Financing Weekly | 15 public financing incidents; crypto security platform Blockaid completed a US$50 million Series B financing, led by Ribbit Capital
Reprinted from panewslab
02/24/2025·2MWhat's the highlight of this issue
According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 15 investment and financing events in global blockchain last week (2.17-2.23); the total funding scale exceeded US$148 million, a slight increase compared with the previous week. The overview is as follows:
- DeFi announced five investment and financing events, among which Mansa, a stablecoin liquidity provider, announced that it had completed a $10 million seed round of financing, led by Tether;
- Web3 Game Track announced an investment and financing event, and Boya Interactive announced another investment of approximately US$4.18 million in the Web3 project MTT ESports;
- Two investment and financing events were announced in the AI+Web3 field, and ClustroAI completed a US$12 million Series A financing, led by Forum Ventures;
- 6 investment and financing events have been announced in the field of infrastructure and tools , among which Cygnus, a modular income layer, completed a US$20 million Pre-Seed round of financing, with Manifold, OKX Ventures and others participating in the investment;
- Other categories announced one investment and financing event, ResearchHub, a tokenized social network founded by Coinbase CEO, completed a new round of financing of US$2 million, and BoostVC participated in the investment.
DeFi
Stablecoin liquidity provider Mansa completes a $10 million seed round, led by Tether
Mansa, a stablecoin liquidity provider, announced a $10 million seed round, led by Tether. This round includes equity and debt financing. Tether contributes $3 million in equity financing, and the new funding will support the company to Latin America and Southeast Asia. The expansion of liquidity challenges in these regions also limit cross-border transactions.
Universal, a16z, completes $9 million in financing
Universal completed a $9 million round of financing led by a16z. Universal aims to enable all types of crypto assets to be traded on the crypto trading network through deep liquidity, thereby enhancing asset access to developers and end users. More than $800 million in uAsset has been traded since the launch of Universal Protocol.
Curve founder 's new project Yield Basis raises $5 million in funding at $50 million token valuation
Michael Egorov, founder of decentralized exchange Curve Finance, is working on a new project called Yield Basis and has raised funds for it. Yield Basis aims to help tokenized Bitcoin and Ethereum holders earn profits through market making by mitigating impermanence losses. It is reported that Yield Basis is raising $5 million in a token round of financing at a fully diluted valuation of $50 million. The project will sell 10% of its "YB" token supply to investors, or 100 million of the total of 1 billion tokens. Investors’ token unlocking schedule includes a six-month lock-up period followed by a linear unlock of two years.
Bitcoin staking platform Acre raises $4 million in financing at $90 million valuation
Bitcoin staking platform Acre allows users to receive rewards in the form of Bitcoin, which raised $4 million in a strategic round of financing and valued the token at $90 million. Investors in this round include Draper Dragon, Big Brain Holdings and Orange DAO. The round also attracted undisclosed angel investors, including individuals from companies such as Lido, EigenLayer, Wormhole, Thesis and Quantstamp.
Bitcoin DeFi project Maestro completes $3 million seed round financing
Bitcoin DeFi project Maestro announced the completion of a $3 million seed round of financing, led by Wave Digital Assets and Draper Associates, and UTXO Management, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Draper Dragon and Necto Labs participated in the investment. According to reports, Maestro is an enterprise-level infrastructure provider customized for Bitcoin DeFi, which has launched UTXO-based infrastructure services, thereby simplifying the complex process of building Bitcoin native financial applications. Maestro provides APIs, developer tools, and innovative solutions such as memory pool meta protocol indexing to enable real-time on-chain insights.
Web3 Games
Boya Interactive, a Hong Kong listed company, issued an announcement to disclose that it has signed a subscription token warrant with MTT ESports Limited, and will further invest in MTT ESports with USDT (second investment) with USDT as consideration. Boya Interactive will obtain it after the second investment is completed. 10% of the total issuance of MTT tokens, that is, 210 million MTT tokens. It is expected that the MTT tokens obtained will be unlocked linearly starting from January 2026 and will be unlocked within about 48 months. After the second investment is completed, the total value of Boya Interactive's investment in MTT ESports is equivalent to approximately US$10 million.
AI
NVIDIA-backed AI startup ClustroAI completed $12 million Series A funding, led by Forum Ventures
San Francisco-based fringe AI startup ClustroAI completed a $12 million Series A funding round led by Forum Ventures and participated by MetaBlast and Metaverse Group, bringing the company's total financing to $15 million, including a seed round led by NVIDIA . ClustroAI focuses on edge AI technology, allowing AI models to run on local devices without relying on cloud computing. Its core technology adopts a containerized architecture, supports large language models (LLMs), AI content generation (AIGC), voice translation, etc., and optimizes GPU resource allocation, accelerates the inference and training process, and improves data privacy.
