Financing Highlights | AI startup Mistral AI completes $640 million in financing; OKX leads investment in decentralized data protocol codatta

According to BlockBeats statistics, the total number of financings last week was 25, an increase from the previous number, with a total amount of approximately US$752.24 million and an average financing amount of US$30.0894 million. Among them, Web3.0+AI fields accounted for the majority, infrastructure fields and Metaverse/GameFi fields were relatively more, DeFi fields increased, digital asset management/payment fields and social/creator economic fields were relatively less, and NFT/digital fashion fields and other fields were not financed for the time being. The following figure shows the proportion of financing in each sector last week:

Metaverse/GameFi

In the Metaverse/GameFi field, there were 7 financings with a total amount of US$17.435 million, accounting for 2.32% of the total financing last week.

Pixelverse

On June 12, The Block reported that the Telegram-based encrypted game ecosystem Pixelverse completed a $5.5 million financing round. This round of financing was participated by Delphi Ventures, Merit Circle, Bitscale Capital, Ghaf Capital, Big Brain Holdings, LiquidX, Foresight Ventures and The Sandbox founder Sébastien Borget, and Nexon CEO Joonmo (James) Kwon.

Pixelverse is a cyberpunk-themed entertainment studio and game ecosystem. Its goal is to create a low-threshold game that allows players to easily enter the world of Web3, experience the true ownership of in-game assets, and reward loyal players with a reward mechanism. Pixelverse has played an important role in promoting the Tap-to-Earn model, which rewards users for regular participation through fun Web3 games and mini-apps.

At the same time, Pixelverse is committed to creating an immersive gaming experience that aims to attract a wider user base, including those from the Web2 field, and promote the popularization and popularization of Web3 technology.

Yuliverse

On June 12, Web3 game social metaverse platform Yuliverse completed a $4 million Pre-A round of financing, led by LIF Capital, with participation from Spyre Capital, Presto Labs, DWF Labs, Sending Labs, 2 Punk Capital, G20, CSP DAO, 071 Labs, Titans Ventures, Ultiverse, HC Capital, etc., with a total financing of more than $6 million.

Yuliverse has two tokens, ARG and ART. ARG (Alternate Reality Gem) is proof of player activity and the main currency of the game. In order to promote the "Katharsis Project", Yuliverse decided to release a limited number of ART (Alternate Reality Token) as a reward.

In addition to the main quests and team games, Yuliverse will also launch the casual game "Fete". This round of financing will be used to build a new generation of Gamefi + DePin model, using user location and behavior data to create the largest decentralized personal behavior data network.

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Sidus Heroes

On June 16, according to official news, Web3 game publisher Sidus Heroes announced the completion of a new round of financing. Crypto trading market maker DWF Labs participated in the investment and reached a partnership with it. The specific amount of financing has not been disclosed.

Sidus Heroes is a 3A-level, MMORPG P2E game launched by SIDUS and is the first project built on WebGL technology. This means that the Sidus Heroes game is accessed through the browser and does not require users to download any applications to their mobile phones or PCs.

Sidus Heroes can achieve a multi-client play-and-earn experience with only one link entrance. It was originally an NFT avatar series launched in August 2021. The series contains 6,000 unique characters with rarity levels. In January 2022, the beta version of the game will be officially launched.

The rest of the financing in the metaverse/GameFi field includes:

On June 11, Web3 Sports Metaverse and GameFi platform BitBall announced the completion of a $2 million strategic round of financing, which was participated by Bitfun Capital. The new funds will be used for marketing and ecological collaboration. At present, BitBall mainly provides a new digital experience for sports stars, clubs, institutions and fans, allowing users to entertain, create and socialize in the metaverse, and currently focuses on football IP resources.

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On June 12, the mobile game L3 blockchain solution Unite completed a $3 million seed extension round of financing, led by SuperLayer, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, OKX Ventures, Solana Ventures, HTX Ventures, CoinDCX Ventures, etc. Unite plans to use this funding to accelerate its strategic transformation and become a Layer 3 blockchain solution for mass-market mobile games.

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On June 12, the Web3 gaming, entertainment and social ecosystem Skytopia completed a $2.4 million seed round of financing, led by Vertex Capital and SuperChain Capital, with participation from Boyaa and InitiateCapital. The funds raised will be used to advance the development of Skytopia, enhance the ecosystem and promote community development.

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On June 13, Web3 game startup D-Drops completed a 500,000 euro Pre-Seed round of financing, with ROM Utrecht participating. This fund will support the launch of a geo-location-based treasure hunt game.

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DeFi

A total of 6 financings in the DeFi field, with a total amount of more than 12 million US dollars, accounting for 1.60% of the total financing last week.

Symbiotic

On June 11, the re-staking project Symbiotic announced its official launch and said it had completed a $5.8 million seed round of financing, led by Paradigm and Cyber Fund.

