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 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 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.
According to Reuters, Nvidia has secured a CPU order from New York-based AI cloud computing startup Modal. Previously relying solely on Intel and AMD chips for its AI agent workloads, Modal plans to transition to Nvidia's Vera central processing units. The company stated that early tests show Vera can double its AI agent workload capacity compared to existing Intel and AMD hardware. Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson said the firm will maintain a hybrid chip deployment strategy, noting that next-generation chips from Intel and AMD may narrow the performance gap. Nvidia stated that Vera is the next-generation data center CPU designed for AI factories, marking another step in expanding its business beyond GPUs. Nvidia also added that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Oracle plan to deploy Vera.
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, former Alibaba flagship model chief architect Lin Junyang recently announced on the X platform the founding of a new company, focusing on developing AI agents for the digital and physical worlds. This comes less than half a year after his unexpected departure from Alibaba. The company has received investment support from Tencent Holdings and several top Chinese venture capital firms.
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.
Odaily News: Presentation startup NextSlide announced its integration into OpenAI, with team members now involved in ChatGPT-related work. NextSlide founder Ahmed Beshry stated that the company's previously developed product can generate editable presentations from prompts, notes, documents, or research materials. Beshry noted that upon joining OpenAI, the team will continue developing AI products that help users create, communicate, and express their ideas.The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Beshry indicated that the acquisition actually took place earlier this year, with this announcement coming several months after the deal was completed. (TechCrunch)
According to Bloomberg, former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI fund Situational Awareness invested $400 million this week to back a private company, semiconductor manufacturing startup Source Foundry. It is reported that VC giant Sequoia Capital also supports the startup. As of now, representatives of Situational Awareness and Source Foundry have not responded to requests for comment, while Sequoia Capital declined to confirm the hedge fund's investment details. According to reports, Source Foundry is dedicated to developing a semiconductor manufacturing process that is simpler, lower-cost, and faster than existing methods, aiming to bridge the widening gap between artificial intelligence computing demand and chip manufacturing capacity expansion capabilities. Analysts believe that Leopold Aschenbrenner's large-scale investment reflects the market's continued strong demand for new chip manufacturing technologies, as artificial intelligence developers' demand for computing power continues to grow. However, this investment also reveals that Situational Awareness had already established highly concentrated risk exposure before its public technology holdings encountered severe volatility and the fund came under significant financial pressure.
According to The Information, OpenAI has acquired some patent assets from AI chip startup Rain AI, following negotiations between the two parties regarding the acquisition that ultimately failed to close. Rain AI is a startup focused on AI chip research and development, founded approximately 8 years ago, with investors including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The report states that due to the failure of the acquisition plan, Rain AI has nearly ceased operations recently, and most employees have left the company. This patent acquisition indicates that although some companies personally invested in by Altman may have business collaborations with OpenAI, this does not mean that all invested companies will receive direct support from OpenAI. Rain AI was previously dedicated to developing specialized chips for artificial intelligence computing, hoping to reduce AI model operating costs through customized hardware and enhance edge computing capabilities. As competition in AI infrastructure intensifies, chips, computing power, and energy have become core strategic resources for large AI companies. Industry insiders believe that OpenAI's acquisition of Rain AI's relevant patents may be aimed at absorbing its technical assets to strengthen its own positioning in the fields of AI hardware and computing infrastructure.
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 sources familiar with the matter, AI robotics startup Genesis AI is in talks with investors for a new funding round, planning to raise approximately $500 million, corresponding to a pre-money valuation of around $3 billion. Existing investor Premji Invest is in discussions to lead the round, while HSG (formerly Sequoia China) and Northzone Ventures are also discussing additional investments.In June this year, Genesis AI launched an AI industrial robot named Eno. The company stated that Eno is capable of reasoning "beyond predefined tasks" and adapting based on different outcomes. (Bloomberg)
: AI reasoning cloud startup General Compute has obtained a $400 million loan from Upper90. This deal is the world’s first financing project to use dedicated inference chips as collateral. The company has built a proprietary AI reasoning cloud platform based on SambaNova’s self-developed ASIC chips, primarily targeting Agent-type AI computing workloads. Compared to traditional GPU clouds, it offers faster token processing speeds and lower operational latency. The hardware requires no water cooling and can be directly deployed in traditional data centers and idle cryptocurrency mining facilities.
MoonPay announced the acquisition of Y Combinator-backed crypto deposit startup Glide via an all-stock transaction, with the specific deal size undisclosed. Founded in 2023, Glide primarily provides crypto asset deposit solutions across tokens, wallets, exchanges, and bank cards, supporting over 100 tokens and 30 blockchain networks, with an annualized trading volume exceeding $100 million.
According to Bloomberg, humanoid robot startup Walden Robotics, spun off from Toyota's robot research lab, announced the completion of approximately $300 million in seed funding, reaching a valuation of $1.1 billion, and officially emerging from stealth mode. This round was co-led by Deviation Capital and Toyota Motor Corporation, with Toyota's strategic investment and early venture capital arm also participating. Nvidia, Boeing, AE Ventures, Samsung Ventures, and CoreWeave Ventures participated as investors. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Walden Robotics was founded in January this year. It independently develops hardware, software, and AI models, focusing on building general-purpose humanoid robots capable of continuous learning and evolution in real-world environments, currently primarily deployed in the manufacturing and logistics sectors. The company has launched multiple commercialization projects, including a pilot program at a Toyota factory in North America, where robots work alongside human teams to complete 8-hour shifts daily, handling repetitive tasks such as parts loading and unloading, machine cleaning, and equipment preparation. Morgan Stanley predicts that the global humanoid robot market size is expected to surpass $5 trillion by 2050.
According to CoinPost, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi delivered a video address at the opening ceremony of WebX 2026, reaffirming the government's policy to promote the social implementation of Web3. Prime Minister Takaichi introduced the "Startup Comprehensive Support Package" launched in May 2025, a plan further strengthened based on the "Five-Year Plan for Startup Cultivation," aiming to expand funding supply from the government and financial institutions to startups and accelerate their scaled development. Prime Minister Takaichi stated that WebX, as Asia's largest-scale Web3 summit gathering approximately 15,000 people globally, is an important platform for all parties to equally discuss the future of society and industry and promote business cooperation. She expects synergies between government policies and the WebX platform to drive the continuous development of Japan's innovation ecosystem.
Citadel Securities has filed a lawsuit in London, seeking over £6 million (approximately $7.9 million) from Leonard Lancia, its former European Head of Derivatives Systematic Market Making and co-founder of high-frequency crypto trading firm Portofino Technologies.Citadel Securities alleges that Leonard Lancia and his colleagues began planning their startup while still employed, and has won damages and legal cost support in related labor arbitration. Additionally, Citadel Securities filed a lawsuit against Portofino Technologies in the US in 2023, accusing it of stealing trade secrets. Leonard Lancia and Portofino Technologies have denied all allegations. The High Court in London rejected Leonard Lancia's request to lift the asset freezing order last Friday. (Bloomberg)