funding

BitBT Ventures posted on platform X that it has provided $5 million in early financing to the social finance platform KIVO. KIVO is building a social finance ecosystem that connects social, trading, payment, digital assets, and emerging financial products through a single consumer-grade application.BitBT Ventures stated that it supports KIVO in building a social layer and a full-stack SocialFi infrastructure for the next generation of users. The related content was published by its social media account and mentioned KIVO account KivoSocialLayer.

According to Decrypt, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control has designated the Russian shadow banking network A7 Network as a significant transnational criminal organization, listing its relevant addresses in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has proposed a draft rule that aims to prohibit U.S. institutions from participating in any fund transfers involving the network's "sub-agent companies," covering convertible virtual currencies and not limited to fiat currencies, which is expected to affect approximately 348,000 institutions, including several cryptocurrency exchanges.The proposal is based on six special measures granted by Section 9714 of the Countering Russian Money Laundering Act, ultimately selecting the sixth measure, which is the fund transfer ban. The fifth measure, which restricts correspondent accounts, is considered to have loopholes: research by blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs shows that A7A5 transactions completely bypass the correspondent banking system, which the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network views as a core aspect of its business model. A7A5 is a ruble-backed token issued by Old Vector, registered in Kyrgyzstan, operating on Tron and Ethereum, with reserves held at the Russian state-owned defense bank Promsvyazbank.The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network stated that between February 2025 and June 2026, over 180 entities handled at least $17.91 billion in A7A5, which historically circulated almost entirely through the sanctioned exchanges Garantex and Grinex, often used as a non-frozen bridge to convert into USDT and then into fiat currency.

Zcash founder Zooko posted that Zcash has issued over 8 million dollars in retroactive grants this round, with millions of dollars awarded to those who contributed to protecting all users during this year's AI vulnerability crisis.The more significant meaning of this funding is that Zcash once again proves that its self-funding and self-governance system is sustainable, resistant to capture, and capable of continuous evolution. Zcash will conduct multiple rounds of similar funding every year in the future while continuously improving the mechanism.

According to Techcrunch, durable workflow infrastructure startup Restate announced the completion of a $20 million Series A funding round, led by Singular, with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Capital One Ventures.Restate was founded in 2022 and is headquartered in Berlin, focusing on building multi-step workflow execution engines that can withstand crashes and network interruptions, leveraging self-developed storage, replication, and redundancy layers, with advantages of high speed and lightweight architecture. Recently, it has signed six-figure to seven-figure contracts with multiple clients, including the vibe programming platform Replit and several Fortune 500 companies in the financial sector. This round of funding will be used to build a marketing team, expand the engineering team, and grow its office in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Market operator Kalshi is negotiating a round of $1 billion financing, targeting a valuation of $40 billion. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management are discussing leading the round, with Tiger Global and Dragoneer Investment Group also participating in the talks. This round of financing has not yet been completed, and the final list of investors and closing date have not been announced.In October 2025, Kalshi raised $300 million at a valuation of $5 billion, and in May 2026, it completed a $1 billion financing at a valuation of $22 billion. On September 25, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals made a ruling unfavorable to Kalshi in a lawsuit involving Ohio and Tennessee, allowing the two states to regulate its sports contracts under gambling laws. Kalshi claims that its products are regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

According to Bloomberg, the Miami-based fintech company Jeeves has completed a $110 million Series C funding round, led by CoinFund, with participation from a16z, Coinbase Ventures, AllianceBernstein, and others.This round of funding will be used to expand its business, including stablecoin wallets, AI Agents, and to implement instant payment features in more countries.

The Circle Foundation announced two grants to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Food Programme (WFP) to explore the application of digital payments and digital financial infrastructure in humanitarian aid and development projects.The Circle Foundation stated that the relevant programs will study how to utilize digital payments and regulated payment-type stablecoins to disburse funds to aid recipients more quickly, transparently, and at a lower cost.For the UNDP, the grant will be used to establish and operate a "Digital Asset Innovation Pool," helping country offices expand previous digital payment pilot projects conducted in Syria, Haiti, Guatemala, and Gambia from single projects to regular project execution, and provide support such as regulation, operations, and beneficiary protection; this mechanism will not replace traditional banking channels but will serve as a complementary option outside the existing payment system.For the WFP, the grant will support the establishment of governance, risk management, funding, reconciliation systems, and compliance tools necessary for stablecoin payments, and integrate local fintech and mobile payment services. Over the next three years, the WFP plans to test 2 to 3 payment channels connecting its payment system with local financial service providers and markets to assess the performance of stablecoin payments in terms of efficiency, transparency, and resilience.

Market prediction protocol functionSPACE announced the completion of a $1.7 million Pre-Seed round of financing, aimed at building economic primitives for pricing numerical outcomes. This round of financing was led by Maven 11 Capital and Blockwall, with participation from Smape Capital.

