6 projects raised $87.8 million, Venice AI raised $65 million

Compiled by: Golden Finance

This week, a total of 6 blockchain startups completed funding rounds, with a total financing amount of $87.8 million.

Largest Funding Round This Week

Venice AI raised $65 million in Series A funding from investors including Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and North Island Ventures (NIV).

Venice AI is a privacy-first artificial intelligence platform that allows users to access over 200 AI models while ensuring that user inputs are encrypted at the client side and routed through external proxies, without being stored in Venice's own system. The platform hosts open-source models in its own data centers and distributes queries to closed-source models, supporting text, image, audio, and video generation. It also offers customizable AI avatars and end-to-end encryption for some models (for subscribers).

Other Investment Rounds

Squid raised $2.3 million in a public sale round, with investor(s) undisclosed.

Squid is a cross-chain swap and routing platform that supports token swaps, cross-chain bridging, and value transfers across over 100 blockchains, all in a single transaction. It is built on a unified routing and execution engine, serving as both infrastructure and a development tool. It has processed over $6 billion in cross-chain transaction volume (since 2023) and provides cross-chain capabilities to over 1,000 applications, including MetaMask, Ripple, and Ledger. The platform is primarily aimed at developers needing cross-chain functionality, DeFi users, and ecosystems seeking interoperability.

Arcus (dYdX) secured an undisclosed amount of funding from Robinhood.

Arcus is a decentralized exchange (DEX) developed by the dYdX team in collaboration with Robinhood, running on the Robinhood Chain and supporting 24/7 self-custodial trading. The platform allows users to trade tokenized stocks with zero fees, while also supporting cryptocurrencies, commodities, indices, and perpetual contracts. It offers a unified cross-margin account, on-chain institutional-grade execution, and up to 50x leverage on perpetual contracts. Users can access global assets through a single self-custodial account while maintaining full control of their funds.

Extended raised $12.5 million from investors including eToro, Jump Crypto, and Àlber Blanc.

Extended Exchange is a decentralized trading platform focused on perpetual contract trading, offering low-fee, high-liquidity leveraged crypto trading. The platform offers a user experience close to centralized exchanges (CEX) while retaining on-chain transparency and self-custody, integrating advanced risk management tools and an efficient order execution system, supporting trading of multiple assets.

Thea raised $8 million from investors including Maven 11 Capital, The Spartan Group, Manifold, Hack VC, Fisher8 Capital, Galois Capital, DCF God, and icebergy.

THEA is a predictive behavioral AI network designed to build autonomous intelligent systems for risk markets. It combines machine learning, behavioral analysis, high-performance computing, and blockchain technology to generate predictive insights for complex decision-making. THEA plans to launch its network on Solana, coordinating AI inference requests, accounting, and settlement on-chain, while keeping computations off-chain for efficiency. Its goal is to convert behavioral and market data into actionable intelligence, providing institutional-grade predictive AI capabilities and transparent infrastructure for decentralized finance and Web3 applications.

Sunscreen received an undisclosed amount of funding through a merger and acquisition (M&A) deal, with Fhenix as the investor.

Sunscreen is a privacy computing infrastructure project that develops a Secure Processing Framework (SPF), enabling developers to build applications using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). Its compiler can convert standard code into privacy-preserving programs that run on encrypted data without exposing sensitive information. The platform targets both Web2 and Web3 scenarios, supports multi-chain deployment, and is suitable for privacy DeFi, voting, AI, identity authentication, secure data processing, and more. It plans to integrate zero-knowledge proof technology to enhance privacy computing capabilities.