Funding Weekly | SBI makes consecutive moves, betting $125 million on Gauntlet; crypto capital continues flowing into trading and infrastructure

Key Takeaways for This Issue

CryptoRank’s statistics show that in 2026, the sector with the largest average single financing round size in the crypto industry is prediction markets, with an average round size of $118 million. The next categories are exchanges ($76.2 million), blockchain ($47.8 million), and compliance ($29.4 million).

This week’s fundraising is a snapshot of where the year’s capital flows are going. Large capital continues to concentrate around trading, compliance, and digital asset infrastructure, and traditional financial institutions are also becoming increasingly important participants. Among them, Japan’s financial group SBI Holdings simultaneously participated in two major financings for Gauntlet and EDX Markets.

Compared with crypto fundraising, the AI sector saw multiple large deals this week with amounts exceeding $100 million. Prime Intellect completed a $130 million Series A round, Norm received $120 million in new funding, and Gradium’s cumulative funding surpassed $100 million. Notably, these projects primarily build their business models around specific scenarios such as enterprise AI infrastructure, legal services, and real-time speech.

Last week, activity in crypto’s primary market remained broadly sluggish. Centralized finance and on-chain finance continued to receive additional capital injections. According to PANews’ incomplete statistics, in the past week (7.6–7.12) there were 9 blockchain investment and financing events globally, with total funding exceeding $261 million. The overview is as follows:

DeFi reported 1 investment and financing event: DeFi risk management and asset allocation platform Gauntlet received an exclusive $125 million from Japan’s financial group SBI Holdings;

In the Infrastructure & Tools category, 4 investment and financing events were reported. Among them, post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security completed a $17 million seed round, led by Merlin Ventures and others;

In the Centralized Finance category, 3 investment and financing events were reported. Among them, crypto exchange EDX Markets completed a $76 million Series C round, led by SBI Holdings;

In the Web3+AI category, 1 investment and financing event was reported: PayGo received strategic investment from Signum Capital and Ledger Capital (Da Hua Bank), accelerating the buildout of real-time machine-economy micro-payment infrastructure.

Crypto Fundraising

DeFi

DeFi risk management giant Gauntlet raises $125 million from SBI Holdings

DeFi risk management and asset allocation platform Gauntlet received an exclusive $125 million from Japan’s financial group SBI Holdings. This round far exceeds its 2022 B round of nearly $24 million, with an estimated valuation of about $1 billion. As a Tokyo-listed financial group with a total market capitalization exceeding $10 billion, SBI has invested in multiple crypto companies including Ripple, Circle, and Morpho. Gauntlet was founded by former Wall Street quantitative analyst Tarun Chitra. It initially provided stress testing and risk analysis for DeFi protocols. In recent years, its business has shifted to “vault curation,” assessing the risks of various DeFi yield vault strategies. Its current customers include Apollo, Coinbase, and stablecoin issuer Circle.

Infrastructure & Tools

Post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security completes $17 million seed round, led by Merlin Ventures and others

QIZ Security announced it has completed a $17 million seed round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, Qino Cyber Capital, and others participating. The company positions itself as a crypto asset and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) management platform, providing continuous crypto asset discovery, risk modeling, and governance. It helps large financial, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure customers achieve “crypto agility,” addressing the risk of a quantum computing “Q-Day” that could appear as early as the earliest time or by 2029 and potentially break existing cryptographic systems. The company is also partnering with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, IBM, and others to support enterprises with quantum security migration plans.

TrueDAO secures a tens-of-millions strategic financing round to accelerate the buildout of AI finance infrastructure

TrueDAO announced it has completed a $10 million strategic financing round. The round was led by Brevan Howard Digital, with participation from Zee Prime Capital and Jump Capital, among others. The funds will be used for core AI protocol development, AI risk control and stress testing systems, security audits and real-time monitoring, bug bounty programs, and advancing global compliance assessments and ecosystem collaboration. TrueDAO is positioned as cross-chain modular decentralized finance infrastructure, providing liquidity and reserve management, risk early warnings, revenue distribution, and governance support for various kinds of projects. The project will further advance testnets, developer tools, and ecosystem integration, and will disclose protocol operating and reserve data in phases. The specific go-live timing and token incentives will depend on official announcements and regulatory requirements.

