Financing Weekly | AI Data Infrastructure Company Databricks Completes $5 Billion Strategic Financing; Several Robotics Companies Raise Over 100 Million Yuan

Highlights of This Issue

According to the Financial Times, several Wall Street giants are collaborating with Nvidia (NVDA.O) to advance a $500 billion artificial intelligence financing plan.

This issue continues to see AI financing led by infrastructure and developer tools. Databricks has completed a $5 billion strategic financing round, raising its post-money valuation to $190 billion; River AI has secured $1.1 billion in funding, continuing its focus on open model training, fine-tuning, and deployment infrastructure.

In the application layer, AI programming remains one of the most active areas, with Lovable, CodeRabbit, and Blacksmith raising $400 million, $143 million, and $45 million respectively, covering application generation, code review, and testing validation.

Meanwhile, financing for robotics and embodied intelligence remains highly active. DeepSea Intelligence has completed over 500 million yuan in Series A financing, while AIoT, LatentVerse, and Daimeng Robotics have all raised hundreds of millions.

In terms of crypto financing, CoinDesk reports that crypto startups completed $11.2 billion in funding in the first half of 2026, with all disclosed funds directed towards regulated, licensed enterprises, with the most funding going to payments and stablecoins, prediction markets, exchanges, and trading platforms.

According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were four financing events in the global blockchain sector last week (August 10-16), with a total funding scale exceeding $18 million. The summary is as follows:

• Prediction market trading platform River Markets completed $8.5 million in seed funding, led by Haun Ventures;
• Malaysian digital asset infrastructure company BLOX completed $1 million in seed funding;
• Crypto travel platform Entravel raised $7.5 million, co-led by Ethereal Ventures and Finality Capital;
• Solana ecosystem social application Memebook completed $1 million in seed funding;
• Stablecoin payment company Rain announced the acquisition of the brand prepaid payment platform Ansa.

Crypto Financing

Prediction Markets

Prediction market trading platform River Markets announced the completion of $8.5 million in seed funding, led by Haun Ventures.

Targeting institutional investors, River Markets provides a unified trading interface across multiple prediction markets, along with data connectivity, risk management, and large order execution tools. The company plans to use the new funds to hire engineers, enhance trading system speed and security, and expand its sales and operations team.

Centralized Finance

BLOX Secures $1 Million Seed Funding to Advance MYRC Stablecoin Expansion

Malaysian digital asset infrastructure company BLOX has completed $1 million in seed funding to expand the MYRC stablecoin pegged to the Malaysian Ringgit, develop products for enterprises and institutions, strengthen compliance and regulatory communication, and regional expansion. This round of financing was led by Kivo Technology, a tech investment platform under a Singapore venture capital firm, with participation from existing shareholders and new investors. BLOX stated that the cumulative trading volume of MYRC has increased over 33 times in the past 12 months, having previously showcased MYRC applications in domestic blockchain payment proof-of-concept projects. Currently, BLOX operates in Malaysia without a clear regulatory framework and continues to communicate with regulatory authorities.

Web3 Applications

Crypto travel platform Entravel raises $7.5 million, led by Ethereal Ventures and others.

Entravel has completed $7.5 million in financing, co-led by Ethereal Ventures and Finality Capital, with participation from GSR, Varrock, G1 Ventures, Seier Capital, Veris Ventures, Funfair Ventures, and WTG Ventures.

Entravel provides travel booking systems for over 40 brands, including Kraken and MetaMask, covering 300 million users, with an average booking conversion rate exceeding 10%. Founded in 2026, Entravel operates three interconnected businesses: MocatravelX directly collaborates with hotels to obtain room sources and prices; RateStellar integrates supplies from other channels, using AI to match hotels and room types from different suppliers, covering over 2.2 million hotels; Entravel provides a white-label booking layer for partners, allowing them to offer hotel booking services to users without building their own supplier network.

Solana ecosystem social application Memebook completes $1 million seed round financing.

Memebook, a social application built on Solana, has completed $1 million in seed funding, with TOF. Ventures as the investor. Memebook is a social application similar to Instagram, allowing users to register using Solana wallets and share photos, videos, and text posts. It includes a wallet-based authentication system and verification systems for Solana Mobile users and other Solana wallets.

Acquisitions

Stablecoin payment company Rain announces acquisition of brand prepaid payment platform Ansa.

