venture

According to official news, the AGENT economic project Agentum has completed a $7 million financing round, with participation from MEXC Ventures, BingX Labs, Arca, Wave Digital Assets, BlockTower Capital, Echo3 Labs, Greenwood Global Capital, UZ Capital, and Vega Ventures.The funds from this round will mainly be used to accelerate the construction of the trust and settlement layer for the autonomous Agent economy, with Agentum deployed on the BNB Chain. The BSC testnet has registered 399 Agents, completed 218 transactions, and achieved a GMV of over 2.44 million MockUSDT.

According to a report by Sina Finance, AI 3D company VAST (Sanqi Wànwù) announced the completion of Series B and B+ financing, totaling approximately 3 billion yuan, led by Matrix Partners. Perfect World, BlueFocus Communication Group, Xindong Energy Investment, Yanqu Games, Zhongke Chuangda, 37 Interactive Entertainment, as well as Dinghui VGC, CICC Capital, CMC Capital and others participated in the investment, while existing shareholders Dachen Caizhi, Chunhua Capital, and Wengce Capital continued to invest.According to the official introduction, VAST has raised approximately 5 billion yuan in less than six months. It is reported that VAST also released the latest version of its flagship 3D base model Tripo P series, Tripo P2. The funds from this round of financing will be invested in the iteration of 3D native models and data capabilities, expansion of training and inference infrastructure, product development, and commercialization.

London-based AI precision machining software startup CloudNC announced the completion of a €17.2 million (approximately $20 million) funding round, led by the American venture capital firm Nimble Ventures, with participation from Calculus Venture Capital, Entrepreneur First, and Lockheed Martin's venture capital fund LM Ventures.

The AI intelligent terminal project Herdr announced the completion of a $6 million seed round financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, e2vc, and Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke.The funds will be used to enhance Herdr's runtime performance, stability, and scalability, and to build a team focused on Rust, terminals, and AI intelligences.

ARK Investment Management has submitted a waiver application to the U.S. SEC, seeking to issue tokenized share classes for its venture capital fund, ARK Venture Fund. The SEC issued a related notice on August 24 and set September 18 as the deadline for hearing requests. The fund is a continuously offered closed-end interval fund, with total assets of $562 million as of January 31.The application proposes to establish two categories: the exchange category will be listed on national securities exchanges, while the tokenized category will record ownership through distributed ledger technology, allowing for peer-to-peer transfers between registered alternative trading systems or whitelisted wallets. Tokenized shares will be issued at net asset value, exempt from sales fees, distributed by registered brokers or fund transfer agents, and will bear the costs of trading fees and other expenses. ARK seeks relief under Sections 6(c), 18, and 17(d) of the Investment Company Act and Rules 23c-3 and 17d-1, with Dechert serving as legal counsel.The application does not specify a tokenization service provider or blockchain, only listing the categories of "tokenization agent" and "fund transfer agent" fees. Currently, BNY Mellon serves as the fund transfer agent, manager, and custodian. The ARK Venture Fund holds equity in Securitize and $10 million in convertible notes; Securitize is the transfer agent for the BlackRock BUIDL Fund. The SEC has not yet formally approved the industry's anticipated tokenization "innovation waiver" framework, and relevant rules are still being advanced.

The prediction market team trading platform ParlayX announced the completion of a $1.25 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Dreamcraft Ventures.ParlayX stated that the prediction market is designed for single-person, single-account trading, and the platform aims to enable teams to trade in prediction markets together.

According to YNetNews, the first Israeli star to enter the NBA, Omri Casspi, announced that his venture capital firm Swish Ventures has completed a $250 million fundraising for its third fund, increasing the firm's assets under management to approximately $800 million.The new fund is expected to invest in about 12 startups, with an average single investment of around $20 million, focusing on areas such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and infrastructure, primarily targeting seed and Series A financing. Swish Ventures has currently invested in 20 companies, including Cognition AI, Applied Compute, EON, Wonderful, Upwind, etc., of which 8 have reached unicorn valuations, with a total valuation of its portfolio companies exceeding $60 billion.