As a strategic partner, NVIDIA promotes the migration of AI computing from data centers to local devices. ClustroAI plans to use new funds to expand hardware compatibility, support chips such as FPGA, TPU, NPU, etc., and develop automation tools to make AI model updates more convenient. In addition, ClustroAI is building a distributed AI computing network, connecting multiple device computing resources through container orchestration technology to improve local AI processing efficiency. The platform provides a unified API, simplifies developer integration, reduces enterprise cloud computing costs, while improving security and flexibility.
Uswap.ai completes $1.5 million in financing for decentralized AI neural network algorithm protocol
Uswap.ai, a decentralized AI neural network algorithm protocol, announced the completion of a US$1.5 million financing, led by Waterdrip Capital. According to reports, Uswap is a decentralized AI neural network algorithm protocol that integrates AI Agent into decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and on-chain transactions, which can quickly create liquidity pools of various consensus assets.
Infrastructure & Tools
Blockaid completes a $50 million Series B financing round, led by Ribbit Capital
Blockaid recently completed a $50 million Series B financing round led by Ribbit Capital, with GV (formerly Google Ventures) and existing investors Variant and Cyberstarts. The financing will help Blockaid deal with the growing risk of cybercrime in the digital asset space. In 2024, Blockaid successfully intercepted 71 million potential attacks, avoiding $5.3 billion in losses. The company expects cyber attacks to surge to “hundreds of millions” in 2025 as users grow and token prices rise. Blockaid plans to use the funds to expand operations and increase R&D investment, and is expected to double its staff this year. Ido Ben-Natan, CEO of the company, said the company is currently facing the challenge of understaffing due to a surge in demand due to changes in the U.S. regulatory environment.
The modular income layer Cygnus announced that it had completed a US$20 million Pre-Seed round of financing, with Manifold, OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Optimism Retro Funding and others participating in the investment. The financing will accelerate Cygnus' growth and expand its product range. According to reports, Cygnus is a modular real-life income layer, allowing blockchains to customize their own restaked network and achieve shared security. In addition, Cygnus is building the first Web3 Instagram application layer, integrating on-chain and off-chain assets to power the creator economy.
Altius Labs completes $11 million Pre-Seed Series, led by Founders Fund and Pantera
Crypto startup Altius Labs completed a $11 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Founders Fund and Pantera, with Archetype, Reforge, DCG, No Limit Holdings, Amber Group and others participating. In addition, angel investors in Berachain, Movement, Ethena Labs, Ritual, dao5, Solana Foundation, Hudson River Trading and other projects also participated in this round of financing. Founded by Anit Chakraborty, former software engineer at Hudson River Trading, and Annabelle Huang, former managing partner at Amber Group, Altius Labs is committed to developing a modular execution stack that is independent of virtual machines (VMs) that can be independent of a single binary implementation and network. Designed to achieve seamless integration with any L1, L2 and application chains to improve performance and enhance interoperability. The project's goal is to help other crypto projects replicate Solana's success.
Fluent Labs completes $8 million financing, led by Polychain Capital
Blockchain developer Fluent Labs announced the completion of a $8 million financing led by Polychain Capital to build its Ethereum Layer 2 hybrid execution network. The financing also received support from several institutions such as Primitive, dao5, Symbolic Capital, and investors include well-known angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan and Mustafa Al-Bassam. Fluent plans to use the funding to expand its core engineering team and support infrastructure development for its ecosystem and test network. Fluent aims to help developers seamlessly build applications across multiple blockchain ecosystems by converging WebAssembly (Wasm), Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) applications into a unified execution environment.
Primus completed a $6.5 million Pre-Seed and seed round financing, led by VanEck and others
The encrypted privacy data layer rimus announced on the X platform that it has completed a total of US$6.5 million in Pre-Seed and seed round financing, led by Dispersion Capital, Symbolic Capital, VanEck, and Samsung Next, Alchemy, Maelstrom and others participated.
InfinityGround has successfully raised $2 million in seed funding, with Animoca Brands, MARBLEX, MH Ventures, Frachtis, KuCoin Ventures, KnightFury, Presto and PAKA participating. InfinityGround is helping individuals shape an open, interoperable and artificial intelligence-driven world at 10 times faster on any blockchain. InfinityGround enables developers to develop Agent applications on Base, BNB Chain, and Kaia using custom proxy IDEs (intelligent development environments) and IDKs (intelligent development kits).
other
DeSci:
ResearchHub, a startup founded by Coinbase CEO, completes a new round of funding.
ResearchHub, a tokenized social network founded by Coinbase CEO, announced a new round of financing of $2 million. BoostVC is participating in the investment, aiming to further use its ResearchCoin (RSC) token to inspire scientists to publicly share academic content and build decentralized scientific collaboration. and publishing tools to promote research collaboration, feedback and knowledge sharing among researchers. According to previous reports, ResearchHub is building a platform where anyone can earn cryptocurrency rewards by contributing new knowledge to the global scientific community. Users earn ResearchCoin (RSC) by posting content to ResearchHub, and the amount of RSCs received is proportional to the value of the content considered by other members of the community.
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