News linked to both this project and an event.
Y Combinator has released a startup guide for the crypto sector, noting that over the past year, growth in the crypto industry was driven by institutions rather than consumers for the first time. Use cases are shifting from speculative trading to real-world financial needs such as oil hedging and cross-border corporate treasury flows, and the firm expects crypto adoption to accelerate further.The firm believes that various asset classes will accelerate toward tokenization, expanding from stablecoins and equities to real estate titles, debt, and commodities. Meanwhile, startup equity and small-value assets that were previously difficult to securitize may also enter the market through on-chain issuance. Around these assets, financial infrastructure such as trading, lending, and derivatives will continue to develop, and AI agents may become important financial participants.For startup directions over the next 6 months, Y Combinator is focusing on AI fundraising, USD and other fiat stablecoins, neobanks, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, trading platforms, and crypto API infrastructure for AI agents. The firm believes that while traditional financial institutions face challenges, this also creates startup opportunities for a new generation of fintech companies.
According to Business Insider, Hyperbolic, an AI computing infrastructure startup, has completed a $30 million Series A-1 funding round led by Walden Catalyst, co-founded by Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and former Samsung President Young Sohn, with participation from Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and others.
According to TechCrunch, NVIDIA participated in the $14 million Series B financing round for Indian startup Simplismart, which was led by Dallas Venture Capital with participation from Accel, Shastra VC, and Micromax. The transaction values the four-year-old company at approximately $100 million, including the new investment. Simplismart states that its software sits between AI models and compute infrastructure, automatically adjusting model deployment and management to optimize response time, request throughput, and compute utilization, enabling customers to better leverage their existing GPU resources. The company noted that its software helped AI video generation platform InVideo reduce GPU service costs by 56%. Simplismart CEO Amritanshu Jain told TechCrunch that the company’s annualized revenue run rate grew 14 times over the past six months to reach an eight-figure amount. This figure is based on recent customer usage rather than contractual recurring revenue, and excludes revenue passed through to infrastructure providers. Although the company serves more customers in India, the United States accounts for more than half of its total revenue.
According to Forbes, US satellite startup Xona Space Systems has completed a $250 million Series D funding round, valuing the company at $2.45 billion. The round was led by Future Ventures, co-founded by SpaceX early investor and former board member Steve Jurvetson, which invested $78.5 million in this round.
According to Bloomberg, AI startup Emulate, founded by Google DeepMind alumni, has been established for only three months and currently has no official website or products, but venture capital firms are competing to invest, driving its valuation to billions of dollars. The report states that due to fierce competition, investors are willing to buy in at escalating prices during the same funding round, resulting in different valuations for the same company within a single round.
According to Sifted, Zurich-based robotics startup Enact Intelligence has announced the closing of a $30 million pre-seed funding round backed by investors including Redalpine, Notion Capital, and Firstminute Capital, making it the largest pre-seed round ever in Switzerland. Yann LeCun and Mistral co-founder Arthur Mensch also participated in the round. The company was co-founded by former employees from 1X and Physical Intelligence, and is dedicated to solving one of the biggest bottlenecks in the robotics field.
According to CNBC, Arda, an AI manufacturing startup founded by former OpenAI research chief and ex-Palantir head of product and engineering Bob McGrew, has announced the completion of a $230 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel, and Khosla Ventures. Arda develops AI software and agents for manufacturing engineers, helping them build and adjust assembly lines faster. Its AI models have been deployed at defense technology company Anduril. McGrew noted that when product designs change, it takes just one day to retrain workers, whereas adjusting automated production lines typically requires three to six months. Arda runs its software using a combination of proprietary, open-source, and select frontier models, with robotics set to be included in its next product roadmap. Co-founders include Augustus Odena, Alex Mark, and Jakob Frick. Apoorv Agrawal of Altimeter stated that the global manufacturing industry amounts to $16 trillion, with approximately $3 trillion in the United States. McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and departed in 2024.
The Blockchain Association (@BlockchainAssn) posted on the X platform that the association has submitted a comment letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding the proposed Regulation Crypto Assets. Previously, the committee led by SEC Chair Paul Atkins had proposed exemptions for startups and fundraising activities, as well as a safe harbor mechanism to clarify when tokens are no longer considered investment contracts. The main recommendations in the letter include: • Establish clear objective criteria: Provide non-exclusive indicators to determine when an issuer’s core managerial efforts have ended, such as open-sourcing the source code or the absence of an entity capable of unilaterally reviewing transactions. • Link liability to control: Project developers shall only be responsible for areas within their control, excluding third-party applications and community activities; exchanges, liquidity providers, and other entities relying in good faith on SEC filings by projects shall be protected. • Create a safe harbor for existing tokens: Qualified third parties such as trading platforms may file for already-issued tokens, and such filing shall not be construed as acknowledging that the tokens were once securities. • Increase exemption limits: Raise the startup exemption cap to $10 million, excluding airdrops and network rewards from the limit; raise the fundraising exemption cap to $150 million, and allow on-chain transparency to substitute audited financial statements. • Strengthen federal preemption: Satisfy
According to TechCrunch, consumer-grade AI agent startup Instinct has announced the completion of a $1 billion Series C funding round, with participation from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue, valuing the company at $10 billion.