Nomura Securities' digital asset subsidiary Laser Digital announced a partnership with Keyring Network to serve as the risk governance entity for the institutional lending market, with the first market set to launch on Euler Finance. The parties did not disclose committed capital, fee terms, or launch dates.According to the cooperation framework, Keyring provides infrastructure and tools, including access verification, quantitative risk parameter setting, and clearing framework design; Laser Digital's asset management department contributes governance standards, portfolio structure, and market practices. Both parties pointed out that institutional participation in DeFi lending faces four major obstacles: licensing, vulnerability risks, governance, and settlement. The solution combines zero-knowledge licensing, quantitative risk modeling, network insurance, and Keyring's settlement technology.According to DefiLlama data, Euler has a total value locked of $368.8 million across 17 chains, with outstanding loans of $555.4 million. Laser Digital previously supported ZIGChain's emerging market private credit in August, while Keyring introduced a zero-knowledge identity layer for the DeFi vault on Avalanche in August 2025. Nomura established Laser Digital in 2022, with operational headquarters in Dubai and Switzerland.

According to Bloomberg, AI and cloud security startup Upwind Security has completed a new round of financing of $300 million, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from some existing investors, bringing the post-financing valuation to $3.8 billion.Upwind Security, headquartered in San Francisco, primarily provides cybersecurity services for AI applications and cloud applications. The new funds are intended to expand the AI security capabilities of its core cloud security platform, aiming to be closer to developers.

According to official news, the anti-quantum EVM Layer 1 blockchain DAC has announced a $1 million investment from Unicorn Crypto Ventures.DAC focuses on building EVM-compatible blockchain infrastructure that can withstand quantum computing attacks. It is built on a Quadrans fork, utilizing a three-layer node architecture and PoQW consensus, driving the ecosystem and transaction execution through a dual-asset model (DACT/DACC), providing scalable and quantum-resistant blockchain infrastructure for developers and enterprises.

DWF Ventures released a report stating that as trading fees continue to approach zero, social trading is becoming a new direction for financial trading platforms to compete for users and build moats.The rise of social trading stems from users seeking validation from others and references for investment decisions. From early brokerage copy trading to investment communities like Reddit and Stocktwits, and now to platforms that combine real position verification, trading signals, and social relationships, social trading is evolving from a simple copy trading tool into a product form that integrates trading, content, and social interaction. As trade execution becomes increasingly homogenized, the future competitive advantage of platforms may come more from network effects, resources of well-known traders, and exclusive information and distribution capabilities.Analysis suggests that social trading platforms are forming a clear growth flywheel: platforms attract well-known traders and their fans, traders build reputations through public trading, fans amplify market influence by following trades, which in turn increases the visibility of traders and the user base of the platform. Public calls for trades may even generate a certain "self-fulfilling" effect in this process.Platforms also lower the entry barriers for users through one-click trading, low-threshold acceptance, trading competitions, and fee incentives, and leverage the social influence of top traders to facilitate user migration. In the future, the social trading ecosystem in the cryptocurrency and traditional stock sectors may further integrate, and platforms that master trader, user attention, and information flow are expected to form stronger network effects.However, social trading also faces significant structural risks. Data shows that among approximately 292,000 wallets analyzed by the Fomo platform over the past three months, only 6.16% achieved profitability based on realized gains. Followers lack independent investment logic and are easily influenced by herd behavior, while there may also be conflicts of interest between traders and followers.Furthermore, even if platforms can verify public positions, traders may still establish undisclosed positions through other wallets, making information asymmetry difficult to eliminate completely. Analysis suggests that as the boundaries between trading and entertainment continue to blur, platforms that can establish unique information layers, gather quality traders, and form network effects may gain an advantage in the competitive social trading market.

According to The Wall Street Journal, documents disclosed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show that OpenAI is launching its second venture fund, having already raised $400 million, all of which comes from its own balance sheet.Previously, OpenAI launched its first venture fund in 2021, raising $175 million, but at that time, OpenAI itself was not the only investor in its first fund, as it raised funds from external investors including Microsoft.

According to TechCrunch, AI Agent development company Runable has completed a $21 million Series A funding round, led jointly by usquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Together Fund and Array VC.The AI Agent currently being developed by the company is capable of generating websites, applications, and presentations through natural language, and can also handle foundational tasks such as deployment and data analysis. The new funding will be used to optimize AI inference costs and integrate infrastructure, marketing, and distribution capabilities.