According to a report by The Information cited by Dongcha, two individuals with direct knowledge stated that the artificial intelligence company DeepSeek has an annual revenue of approximately $1 billion, up from less than $500 million a few months ago. The revenue primarily comes from model APIs, and the free chat application currently has no advertising or subscription revenue.The report indicated that part of the revenue growth is due to price increases, with some API prices raised by about 2.3 to 4.5 times. Liang Wenfeng recently told investors that the number of customers did not decline after the price increase, and demand remains strong. Previously disclosed financial data showed that the gross margin for the API business in the first seven months of this year was 82.9%.DeepSeek's second round of financing plans to raise approximately 50 billion yuan, with a valuation of about 500 billion. The company hopes to complete this by the end of October and is also preparing for an IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's Sci-Tech Innovation Board. Liang Wenfeng stated that over 70% of the computing power is used for training new models, leaving less than 30% for inference; the company is trying to run more small models directly on gaming graphics cards, reserving high-end chips for training.

According to Bloomberg, a data center developer supported by an affiliate of Blue Owl Capital announced a bond issuance to raise $1.1 billion to bet on AI computing power, funding the Digital Drive data center project near Richmond, Virginia.The data center has an IT capacity of 76 megawatts and will be fully leased by CoreWeave under a 15-year, $2.94 billion contract, expected to be operational from 2027 to 2028.

According to Techcrunch, AI agent startup Ema has completed a $77 million Series B funding round, led by Creaegis, with existing investors Accel, Section 32, and Prosus participating in the round. To date, the company's total funding has reached $140 million, with a valuation that has more than doubled since the last funding round in 2024.Ema was founded in 2023 by former Google and Coinbase executive Surojit Chatterjee and former Okta executive Souvik Sen. The company deploys technology called "AI Employee," which is a system capable of coordinating multiple AI agents to help businesses execute multi-step business processes within existing applications, rather than handling one task at a time.It is reported that most of the new funds will be used to expand market operations, as the company had previously focused primarily on product development.

Market news reports that Firmus, supported by Nvidia, is seeking $10 billion in financing to develop artificial intelligence chips.

The web data infrastructure company Firecrawl announced on platform X that it has completed a $75 million Series B financing round, led by Smash Capital, and launched a knowledge base for AI agents called Alexandria, aimed at providing agents with unified access to real-time web, official data providers, and professional indexes.According to the official page, Alexandria currently integrates 82 data providers, 471 data capabilities, and over 113 million papers, READMEs, Issues, and technical documents, covering 28 categories including finance, government, code, shopping, and real estate, and supports access via MCP, CLI, and API. Firecrawl claims that its internal testing shows that Alexandria's answer quality on approximately 1,000 directory-type questions is 21% higher than that of built-in web tools.

Global payment and financial infrastructure Infini announced the completion of a $6 million seed round financing, with participation from SNZ, Reforge, Enlight Capital, NDV (NextGen Digital Venture), FORTWEST, Vernal, and others.Infini stated that the funds will be used to further strengthen its global payment and financial infrastructure, making it easier and more efficient for individuals and businesses to manage and use funds globally.

On-chain gold and foreign exchange trading infrastructure XStable has recently completed a new round of financing, which was supported by several institutions including YZi Labs, Sui Foundation, Taisu Ventures, and CatcherVC.Previously, XStable had received investments and support from institutions such as Solana, Amber Group, KuCoin Ventures, and Singchain, accumulating millions of dollars in financing from more than ten institutional investors worldwide. Currently, XStable has focused on market development around gold, silver, and major foreign exchange trading pairs. According to data disclosed by the platform, XStable's average daily trading volume has exceeded 100 million dollars, with a cumulative trading volume of over several hundred billion dollars.

According to exclusive reports from "Investment World", Yan Wentao officially joined DeepSeek on Monday and reported to the company, taking on the role of the company's first CFO.Yan Wentao was born in 1991 and graduated from Fudan University. He joined Hillhouse Capital in 2020 and has previously participated in projects such as MiniMax, Zhipu AI, and ByteDance.DeepSeek is finalizing its second round of financing, planning to raise 50 billion yuan, with a pre-investment valuation of 500 billion yuan, and has already hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a potential Sci-Tech Innovation Board IPO.

The collectibles trading platform CatchBack announced the completion of an $8 million seed round financing, led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Robinhood Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Solana Foundation.CatchBack stated that it will use the funds to build products related to collectibles trading.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas stated that Bitcoin ETFs have advantages over gold ETFs, including the fact that the Bitcoin investor demographic is younger; as the market matures, volatility decreases, and correlation with other assets stabilizes, Bitcoin will attract more large institutional adoption.In addition, Bitcoin ETFs have stronger market enthusiasm and sales resources, with dozens of wholesalers familiar with both the crypto market and traditional investors currently promoting and educating the market, while gold ETFs lack similar promotional strength.

According to The Wall Street Journal, AI computing infrastructure startup Crusoe has completed a $3.9 billion Series F funding round, with a post-money valuation of approximately $30.9 billion. This round of financing was co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Mubadala Investment, with participation from Founders Fund, TPG, and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).Founded in 2018, Crusoe initially provided services for cryptocurrency miners and later shifted to AI computing infrastructure. It spent two years building a large AI data center in Abilene, Texas, to provide computing power for OpenAI and Microsoft. The company is currently transitioning to producing compact data centers named "Spark," loading prefabricated facilities onto trucks and deploying them to locations with excess power to more quickly meet the demand for AI inference computing power.