Stablecoin payment company Rain has announced the acquisition of payment platform Ansa, which is designed for brand prepaid and closed-loop payments. After the integration of Ansa into Rain, partners will be able to extend prepaid balances beyond a single merchant and use them among merchants covered by Visa and Mastercard networks. Rain also stated that it is advancing in the direction of agency payments and has provided budget-limited cards for AI agents.

Selected AI & Robotics Financing

AI Infrastructure

AI data infrastructure company Databricks completes $5 billion strategic financing, led by Coatue.

AI data infrastructure company Databricks has announced the completion of $5 billion in strategic financing, led by Coatue, with participation from Blackstone, MGX, and T. Rowe Price, and Sixth Street Growth joining as a new investor. The post-money valuation of the company has reached $190 billion, higher than the previously disclosed valuation of $188 billion. The funds will be used to advance AI infrastructure layout, product development, and potential acquisitions.

Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi stated that the company's current annualized revenue run rate has exceeded $7 billion, with a year-on-year growth of over 80%. In terms of AI Agent infrastructure, Databricks believes that the scale of AI-generated software will grow significantly in the future, and each AI application will require database support.

Full-stack AI company River AI completes $1.1 billion financing, with Nvidia and AMD participating.

Founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, full-stack AI company River AI has announced the completion of $1.1 billion in financing, led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic investments from Nvidia and AMD Ventures, and participation from Y Combinator, Temasek, and others. The financing will be used to build an open AI technology stack and provide developers and enterprises with tools for training, fine-tuning, and deploying their own AI models. River AI claims that its API can complete complex reinforcement learning training in 15 to 20 minutes without the need for a dedicated infrastructure team, at a cost 2 to 4 times lower than closed-source alternatives.

Defensive AI cybersecurity model Corma completes $60 million seed round financing.

Founded in 2025, cybersecurity startup Corma has announced the completion of $60 million in seed round financing, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Coatue. Corma is headquartered in Tel Aviv and San Francisco and has deployed its first AI model to several Fortune 100 and 500 companies across various industries (including healthcare, financial services, energy, critical infrastructure, and retail) six weeks ago. Unlike current cybersecurity models trained by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc., which focus on "offensive" capabilities, Corma's trained models focus on "defensive" capabilities, analyzing logs and audit data, identifying threats among massive events, and maintaining consistent strategies across thousands of operations. According to the company, its models have helped clients reduce threat response times by 94%.

AI infrastructure company Trajectory completes $40 million financing, with Sequoia Capital participating.

Founded by former Google and Apple researchers, AI infrastructure startup Trajectory has completed $40 million in financing, with a post-money valuation of $300 million, and participation from Sequoia Capital. This is the company's second consecutive round of financing following the completion of $15 million in seed funding in May, with main business including enterprise open-source model customization and AI agent software toolchain optimization.

AI computing economy benchmark platform Silicon Data completes $30.5 million Series A financing, with CME Group participating.

AI computing economy benchmark platform Silicon Data has completed $30.5 million in Series A financing, led by Valor Atreides AI Fund, with participation from CME Group, DRW, F-Prime, Samsung, VanEck, Further, Jump, Tectonic, and Wintermute.

Silicon Data provides independent benchmarks and verification services for the computing economy, and its pricing benchmarks will be used by CME Group for planned cash-settled GPU futures contract reference prices. Since completing $4.7 million in seed funding in March 2025, Silicon Data has developed nine financial-grade indices covering GPUs and LLMs, and has accumulated over 1,000 registered users. Some of the funds will be used for SiliconMark performance benchmarking to help market participants hedge against output risks arising from GPU performance differences.

AI architecture development company Pathway completes $30 million seed round financing, with former Google DeepMind product head appointed as CPO.

AI architecture development company Pathway has announced the completion of $30 million in seed round financing, with participation from Id4 Ventures, TQ Ventures, Red Bridge Ventures, Kadmos Capital, and WS Investment, an investment institution under Wilson Sonsini. Databricks' chief AI scientist Jonathan Frankle has also joined as an angel investor.

