There were 16 financing events this week, and the open source AI platform Sentient completed a $85 million seed round of financing | Investment and Financing Weekly Report

According to Foresight News, from June 29, 2024 to July 5, 2024, there were 16 investment and financing events in the crypto market, including 8 in tools and infrastructure, 2 in DeFi, 1 in asset management, 2 in blockchain games and NFT, and 3 in Web3. The total amount of investment and financing disclosed is approximately US$185 million.

Summary of total disclosed financing amount and financing number at weekly level:

This week's investment and financing projects are sorted by financing amount as shown below:

This week, there were five financings of tens of millions of dollars, including the blockchain oracle service RedStone, which completed a $15 million Series A financing; the Bitcoin re-staking agreement Lombard, which completed a $16 million seed round; Pi Squared, which completed a $12.5 million seed round; the open source AI platform Sentient, which completed a $85 million seed round; and the shared sorter network Astria, which completed a $12.5 million financing, led by dba and Placeholder VC.

Among the investment and financing segments, the tools and infrastructure sectors were relatively hot this week, while the asset management sector was relatively sluggish.

In terms of institutions, active institutions this week include Pantera Capital, Foresight Ventures and Placeholder VC, which mainly focus on tools and infrastructure.

Tools and Infrastructure

Nubila receives $2.5 million in funding

Nubila is an ESG data oracle project.

Astria Completes $12.5 Million Financing

Astria is a shared sequencer network.

Blockchain oracle service RedStone completes $15 million Series A funding

RedStone is a blockchain oracle similar to popular oracles such as Chainlink and Pyth Network, but based on a modular design.

Open source AI platform Sentient completes $85 million seed round of financing

One of Sentient’s core contributors is Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, and EigenLayer founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan serves as an advisor to the project.

Pi Squared Completes $12.5 Million Seed Round

Pi Squared is led by Grigore Rosu, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Its first product is a "universal settlement layer" that can settle blockchain transactions in any programming language. The project is expected to enter the testnet stage by the end of 2024.

SendBlocks Completes 8.2 Million Seed Round Financing

SendBlocks is a blockchain data management startup that allows blockchain enterprises, ecosystems, protocols and applications to define important data. The platform’s current customers include Bancor and SphereX.

QED Completes $6 Million Seed Round

QED is a Bitcoin scaling protocol. The testnet of the QED protocol is expected to be launched in the next 3 to 4 months, and the mainnet will be launched after QED reaches community consensus on the launch. QED will also launch its native token along with the mainnet.

onaji completes $2.5 million in financing

onaji is a smart contract blockchain machine learning platform.

DeFi

Pac Finance Completes Million-Dollar Financing

Pac Finance is a Blast ecosystem lending protocol.

Lombard Completes $16 Million Seed Round

Lombard is a Bitcoin re-staking protocol that unlocks liquidity by issuing liquid and profitable staked Bitcoin tokens, LBTC.

Asset Management

Compute Labs Completes $3 Million Pre-Seed Round of Financing

Compute Labs is building an RWA tokenization protocol with compute (CPU and GPU processing power) as the underlying asset.

NFT and blockchain games

MMO Swords & Dungeons Completes $5 Million in Funding

Swords & Dungeons is a fantasy-like turn-based multiplayer role-playing game that integrates Web3 profit mechanisms and economic models based on traditional MMORPG gameplay, creating a variety of gameplay for different investment types.

Cambria Completes $2.5 Million Seed Round

Cambria is an MMO that will build a risk-reward MMO inspired by Runescape.

Web3

Ethos Network Completes $1.75 Million

Ethos Network is an on-chain reputation project that will be released on Base soon.

Web3 AI company OpenLedger completes $8 million seed round

OpenLedger builds permissionless, data-centric infrastructure for AI development, and the new funds will be used to expand the team and strengthen its data pipeline infrastructure.

Web3 security company Mamori completes $5 million seed round

Mamori is working to enhance Web3 security by developing an algorithm that can detect issues in blockchain software.