Funding Weekly Report | 13 publicly disclosed funding events; Superstate completes $82.5 million Series B funding round, led by Bain Capital Crypto and Distributed Global.

Highlights of this episode

According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 13 investment and financing events in the global blockchain sector last week (January 19-25), with a total funding scale exceeding US$222 million. An overview is as follows:

• In the DeFi sector, five investment and financing events were announced, including Superstate, a fintech and asset tokenization company, which announced the completion of an $82.5 million Series B financing round.
• Three investment and financing events were announced in the Web3+AI sector, among which Warden, an AI agent infrastructure and application layer, completed a strategic financing of $4 million.
• Two investment and financing events were announced in the infrastructure & tools sector, including Bitcoin payment startup ZBD completing a $40 million Series C funding round led by Blockstream Capital;
• Three investment and financing events were announced in the centralized finance sector, including a $55 million Series C funding round led by Kaszek and Insight Partners for Pomelo, a fintech company headquartered in Argentina.

DeFi

Fintech and asset tokenization company Superstate raises $82.5 million in Series B funding.

Fintech and asset tokenization company Superstate announced the completion of an $82.5 million Series B funding round, led by Bain Capital Crypto and Distributed Global, with participation from Haun Ventures, Brevan Howard Digital, Galaxy Digital, Bullish, and ParaFi. The company plans to use this funding to build a complete on-chain issuance layer on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains for issuing and trading stocks registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Its goal is to leverage blockchain technology to make the company's fundraising and IPO processes more efficient.

Superstate currently manages over $1.23 billion in assets and operates two tokenized funds. As an SEC-registered transfer agent, the company, through its "Opening Bell" platform, has been supporting publicly traded companies to issue and sell digital shares directly to investors on public blockchains by the end of 2025, enabling real-time management of issuance, settlement, and ownership records.

River has completed a $12 million strategic funding round, with participation from Maelstrom Fund, The Spartan Group, and others.

River has announced the completion of a $12 million strategic funding round, with investors including Tron DAO, Justin Sun, Maelstrom Fund founded by Arthur Hayes, The Spartan Group, and several Nasdaq-listed companies in the US and Europe. This funding round will support River's expansion into both EVM and non-EVM ecosystems, including multiple networks such as TRON and Sui, and will continue to build its on-chain liquidity infrastructure.

Tokenization startup Cork raises $5.5 million in seed funding, led by a16z and CSX.

Startup Cork announced the completion of a $5.5 million seed funding round, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), CSX, and Road Capital, with participation from 432 Ventures, BitGo Ventures, Cooley, DEPO Ventures, Funfair Ventures, G20 Group, Gate Labs, Hyperithm Gate, IDEO Ventures, PEER VC, Stake Capital, and WAGMI Ventures.

Cork aims to build a "programmable risk layer" that makes the risks inherent in real-world assets transparent and tradable through tokenization. Its infrastructure allows asset managers, issuers, and others to create customized swap markets to improve on-chain asset redemption liquidity, risk transparency, and market confidence. This tool can also be used to assess the risks of crypto-native products such as stablecoins and staking tokens. The team plans to launch the first production-grade risk markets in the coming months and expand its partnerships with vaults and asset issuers.

HyperLend announced the completion of a $1.7 million funding round to date, with participation from RockawayX and others.

Lending platform HyperLend announced its HPL token economic model allocation: 30.14% for ecosystem growth and incentives, 25% for genesis distribution, 22.5% for core contributors, 17.36% for strategic investors, and 5% reserved for liquidity. The protocol has raised $1.7 million to date, with investors including RockawayX, No Limit Holdings, Nucleus, Duplicate Capital, and Dumpster. Strategic investors receive 10% equity at the token offering (TGE), followed by a 4-month lock-up period, with the remaining shares gradually unlocked over 2 years.

Saturn announced the completion of an $800,000 funding round, with participation from YZi Labs, Sora Ventures, and others.

Saturn announced the completion of an $800,000 funding round, with participation from YZi Labs, Sora Ventures, and several prominent angel investors in the cryptocurrency space. The funds will be used to develop USDat, a Bitcoin-backed stablecoin protocol offering yields of 11%+. Saturn stated that yields will be provided through Strategy Perpetual Preferred Shares (STRC), while also unlocking global on-chain digital credit access.

AI

Warden, an AI agent infrastructure and application layer provider, has completed a $4 million strategic financing round.

Warden, an infrastructure and application layer project for AI agents, announced the completion of a $4 million strategic funding round, valuing the company at $200 million. This round was led by strategic partners and ecosystem contributors including 0G, Messari, and Venice.AI. The funding aims to accelerate product development and expand its AI agent capabilities in areas such as trading, automation, and programmable wealth. Warden is reportedly building a full-stack proxy internet, including a next-generation proxy crypto wallet.

AI-native content creation engine AKEDO has raised $5 million in seed funding, with participation from Sfermion and others.

AKEDO, an AI-native content creation engine and publishing platform, announced the completion of a $5 million seed funding round. The round was led by Karatage, with participation from investors in the gaming, AI, and cryptocurrency sectors, including Sfermion, Collab + Currency, MARBLEX, Seed Club, The Open Platform, TON Ventures, Gagra Ventures, Kenetic Capital, and Metalabs Ventures.

AKEDO is dedicated to building an "ambience coding" platform driven by a multi-agent AI system, aiming to significantly improve the efficiency of game and content development through collaborative AI agents. The platform allows users to create game collections, generate AIGC content, and plans to support one-click issuance of collection tokens in the future, unlocking diverse revenue streams for creators and protocols. The company's CEO stated that this round of funding will be used to expand its multi-agent infrastructure.