Pathway is developing a "Post-Transformer" architecture called BDH (Biologically-inspired Dynamic Hierarchy), aiming to overcome the limitations of current Transformer models that continuously rely on more data, GPUs, energy, and capital expansion. Unlike traditional large models that require periodic retraining, BDH can learn continuously with less data and achieve ongoing adaptation. The company has appointed Adam Kurzrok, former head of product for Google DeepMind's Gemini, as Chief Product Officer to oversee product direction based on the BDH model, including model packaging, evaluation systems, and commercial deployment.

AI Data Infrastructure Company GraphAI Completes $12 Million Series A Funding Led by K2 Investment Partners

South Korean enterprise AI data infrastructure company GraphAI announced the completion of 17 billion KRW (approximately $12 million) in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to 20.6 billion KRW (approximately $14.7 million). This round was led by K2 Investment Partners, with new investors A-Ventures and Jiyu Investment participating. Previous investors in GraphAI's Pre-A round, including Quad Ventures, Kiwoom Investment, and We Ventures, also continued to invest.

GraphAI focuses on enterprise-level AI data infrastructure, with its Akasic platform providing an integrated solution covering enterprise data connection, collection, transformation, AI inference, and Agentic AI execution environments. The company is currently collaborating with large enterprises and institutions in finance, telecommunications, and other sectors for business cooperation and proof of concept (PoC). The new funds will be used to launch new product lines, expand into global markets, and grow the core R&D team.

Agents and Vertical Applications

Tencent and ZhenFund Buy Back Manus Shares from Meta for $2 Billion

Sources close to Manus revealed that Tencent, ZhenFund, Sequoia China, and other major shareholders previously bought back Manus shares from Meta for $2 billion. This transaction price is close to the acquisition price announced by the U.S. social media tech giant Meta in December 2025. Benchmark was the largest shareholder before the acquisition but will not participate in this buyback; its previous shares will be acquired by Tencent, making Tencent the largest shareholder of Manus. Currently, Manus is operating normally.

Previously, Manus announced it would resume independent operations, with some users required to back up their data by August 23.

AI Investment Platform Thrive Holdings Completes $2 Billion Financing with Participation from SoftBank

AI investment platform Thrive Holdings announced the completion of $2 billion in financing, reaching a valuation of $12 billion, with participation from SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital. Thrive Holdings was founded in 2025 by Thrive Capital founder Joshua Kushner. Unlike traditional investment firms, it does not directly invest in AI large model R&D companies but primarily acquires traditional service enterprises and integrates AI technology into business processes to enhance efficiency. Its goal is to build platforms and products that bring cutting-edge artificial intelligence into key industries relied upon by millions of businesses and individuals. The company previously secured approximately $1 billion in initial funding.

AI Evaluation Company Vals AI Completes $40 Million Series A Financing Led by a16z

AI evaluation company Vals AI announced the completion of $40 million in Series A financing, with a post-investment valuation of $400 million. This round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with existing shareholders 8VC, Pear VC, and Bloomberg Beta participating, and new investors including HRT Ventures and Next Ladder Ventures. Vals AI was founded by Rayan Krishnan and Langston Nashold, positioning itself as a third-party evaluator and "scorer" for large models. By collaborating with experts in law, finance, healthcare, and coding, it scores models' outputs in real business scenarios. Its private test set operates in limited quantities to avoid being "trained on the questions" and gaming the rankings. Its evaluation results have been included in model cards by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI, among others, and companies use these results to select production environment models. The company claims an eightfold year-on-year revenue growth in 2025, doubling its customer base, and expanding its team threefold in six months, while launching the code evaluation tool Vals Smith and the advanced risk assessment and expanded economic measurement tool Vals Index 2.0.

Moss Completes €30 Million Financing, Valuation Reaches €1 Billion to Become a Unicorn

Corporate expense management platform Moss has completed €30 million in financing, led by Portage, with existing investors such as Cherry Ventures participating, bringing its post-investment valuation to €1 billion. Moss primarily provides corporate cards, payment, and financial automation services, currently serving over 10,000 companies in Europe. The new funds will focus on developing AI Agents for automating corporate financial processes.

