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

Compiled by: Jinse Finance

This week, six blockchain startups completed funding rounds with a total of $87.8 million raised.

Largest Funding Round This Week

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

Venice AI is a privacy-first AI platform that allows users to access over 200 AI models while ensuring that user inputs are encrypted on 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 investors undisclosed.

Squid is a cross-chain swap and routing platform that supports token swaps, bridging, and value transfers across over 100 blockchains, all in a single transaction.
Built on a unified routing and execution engine, it serves as both infrastructure and a development tool. It has processed over $6B 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, DeFi users, and ecosystems seeking interoperability that require cross-chain functionality.

Arcus (dYdX) secured an undisclosed funding amount, with Robinhood as the investor.

Arcus is a decentralized exchange (DEX) developed by the dYdX team in partnership with Robinhood, running on Robinhood Chain, 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 unified cross-margin accounts, 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 over their funds.

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

Extended Exchange is a decentralized trading platform focused on perpetual contract trading, offering low fees and high liquidity for leveraged crypto trading.
The platform provides a user experience close to centralized exchanges (CEXs), while retaining on-chain transparency and self-custody, and integrates advanced risk management tools and efficient order execution systems, supporting multiple asset trading.

Thea raised $8 million, with 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 computation off-chain for efficiency.
Its goal is to transform behavioral and market data into actionable intelligence, providing institutional-grade predictive AI capabilities and transparent infrastructure for decentralized finance and Web3 applications.

Sunscreen's funding amount was undisclosed, and it received capital through a merger and acquisition (M&A), 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 ordinary 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 use cases such as private DeFi, voting, AI, identity verification, and secure data processing. It plans to integrate zero-knowledge proof technology to enhance privacy computing capabilities.