RLUSD against the asset. The proposal describes HINC as the first below-investment-grade credit collateral considered for Horizon and argues that its expected yield is meaningfully higher than stablecoin borrowing rates, which could support two ongoing use cases: arbitrage trades and balance sheet financing. At the same time, the filing lays out several risks. It says the fund has no actual operating history and carries liquidity mismatch and credit risk. For pricing, the design would use a Chainlink net asset value oracle with a capped growth rate. For liquidations, the proposal calls for a window-based process rather than instant liquidation. HINC’s investment adviser is Securitize Capital LLC, with Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers serving as sub-adviser. The fund mainly invests in fixed-income assets including high-yield corporate debt and CLO tranches, and its shares are issued on Ethereum as permissioned DSTokens using the same issuance structure as VBILL, the VanEck Treasury fund already onboarded to Horizon. Securitize also disclosed a direct commercial interest through its roles in the product.

TRON’s latest weekly industry report, covering Aug. 3 to Aug. 9, 2026, said crypto markets moved in a choppy recovery as traders focused on U.S. macro data, Federal Reserve policy expectations and key technical levels in Bitcoin. The report said BTC rebounded from around $62,500 to the $64,900-$65,100 range during the week, while ETH outperformed and held near $1,900. TRON said risk appetite improved after weaker-than-expected U.S. labor data, though institutional flows and trading activity had yet to show a clear acceleration, leaving Bitcoin near an important resistance zone. Beyond short-term market moves, the report reviewed sector themes and regulation. It said AI+Crypto has shifted from AI tokens toward infrastructure for AI agents, including on-chain execution, authorization and payment rails, while DeFi continues to move toward institutionalized yield management. TRON also highlighted two projects: Sealcoin, a machine economy protocol built around identity, service discovery, negotiation and settlement for devices such as IoT hardware, satellites and AI agents; and STRATO, a Layer1 application chain and overcollateralized stablecoin system designed for enterprise and RWA use cases. The report also tracked policy developments in the U.S., India and the EU, including the delayed CLARITY Act vote in the U.S., expanded tax transparency rules in India and ongoing MiCA implementation in Europe.