Silicon Data Completes $30.5 Million Series A Financing Led by Valor Atreides AI Fund

GPU market data infrastructure company Silicon Data announced the completion of $30.5 million in Series A financing. This round was led by Valor Atreides AI Fund, with participation from CME Ventures, DRW, Samsung Next, VanEck, Jump Trading, and Wintermute. The funds will be used for GPU benchmark pricing, performance measurement, institutional and alternative data, as well as derivatives, insurance, and credit market risk infrastructure. Silicon Data currently collects data from about 100 GPU leasing platforms in over 40 countries, processing more than 150,000 verified price records daily. CME Group plans to adopt Silicon Data's benchmarks as the reference price for its upcoming cash-settled GPU futures, pending regulatory approval.

AI Programming and Developer Tools

AI Programming Startup Lovable Completes $400 Million Series C Financing, Valuation Reaches $13.3 Billion

Swedish AI programming startup Lovable has completed $400 million in Series C financing, reaching a valuation of $13.3 billion. This round was led by Menlo Ventures and the EU's Scaleup Europe Fund, with participation from Tencent and other institutions. Lovable, founded in 2023, primarily provides AI tools that allow users to build websites and applications through natural language prompts, with corporate clients including Adidas, Deutsche Telekom, and Hearst Group.

NVIDIA-Backed AI Code Review Platform CodeRabbit Completes $143 Million Financing, Valuation Reaches $1.5 Billion

NVIDIA-backed AI code review platform CodeRabbit announced the completion of $143 million in financing, reaching a valuation of $1.5 billion. This round was co-led by Atomico and Smash Capital, with participation from BMW i Ventures and Datadog. To date, CodeRabbit has raised over $200 million in total funding.

CodeRabbit primarily uses artificial intelligence to automatically review software code, helping developers identify code defects, security risks, and potential issues. Its product can automatically review both AI-generated and human-written code during the development process, providing developers with feedback and improvement suggestions.

AI Code Testing Company Blacksmith Completes $45 Million Series B Financing, with Participation from Y Combinator

AI code testing startup Blacksmith has completed $45 million in Series B financing, led by Peak XV Partners, with existing investors GV and Y Combinator participating. The company's valuation has surged from less than $60 million in the previous Series A round to $550 million, with total funding reaching $585 million. The company plans to expand its suite of coding tools to help developers write, validate, and merge software more quickly.

Founded in 2024, Blacksmith helps enterprises build, test, and validate software code, growing its client base from over 700 a year ago to over 5,000. The company has achieved an annualized revenue level in the tens of millions of dollars, with its workforce expanding from 10 to about 30 employees. Initially providing cloud services for CI (Continuous Integration) workloads, Blacksmith later launched the AI coding agent Codesmith, which can automatically fix failed code checks.

Robotics

Deep-Sea Robotics Company Deep Sea Intelligence Completes Over 500 Million RMB Series A Financing

Deep-sea robotics company Deep Sea Intelligence announced it has completed over 500 million RMB in Series A financing, with new shareholders including Light Capital, Dachen Capital, GSR Ventures, Yida Capital, Zhongbao Investment, China Electronics Technology Group, and Total Energy's energy technology fund managed by Kaihui Capital. Additionally, existing shareholders such as Zhengxuan Investment, Yunze Capital, Yunshi Capital, Gaojie Capital, and Xingzhi Capital have significantly followed up on their investments.

GAC's Humanoid Robot Company Huilun Technology Completes Over 100 Million RMB Financing

Huilun Technology, a humanoid robot company incubated by GAC Group, announced it has completed over 100 million RMB in financing, with joint investments from CRRC Guochuang Fund, CMB International, and Sichuan Science and Technology Innovation. The funds from this round will be invested in the continuous optimization of vertical models and the expansion of automotive production lines and comprehensive service scenarios, promoting the large-scale commercialization of humanoid robots and core components. GAC Group began its foray into the humanoid robot sector in early 2022 and established Huilun Technology in February 2026 as an independent entity to fully undertake GAC's humanoid robot R&D and market operations, launching four embodied robot products including GoMate and GoMate Mini.

Robotics and Embodied Intelligence Data Infrastructure Company IO-AI Tech Completes Several Hundred Million RMB Financing

Robotics and embodied intelligence data infrastructure company IO-AI Tech announced it has completed several hundred million RMB in financing. This round was jointly invested by Shunwei Capital, Songhe Capital, and Shenzhen Capital Group, and received strategic investments from leading robotics companies. Founded in 2023, IO-AI Tech focuses on robotics and embodied intelligence data infrastructure, aiming to build a bridge connecting data, robots, models, and real-world scenarios to support the continuous enhancement and large-scale application of robotic capabilities. The founding team comes from top tech and robotics companies such as Tencent, Xiaopeng Motors, ByteDance, Amazon, and Baidu.