Lazbubu, an AI-related project within the BNB Chain ecosystem, has completed a strategic round of financing, led by Metis.

Lazbubu, an AI-powered project within the BNB Chain ecosystem, announced the completion of a strategic funding round led by Metis, with participation from Hotcoin Labs, Honey Capital, APUS Capital, and Becker Ventures. This round of funding will be used for core product development, global user growth, ecosystem expansion, and further refinement of the DAT (Data-Anchored Token) mechanism.

Lazbubu is an on-chain AI companion agent based on the DAT mechanism. It achieves personalized growth by recording user interaction data (such as dialogues and decisions). All data is anchored through BNB Chain, ensuring continuous verifiability and user-controlled autonomy. Its testnet phase attracted over 80,000 users and generated over 1 million interactions.

The DAT mechanism supports the real-time creation of on-chain assets from AI interactions, allowing users to view, transfer, or combine related data. Future project plans include expanding multimodal interaction capabilities, achieving cross-chain compatibility, and launching a community governance mechanism.

AI startup Humans& raises $480 million in seed funding, valuing the company at $4.48 billion.

Humans&, a human-centric AI company co-founded by Anthropic, xAI, and former Google members, has raised $480 million in seed funding, valuing the company at $4.48 billion. Investors include Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV, and Emerson Collective. The company focuses on developing AI tools to enhance human collaboration. Its team members come from OpenAI, Meta, AI2, MIT, and other institutions, concentrating on multi-agent reinforcement learning, AI memory, and user understanding, aiming to reshape the way AI models are trained and interact.

(This financing is not included in the data statistics of this week's report)

Nvidia invests $150 million in AI inference company Baseten

Baseten, a startup focused on AI inference, has raised $300 million to value itself at $5 billion, nearly double its previous valuation. The round was led by venture capital firm IVP and Alphabet's independent growth fund CapitalG, with chip giant Nvidia also participating, contributing $150 million as part of the deal. This transaction underscores Nvidia's aggressive investment in startups in the AI ​​inference field. As industry focus shifts from training models to large-scale operation and inference (i.e., AI models generating outputs from inputs), Nvidia is increasing its investment in related startups while continuing to invest in its own AI chip customers.

(This financing is not included in the data statistics of this week's report)

Infrastructure & Tools

Bitcoin payments startup ZBD raises $40 million in Series C funding, led by Blockstream Capital.

Bitcoin payments startup ZBD announced the completion of a $40 million Series C funding round, led by Blockstream Capital (which invested $36 million). Other investors and company valuation were not disclosed. Headquartered in New Jersey, ZBD primarily provides payment software solutions for video games, supporting various transaction processing methods, including Bitcoin. The company does not involve NFTs or crypto-based gameplay; instead, it focuses on using blockchain as a payment channel to help game developers and players establish direct financial relationships, enabling user-to-user transfers and in-game reward distribution. The company currently has 70 employees and has partnered with 55 games by 2025. This funding round will be used to expand its payment product suite over the next year.

Bitway, the native L1 protocol for Bitcoin, has completed a $4.444 million seed funding round, led by TRON DAO.

Bitway, a Bitcoin native Layer 1 protocol and infrastructure platform, announced the completion of a $4.444 million seed funding round, led by TRON DAO, with participation from HTX Ventures and others. To date, Bitway has raised over $5.8 million from institutional investors. Following its initial seed funding round, it has now completed a targeted strategic funding round, valuing Bitway at $100 million.

Founded by former Binance team members, Bitway was previously incubated through YZi Labs' EASY Residency program and launched through the Binance Booster program. Bitway has two core products: Bitway Earn, an on-chain wealth management platform, and Bitway Chain, a Layer 1 application chain dedicated to payment and financing solutions.

Centralized Finance

Argentine payments startup Pomelo has raised $55 million in Series C funding and will launch a stablecoin credit card.

Argentina-based fintech company Pomelo has raised $55 million in Series C funding, led by Kaszek and Insight Partners. The funding aims to deepen its presence in the Latin American market and expand its global operations. The funds will be used to expand its credit card payment processing business in Mexico and Brazil, and to launch a global credit card settled in the stablecoin USDC. Pomelo also plans to develop a real-time and intelligent agent payment system that can operate across borders, serving traditional banks and large international clients. Current partners include Visa, Mastercard, Binance, and Western Union.

Dutch cryptocurrency platform Finst completes €8 million Series A funding round.

Dutch cryptocurrency platform Finst has completed an €8 million Series A funding round, led by Endeit Capital, with participation from existing investors Eelko van Kooten, founder of Spinnin' Records, and Mark Franse, co-founder of DEGIRO. This brings Finst's total funding to €15 million.

Founded in 2023, the platform has been authorized as a crypto asset service provider by the Netherlands Financial Markets Authority (AFM), serving retail and institutional clients in 30 European countries. The company stated that this round of funding will be used to expand into the European market, develop new products and services, including expanding collateral coverage and market-leading interest rates, increasing asset selection and platform functionality, and developing more product lines for institutional and professional users.

CheckSig, a "crypto-as-a-service" platform, has raised €3.5 million in Series A funding.

CheckSig, a European "crypto-as-a-service" platform, announced the completion of a €3.5 million Series A funding round at a valuation of €33.5 million. This brings its total funding to €6.2 million. The company obtained a MiCAR license this year and provides crypto custody, crypto trading, and cryptocurrency tax withholding services, aiming to offer secure and transparent cryptocurrency services to individual and institutional investors.