On-chain clearing platform KOR Protocol completes $7.5 million Series A financing, with 1kx among investors

KOR Protocol, which focuses on the entertainment sector, completed a $7.5 million Series A financing round, with participation from 1kx and Blockchain Capital, at a valuation of $100 million. This round will be used for platform development, ecosystem growth, and integration of partners, and the company plans to launch a token. KOR Protocol is an on-chain creative asset clearing platform built on Coinbase Layer 2. It provides verification, routing, and settlement infrastructure for creative works such as music and film. By registering assets on-chain, KOR helps creators match with the right brands, platforms, and distributors, and enables programmable revenue-splitting payments via stablecoins such as USDC.

Blockchain analytics company Elliptic announces it has received an investment from Circle Ventures

Blockchain analytics company Elliptic posted on the X platform to announce that Circle Ventures has invested in Elliptic. The specific amount was not disclosed. This investment comes shortly after Elliptic’s $120 million D round in May, led by One Peak, with participation from Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank, and UK commercial banks. Circle also joined Elliptic’s Agentic Design Partner Program. The program brings together infrastructure providers, compliance leaders, and technology teams to jointly develop cutting-edge agentic compliance solutions.

Centralized Finance

Crypto exchange EDX Markets completes $76 million Series C financing, led by SBI Holdings

Crypto exchange EDX Markets, supported by a Wall Street heavyweight, announced that it has completed a $76 million Series C financing round. The round is led by Japan’s financial group SBI Holdings, and the funds will be used to expand its institutional digital asset trading, clearing, and settlement capabilities, accelerate product development, and drive global business expansion. SBI previously launched the Japanese yen stablecoin JPYSC supported by a trust bank, and plans to handle USD stablecoins such as RLUSD and USDC in Japan. This investment is seen as part of its efforts to strengthen its compliance-oriented digital asset infrastructure. Earlier this year, EDX launched its “EDX FlowConnect” crypto-as-a-service product and submitted an application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in the United States to establish a regulated custody and clearing institution, EDX Trust, to provide custody, clearing, settlement, and risk management services to institutions.

Tether invests $20 million betting on Mercado Bitcoin’s expansion of on-chain financial services

Tether announced a $20 million strategic growth funding round investment into Mercado Bitcoin, a Latin American on-chain financial services platform, to support its expansion in areas including tokenization, stablecoin payments, credit, on-chain capital markets, and compliant digital financial services. Mercado Bitcoin was founded in 2013. It currently has 4.5 million users, has issued more than $2 billion in tokenized assets denominated in Brazilian reais, and holds more than 10 financial licenses in Brazil and Europe. Tether said this investment will further promote the development of on-chain financial infrastructure in Brazil and across Latin America, and accelerate the mainstream adoption of stablecoins and asset tokenization.

Crypto startup M1X Global completes $5.5 million seed round, led by Paradigm

Crypto startup M1X Global completed a $5.5 million seed round, led by Paradigm, with Breed VC participating. Total funding reached $8.5 million. Previously, the company completed a $3 million angel round in March, with investors including former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan and Cumberland Labs CEO Tama Churchouse.

M1X Global, building sovereign financial infrastructure, collaborated with the Republic of the Marshall Islands to issue USDM1. USDM1 is a tokenized U.S. dollar-denominated sovereign debt instrument that is one-to-one backed by U.S. Treasury bonds, and is natively issued by sovereign states on public blockchains. USDM1 was initially issued on the Stellar blockchain and can also be traded on the Canton and Solana blockchains.

Web3+AI

PayGo receives strategic investment from Signum Capital and Ledger Capital (Da Hua Bank), accelerating the buildout of machine-economy micro-payment infrastructure

Based on the x402 open standard, the HTTP-native payment infrastructure PayGo officially announced the completion of strategic financing. Investors include United Overseas Bank (UOB), Signum Capital, and Ledger Capital (Da Hua Bank). It is reported that PayGo is natively built on the ENI blockchain. Its core business is to provide request-level instant stablecoin (USDT/USDC) payment settlement services for API, AI agents, and the machine economy using the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code—without accounts, without subscriptions, and without API keys—while PAYG serves as the project governance token.

Acquisitions

Cross-border payments infrastructure company Nium acquires crypto wallet and card issuing company Cypher

Cross-border payments infrastructure company Nium announced that it has acquired Cypher, a crypto-native non-custodial wallet and card issuing company. The deal will expand Nium’s core capabilities as compliant funds-flow and settlement infrastructure between fiat and digital assets. Cypher was founded by Kuberan Marimuthu (Kube), and was supported by Y Combinator and Coinbase Ventures. Over the past four years, it has focused on cross-product development between on-chain systems and banking systems. Kube has joined Nium as Vice President of Digital Assets, and Cypher’s engineering team will also join.