As a flexible, permissionless protocol, Symbiotic allows network developers to fully control staking implementation and operator selection while providing a wide range of security services. In the short term, Symbiotic is mainly used to launch new consensus instances, such as the election of new L1 operators and decentralized sorting. In the long term, Symbiotic will also support use cases such as block production and multi-party computing.

In addition, Paradigm has developed Reth Execution Extensions (ExEx) to further enhance shared security services based on Symbiotic.

Honeypot Finance

On June 11, Honeypot Finance, a Berachain ecological project, announced the completion of a strategic round of financing on the X platform, with a valuation of US$20 million. The total amount of funds raised by the project in the seed round, seed round and strategic round financing has now reached US$1.3 million. This round of financing was led by TKX CAPITAL, CSP DAO, AQUANOW, Web3Port, EnigmaValidator and other institutions.

Honeypot Finance is building a community-operated DeFi Hub on Berachain that integrates a unique AMM model to combine a community-led launchpad and DEX. It solves the problem of low liquidity utilization caused by liquidity segmentation between DeFi products. Our unique flywheel operates in a community-driven model, fostering an ecosystem where increased participation leads to enhanced liquidity and vice versa, thereby maintaining a self-reinforcing growth and reward cycle.

The rest of DeFi financing includes:

On July 3, IncrementFi, a DeFi infrastructure based on the Flow blockchain ecosystem, announced the completion of a $1 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was participated by Dapper Labs, Lattice Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, Quiet Ventures, and several angel investors in the Flow ecosystem. IncrementFi mainly provides liquidity and income solutions, with two main products, Increment Swap (a completely permissionless decentralized exchange) and Increment Earn (a decentralized lending protocol for homogeneous tokens).

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On June 14, Blast Ecosystem DeFi Protocol Particle announced the completion of a new round of strategic financing. The specific amount has not been disclosed. This round of financing was participated by dingaling, Christian, Spirit DAO, etc. Particle completed financing led by Polychain in January this year, aiming to achieve permissionless leveraged trading.

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On June 14, Qiro Finance, a DeFi credit service company headquartered in Singapore, announced the completion of a $1.2 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Alliance, with participation from Druid Ventures, Escape Velocity (EV3), Trident Digital and CMT Digital. The specific valuation information has not yet been disclosed. Qiro Finance aims to solve the huge credit gap that is prevalent in Southeast Asia and other regions by leveraging blockchain technology and a stablecoin framework.

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On June 16, DeFi trading platform Reposwap announced the completion of its seed round of financing, led by QCP Capital, with participation from ZK Prime Capital, XLink Ventures and other investment institutions. The specific amount of financing and valuation have not been disclosed yet.

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Social/Creator Economy

A total of 1 financing in the social/creator economy field, with a total amount of over 2.4 million US dollars, accounting for 0.32% of the total financing last week.

Stage

On June 14, according to Decrypt, the Web3 music platform Stage completed a financing of 2.4 million US dollars, with participation from the Solana Foundation, Kraken US CEO, RR2 Capital, Moonrock Ventures, Cogitent and others.

Stage's mission is to support music fans and artists and ensure that everyone benefits from it. Its vision is to build a thriving community where every interaction enriches the journey of fans and artists.

It is reported that Stage will soon launch the STAGE token on BNB Chain. STAGE's token generation event (TGE) will be carried out through launchpad platforms ChainGPT, Decubate and Eesee.

Infrastructure

A total of 8 financings in the infrastructure field, with a total amount of more than US$73.4 million, accounting for 9.76% of the total financing last week.

Nexus Labs

On June 10, zero-knowledge privacy platform Nexus Labs completed a $25 million Series A financing, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pantera Capital. The financing also attracted participation from Dragonfly Capital, Faction Ventures and Blockchain Builders Fund.

Nexus Labs is a Web3 startup dedicated to building zero-knowledge-driven expansion and privacy tools to support artificial intelligence (AI), network security, cloud computing and other privacy-enhancing technologies. Nexus is building a series of zero-knowledge privacy tools that allow developers to expand their projects and make their zero-knowledge-driven applications faster and more secure.

Nexus plans to use the new funds to expand its engineering team and develop more products. As the company continues to "collaborate with the scientific community", the funds will also be used to support early users in production deployment.

Layer3

On June 12, according to The Block, the token distribution protocol Layer3 completed a $15 million Series A financing round, which was co-led by ParaFi and Greenfield Capital, and participated by Electric Capital, Immutable, Lattice, Tioga, LeadBlock, Amber, etc. Layer3 also revealed its previously unannounced $3.7 million strategic financing, which was participated in by Electric, ParaFi, and Sandeep Nailwal of Polygon and completed in 2022. Prior to this, the company also raised $2.5 million in 2021.

Layer3 essentially unifies user activities across multiple blockchains and applications, enabling protocols to distribute tokens more efficiently. Layer3 is also developing a new AI-enabled protocol for optimizing token allocation strategies, which it plans to launch later this year.