Embodied Base Model Company LatentVerse Completes Several Hundred Million RMB Seed Round Financing

Embodied base model company LatentVerse announced it has completed several hundred million RMB in seed round financing. Investors include Hillhouse Capital, Qingliu Capital, Inno Fund, Zhiyuan, and Star Motion Era. It is understood that LatentVerse was established in May 2026 by a research team in embodied intelligence from Tsinghua University's Institute of Interdisciplinary Information.

Daimeng Robotics Announces Completion of Several Hundred Million RMB Financing, Led by Ant Group

Daimon Robotics announced today that it has completed a strategic round of financing worth hundreds of millions, led by Ant Group, with existing shareholders participating significantly. Two months ago, Daimon completed a Series A financing of over 100 million. Along with this round led by Ant Group, Daimon has gathered a group of leading industrial capital, including China Merchants Venture Capital, Lenovo Capital, Huichuan Industrial Investment, China Mobile, and China Telecom.

According to reports, Daimon has recently officially launched the world's first tactile anchoring world model, Daimon-TWM, which integrates native touch to facilitate understanding, reasoning, prediction, and verification. This constructs a "tactile nervous system" that moves from fingertip perception to brain reasoning and back to action control, promoting embodied intelligence from "seeing the world" to "understanding the world" and "interacting with the world." Based on a large-scale tactile perception device and collection system already deployed, Daimon has established the world's largest tactile multimodal physical world dataset, Daimon-Infinity.

Investment Institutions

Accel Raises $3.5 Billion New Fund for Early-Stage AI Startups

Venture capital firm Accel has raised a new fund of $3.5 billion for investing in early-stage AI startups globally. The funds are divided into four funds: a $1.35 billion global expansion fund (for larger early rounds and rapid follow-on investments), an $800 million U.S. fund (mainly targeting Silicon Valley), an $800 million Europe and Israel fund, and a $550 million India fund. Accel partners stated that the company is raising more funds earlier and faster than ever before, which brings both significant opportunities and risks. Accel has invested in AI companies such as Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity, as well as Thinking Machines Lab (founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati) and Safe Superintelligence (founded by former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever). Accel also participated in Periodic Labs' $300 million seed round (valued at $1.3 billion). Its early investment focus remains on securing meaningful equity stakes in deals.

Investment Firm Team8 Secures $365 Million in New Funding to Boost Early-Stage Tech Investments

Early-stage investment firm Team8 announced it has secured $365 million in new funding, of which $265 million will be used for Team8 Capital's third fund, with the remaining over $100 million allocated for follow-on investments in existing high-certainty portfolio companies. This new funding increases Team8's assets under management to nearly $2 billion, managing a total of eight funds since its establishment in 2014. Team8 focuses on supporting Seed and Series A startups in cybersecurity, software infrastructure, fintech, and digital health, and helps founders refine problem definitions, validate solutions, and accelerate scaling through its internal multidisciplinary team and network of corporate executives.

Micron Establishes $250 Million AI Investment Fund, Betting on Next-Generation Models, Computing Infrastructure, and Physical AI

Storage chip giant Micron Technology's Micron Ventures has announced the launch of the Micron Ventures Paradigm Fund, with a scale of $250 million, aimed at investing in startups that drive the next generation of artificial intelligence. This is the largest third fund since the establishment of Micron Ventures, increasing its total capital commitments to $550 million. The fund will cover the entire AI technology stack, including AI model architecture, computing infrastructure, enterprise applications, and physical AI.

Micron stated that the Paradigm Fund aims to establish deeper collaborations with companies driving these technological transformations and to proactively position itself for future AI infrastructure needs, focusing on four major areas: model architecture, computing infrastructure, enterprise AI applications, and physical AI.

This content is provided for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. Any events, rewards, online promotions, or related information mentioned herein should not be considered a recommendation, solicitation, or invitation to purchase, sell, trade, or otherwise deal in any crypto assets. Crypto assets are highly volatile and may result in loss. The availability of WEEX services, products, and related events may vary by region. You are responsible for ensuring that your participation is in accordance with applicable local laws and regulations.