News linked to both this project and an event.
Odaily AI-driven anti-fraud infrastructure provider InfoHawk has announced the completion of a $2.25 million Pre-Seed funding round, led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from former U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, AppNexus founder Brian O'Kelley, former Meta advertising executive Rob Goldman, GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov, and others. The new funds will be used to support the company's application of AI content recognition and deep infrastructure analysis technology to help enterprises detect, analyze, and combat large-scale online fraud, phishing sites, brand impersonation, and Deepfake attacks. (PRNewswire)
According to Tech in Asia, Special, an AI-powered M&A firm co-founded by Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox—both former staff members of the U.S. government’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—has announced a funding round of undisclosed amount, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Investors include Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners; Anthony Armstrong, former CFO of xAI; Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase Global; and Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir Technologies. Special plans to acquire service-based businesses by automating workflows with AI to reduce costs, and has already reached an agreement to acquire a Texas-based healthcare company, which will be integrated into Figure Health—the company’s business line focused on aging populations.
According to The Block, a16z crypto—the cryptocurrency division of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—has completed fundraising for its fifth fund at $2.2 billion. This fund is smaller than its record-breaking fourth fund, which raised $4.5 billion in 2022. Paul Cafiero, Communications Partner at a16z crypto, stated that the firm intentionally returned to a smaller fund size because “a shorter fundraising cycle enables us to keep pace with the rapidly evolving crypto landscape.” Prior a16z crypto funds included: the $2.2 billion third fund in 2021, the $515 million second fund in 2020, and the $350 million first fund in 2018.
Printr founder announced stepping down as CEO, with COO and GTM head Lennon immediately succeeding as CEO, while co-founder Lea continues as CTO. The founder will transition to an advisory role.Meanwhile, Printr announced it will fully refund its community fundraising, with the relevant refund process expected to be disclosed within 7 days. The team stated that this move aims to rebuild community trust, while the platform's products, team, and development roadmap will remain unchanged.
Sooth Labs, an AI prediction laboratory founded by former Meta executives and a CMU professor team, is completing a $50 million funding round at a $335 million valuation, led by Felicis Ventures. Yann LeCun and Jeff Dean are participating as individual investors, and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth serves as an advisor. The company specializes in multimodal AI event probability prediction, serving institutions in finance, defense, insurance, and other sectors, and has already provided probability predictions for events such as the WHO pandemic and Anthropic's IPO.
According to Bloomberg, Sooth Labs, an AI lab founded by former Meta employees, is raising approximately $50 million in funding, led by Felicis Ventures, with a post-money valuation of about $335 million. The company plans to develop AI models that predict the probability of specific geopolitical and market events, offering these capabilities to enterprises. Sooth Labs has also received support from Yann LeCun and Google’s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth serves as an advisor.
OpenGradient, a verifiable AI computation layer, has announced the completion of a $9.5 million funding round. Investors include a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, SV Angel, Foresight Ventures, Pragma, SALT, Symbolic Capital, Canonical Crypto, Black Dragon, NEAR, Celestia, Thanefield Capital, and angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase. The new funds will support the development and expansion of a decentralized infrastructure network for hosting, executing, and verifying AI models—enabling open and auditable model execution.