South Korea’s Mirae Asset Group approved to acquire 92.06% of Korbit for 133.4 billion won

South Korean regulators announced that they have approved Mirae Asset Consulting (under Mirae Asset Group) to acquire 92.06% equity in Korean crypto exchange Korbit. The transaction amount is approximately 133.4 billion won (about $98 million). It is understood that this deal is also the first time a South Korean traditional financial group has completed an acquisition of a virtual asset exchange. Because Korbit has a relatively low market share, regulators believe the merger will not produce exclusionary effects in the securities business or asset management business, and it is also unlikely to have a major impact on market competition dynamics for markets such as future digital asset ETFs.

AI & Robotics Fundraising Picks

AI

Decentralized AI protocol Prime Intellect completes $130 million Series A financing, led by Radical Ventures

Decentralized AI protocol Prime Intellect announced it has completed a $130 million Series A financing round, led by Radical Ventures, with participation from NVIDIA Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and existing investors. Cumulative financing exceeds $150 million, which will be used to build an open superintelligence stack. Prime Intellect was founded in 2024 and is committed to building an “open superintelligence stack,” providing an end-to-end AI agent development infrastructure for enterprises, covering compute, large-scale reinforcement learning, sandboxing, evaluation, and deployment. Customers include Ramp, Zapier, and more than 6,000 enterprises and startups, with annualized revenue exceeding $100 million. The company plans to expand its compute clusters and reinforcement learning scale, and is betting on cutting-edge directions such as long-horizon agents, recursive language models, and continuous learning.

AI legal services company Norm completes $120 million financing, led by Khosla Ventures

AI legal startup Norm completed a new round of financing of $120 million. The post-investment valuation is about $1.2 billion. The round is led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Blackstone, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue Management, and others, bringing total financing to over $260 million. Norm was founded in 2023. Unlike the traditional model of selling software to law firms, it built its own Norm Law firm, directly providing legal services to clients through collaboration between lawyers and AI engineers, charging based on outcomes rather than hourly billing. The company is also developing “AI regulatory AI” compliance agents for regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, and plans to use the new funding to expand its team of engineers and lawyers and strengthen related systems.

AI voice company Gradium completes $100 million seed round, with Nvidia participating

Gradium, a startup headquartered in Paris that provides speech AI models, announced that its cumulative funding has surpassed $100 million. In its latest seed round expansion, it also introduced Nvidia as a new shareholder. Gradium said it has recently launched products including real-time speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), Gradium Translate, and Phonon within the past few months. It also plans to set up a new office in San Francisco to be closer to the local startup ecosystem and accelerate the hiring of relevant talent.

AI writing startup Marker secures $13 million seed round

Marker, an AI writing startup headquartered in London and co-founded by former DeepMind creative leads, has exited stealth development and announced it has completed a $13 million seed round. The round is led by Index Ventures, with Local Globe participating. Angel investors include: Writely co-founder Steve Newman, Slack co-founder Cal Henderson, and Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face. According to the description, Marker’s early testing users have used the platform to write various types of content such as blog posts, Substack newsletters, business documents, memos, and novels. As concerns about “AI slop” grow, Marker CEO Steinback said: “We’re at a critical moment when people can choose what the future of writing looks like. I believe people will choose solutions that value the craft of writing, rather than ones that churn out low-quality content that is seriously eroding the essence of writing.”

Robotics

Physical AI startup Mowito completes $3 million funding, aiming to train factory robots through demonstrations rather than code

Physical AI startup Mowito completed a $3 million Pre-Seed funding round, led by Version One Ventures, with participation from All In Capital, Unisol, and iSeed. AI researcher Soumith Chintala and founders of Foundry Robotics, Coformer.ai, Better Capital, and others participated as angel investors. Mowito was founded in 2024 by Puru Rastogi, Adityanag Nagesh, and Safar V. The company builds AI foundation models for industrial robotic arms by enabling robots to observe human demonstration learning tasks rather than through explicit programming, addressing the bottleneck in software programming for manufacturing automation—so when product lines change, engineers don’t need to rewrite control code.