According to TechStartups.com, Dutch AI chip startup Euclyd has completed an over €200 million (approximately $231 million) Series A funding round, co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund, and Innovation Industries. Founded in 2024 by Bernardo Kastrup and Atul Sinha, Euclyd is headquartered in Eindhoven and focuses on AI inference, aiming to replace GPU solutions with proprietary chips and memory architectures to reduce energy consumption for AI inference and lower cost per token. Former ASML CEO Peter Wennink will serve as the company's board chairman.
According to TechCrunch, cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks announced the acquisition of AI Agent startup Console for $500 million in cash and stock. Founded in 2024, Console utilizes AI Agents to automate tasks such as password resets, application access provisioning, and daily IT troubleshooting, serving clients including Ramp, Flock Safety, and Scale AI. Palo Alto Networks plans to integrate Console into its AI-driven security platform, Cortex, enabling security teams to investigate and handle security alerts through natural language to achieve more automated enterprise security operations. This marks Palo Alto Networks' seventh acquisition completed this year. Previously, the company acquired Chronosphere at a $3.35 billion valuation and cybersecurity startup Koi for $400 million.
According to TechCrunch, Accel-backed startup Keenable has recently closed a $26 million seed funding round and officially emerged from stealth mode. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and several angel investors. Co-founded by Andrey Styskin, former head of search, AI, and cloud at Yandex, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri, Keenable is building web search indexing and retrieval infrastructure for AI agents.
According to Business Insider, Waymo founder Sebastian Thrun announced the founding of new robotics startup Dulo at the San Francisco robotics conference Actuate; the company is currently still in stealth mode. According to a webpage hosted by Stanford University, Dulo is dedicated to building a "foundation model for hardware design," with the goal of achieving "hyper-fast manufacturing." The team includes core talent from Waymo, Google Brain, and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Thrun did not disclose funding details, product details, or launch timeline. Notably, in the first quarter of 2026, financing in the physical AI sector reached a record $16.3 billion.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, SpaceX approached AI programming startup Cognition to discuss a potential acquisition, but Cognition CEO Scott Wu explicitly stated that the company "will not sell and is not engaged in related negotiations." Sources familiar with the matter revealed that both parties are still discussing collaboration, including the possibility of Cognition using SpaceX's compute resources. Cognition achieved a valuation of $26 billion in a funding round this May and is currently seeking a new round of funding at a valuation of at least $40 billion.
According to EU-Startups, AI security startup Mindgard announced the completion of a €26 million (approximately $30 million) Series A funding round, led by Album VC, with participation from Karma Ventures, .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital, and Lakestar. Mindgard was founded by Dr. Peter Garraghan in 2022, incubated by Lancaster University in the UK, and is headquartered in Boston and London. The company's platform provides Shadow AI discovery, AI red teaming, and runtime AI protection capabilities, and has helped disclose over 150 high-impact AI security vulnerabilities, covering issues such as the Cursor IDE zero-day code execution vulnerability, Google Antigravity trusted workspace defects, and ChatGPT image generation protection failures.
According to TechCrunch, AI code verification startup Blacksmith announced the completion of a $45 million Series B funding round, led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from GV and Y Combinator, valuing the company at $550 million.
According to Yonhap News, Naver D2SF announced the completion of a follow-on investment in physical AI data startup NdotLight (엔닷라이트). This round of financing was led by the Korea Development Bank, with a total size of 15 billion Korean won. This is also Naver D2SF's third investment in the company following the Pre-A round in 2021 and the Series A round in 2022. NdotLight independently developed the 3D data generation solution TRINIX, which can automatically generate high-precision 3D data containing physical properties (mass, friction), joint structures, and collision range information, and is deeply integrated with NVIDIA's simulation platform Omniverse, achieving mass supply of large-scale high-quality 3D simulation datasets.
According to TNW, AI supply chain management startup Freehand announced the completion of a $75 million funding round, co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and PSP Growth, a fund under former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. Freehand's AI agents can autonomously handle contract interpretation, supplier rate negotiation, overcharge bill identification, payment processing, and ERP system reconciliation, with clients covering top enterprises such as Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin', and Cardinal Health.
According to TechCrunch, New York AI detection startup Pangram announced the completion of a $9 million funding round, led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Haystack, ScOp, Script Capital, and Cadenza. Pangram simultaneously released the new generation AI text detection model Pangram 4 and AI image detection model Pangram Image, with text detection accuracy exceeding 99%, capable of identifying AI-assisted writing, mixed human-AI content, and text generated by AI humanization programs; the image detection model is currently in the research preview stage, based on pixel-level distribution analysis, capable of identifying cross-model AI-generated images, and can detect AI images appearing within real photos.
According to Bloomberg, UK real estate tech startup Dwelly announced it has completed $170 million in financing to acquire more real estate businesses and integrate artificial intelligence into its operations. The round was led by EQT Growth and General Catalyst and included $95 million in equity financing and a $75 million debt facility provided by Trinity Capital. The company did not disclose its valuation.