The financial AI platform Oro, which transforms complex user intentions into multi-step executions, announced the completion of a $3 million strategic financing round, led jointly by MH Ventures and Mapleblock Capital, with participation from M2M Capital, Archer Capital, and X21 Digital. Disrupt.com and ZIGLabs provide subsequent strategic support, bringing the total financing amount to $4 million. The funds will be used to advance core AI and agent research and development (including the proprietary Shield Engine and natural language execution stack), global market and user acquisition, build a self-hosted compliance framework with policy constraints, and expand engineering, AI research, and enterprise B2B teams.Oro converts natural language prompts into multi-step transaction paths in a non-custodial, user-signature manner. The official disclosure states that there are already over 350,000 independent active users, supporting more than 80 languages, and has completed mainnet integrations with Morpho, Kamino, Lido, Aave, Uniswap, Raydium, etc.; the activities with Ondo Finance saw over 50,000 verifications completed on the first day of launch. The company's goal is to reach 10 million active users in the next 6 to 12 months, launch native iOS and Android applications, and expand integration as a B2B and B2C intent routing layer.

On August 21, MEXC Ventures held the Day 3 Helicopter Trip and Closing Gathering during CoinFest 2026 in Bali. The event invited 32 KOLs and industry guests to participate in a 50-minute helicopter experience, overlooking the southern coast of Bali and the main venue of CoinFest from the air.Later that day, 100 participants, partners, and industry professionals attended the Closing Gathering. MEXC CEO Vugar and MEXC Product Director Vivien shared observations on structural opportunities in the primary and secondary markets during the MEXC Alpha Insights session, and introduced the strategic direction of MEXC Ventures for the upcoming quarters. According to the organizers, this event aimed to provide a platform for CoinFest participants to exchange industry views and establish collaborative connections.

Stanford Business School Professor Ilya Strebulaev, in collaboration with Blake Jackson, released the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Capital Firm Rankings, based on nearly 30 years of data from over 230,000 investments and nearly 13,000 VCs. The research estimates that about 5% of VCs generate approximately 90% of the industry's profits. The top five are Sequoia Capital (10,158 points), Andreessen Horowitz (8,292 points), Accel, DST Global, and Tiger Global. Among them, Parkway Venture Capital (19th place) and Notable (20th place) made it into the top 20, but are not well-known leading brands.The rankings are based on six major factors: discount valuation, dilution adjustment, net profit (after costs), value added (lead investments and board seats), human capital decay (three-and-a-half-year half-life), and credit allocation between institutions and individuals (25% for the investing institution and 75% for the current institution). Of the top 100, 62 are located in California, 19 in New York, and 6 each in Massachusetts and Texas. 21 were established in 2015 or later, and 23 of the best investments are in frontier AI or AI infrastructure companies, with OpenAI listed as the best investment by 4 firms, xAI by 3, and Anthropic and Perplexity by 2 each. The ranking methodology has a correlation of only about 0.27 with the Midas List, with SV Angel investing in about 139 unicorns ranked 31st, and Thrive with only 47 unicorns ranked 8th. This ranking is the result of research by Stanford professors and does not constitute investment advice.

According to TechCrunch, the space computing startup Starcloud announced the completion of a new funding round of $250 million, led by Manhattan West Ventures, with participation from institutions such as Nvidia, Cisco, Benchmark, and EQT, among which Nvidia invested approximately $25 million in this round.The new funds will be used to expand satellite manufacturing facilities and advance the research and development of the next-generation orbital data center satellite Starcloud-3. Starcloud revealed that the company has been operating Nvidia H100 data center GPUs in orbit and has completed model training based on this GPU. Currently, most space computing projects use edge computing chips, while Starcloud is collaborating with Nvidia to provide test data for the Vera Rubin Space-1 GPU, which is specifically designed for the space environment. Starcloud's CEO Philip Johnston also previously stated plans to mine Bitcoin in space.

AI economic infrastructure NeoSoul announced the completion of a $11 million Pre-A round of financing, with participation from MH Ventures, Amber Group, ArkStream Capital, 0G Foundation, Kirin Capital, CatcherVC, and New Oak International.NeoSoul stated that it will further develop NeoTrade, strengthening trading infrastructure to build underlying facilities for AI entities to participate in economic activities on a large scale.