Layer3 co-founder Brandon Kumar said the project began raising funds for this round in April and closed in May, with the round structured as equity plus token warrants, but declined to comment on valuation.

codatta

On June 12, codatta announced the successful completion of a $2.5 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was led by OKX Venture, and Comma3 Ventures, Mask Network, OGV, Paramita Venture, Web3Port, CGV, Fibo Partners, CatcherVC, BlockAI Venture, and angel investors of former Coinbase and Pinterest executives also participated. In addition, partners such as GoPlus and zCloak Network also participated in strategic investments.

codatta is the first decentralized data protocol with scientific confidence that aims to build basic data facilities and is designed to serve developers and protocols. The protocol focuses on building a permissionless data contributor network that prioritizes data quality to support applications and protocols built using machine learning or AI.

The funds will be used to accelerate the development of developer tools, enhance AI capabilities, build decentralized technologies, and increase community engagement.

The rest of the infrastructure financing includes:

On June 10, the Solana-based multi-signature agreement Squads completed a $10 million Series A financing, led by Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Placeholder VC, RockawayX, L1 Digital and Helius co-founder and CEO and Odyssey Ventures founder Mert Mumtaz also participated in this round of financing. Squads is a multi-signature protocol based on Solana that helps enterprises manage on-chain assets such as funds, tokens, and management keys through multi-signature security.

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On June 11, native account abstraction layer Zyfi announced the completion of $2 million in private financing on the X platform, with participation from Tenzor Capital, Everstake Capital, ZBS Capital, etc.

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On June 11, Web3 infrastructure K3 Labs announced the completion of its Pre-Seed round of financing, with participation from Finality Capital Partners, Blockchain Founders Fund, and Aztlan Capital. K3 Labs mainly helps developers design and deploy decentralized business workflows and applications. Its stateless aggregation framework supports self-deployment of custom computing services in a trustless execution environment. The new funds will support its launch on the Eigenlayer test network.

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On June 12, Ava Protocol (formerly OAK Network) completed a $10 million seed round of financing, with participation from Electric Capital, Taisu Ventures and Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal. The new funds will be used to develop its Eigenlayer AVS for private autonomous transactions on Ethereum.

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On June 12, on-chain data developer Irys completed a round of financing led by Lemniscap, a venture capital firm focused on cryptocurrency. Framework, Primitive Ventures, Berachain co-founder Smokey the Bera, Ryan Watkins, Daniel Cheung and others participated in this round of financing. Irys, formerly known as Bundlr Network, has expanded its service scope from bundling transactions to enhancing storage throughput to developing scalable on-chain data. In addition, the platform is building infrastructure to track and verify data to combat digital false information.

Digital Asset Management/Payment

In the field of digital asset management/payment, there was a total of 1 financing, with a total amount of over US$5 million, accounting for 0.66% of the total financing last week.

Kima

On June 12, according to The Block, payment startup Kima completed a $5 million Pre-Seed round of equity and token financing, and the company's total financing has reached $8 million. This round of financing was led by Blockchange and FinSec Innovation Lab (a research and development accelerator under payment giant Mastercard), and Outlier Ventures, Blockchange, Big Brain Holdings, Castrum Capital, Kangaroo Capital and Maven Capital participated.

Web3+AI

There were 2 financings in the Web3+AI field, with a total amount of over 642 million US dollars, accounting for 85.35% of the total financing last week. Including:

On June 12, French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI completed a 600 million euro (about 640 million US dollars) Series B financing, led by General Catalyst, and other investors included Lightspeed Venture Partners, a16z, Nvidia, Samsung Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Belfius, Bertelsmann Investment, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, Hanwha Asset Management Venture Fund, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow and SV Angel.

It is reported that Mistral AI was founded by former DeepMind and Meta researchers to compete with OpenAI and Google to develop generative artificial intelligence infrastructure. In December last year, Mistral AI announced the completion of 385 million euros (415 million U.S. dollars) in financing, led by a16z and Lightspeed Ventures, bringing the company's valuation to 2 billion U.S. dollars.

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On June 13, AI Layer2 project Optopia.ai announced the completion of its seed round of financing. G Ventures , Kucoin Ventures, JRR Capital, KKP International Limited, ZenTrading, Klein Labs, MCS Capital and well-known KOL MrBlock participated in the investment. The funds will be used to accelerate the continuous upgrade and optimization of Optopia's infrastructure, enhance AI capabilities, build decentralized technology, and increase community participation.

It is reported that Optopia.ai is a Layer 2 network that aims to build innovative AI standards and expand AI application scenarios. It aims to simplify Web3 operations through AI agents, lower the entry threshold for users, and empower AI agents through token economic models. Unleash the potential of Web3. Optopia launched its mainnet in May and is currently conducting mainnet interactive activities to cultivate a strong and active developer and user community.

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