Last week saw relatively low cryptocurrency funding activity, primarily due to the Fourth of July holiday in the United States.
Despite the quiet holiday season, several high-profile funding events demonstrated the growing interest in the potential of Web 3 innovations.
Conscious, $85 million
Sentient, an AI research organization, has raised $85 million in seed funding.
Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures led the effort, with participation from a broad list of investors, including Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, and Delphi Ventures.
Sentient seeks to foster an open AI economy for AI developers by creating platforms and protocols that enable innovation in open source AI.
This funding round highlights the growing demand for decentralized AI solutions that foster collaboration and monetization for developers.
Lombard, $16 million
Lombard, a startup dedicated to integrating Bitcoin (BTC) into the decentralized finance (defi) space, has successfully Starch $16 million in its funding round.
Led by Polychain Capital, the round also saw investments from BabylonChain, dao5, Franklin Templeton, and several others.
Lombard’s flagship LBTC product offers a liquid, yielding representation of Bitcoin, allowing users to engage in defi activities such as lending and trading while holding Bitcoin.
This innovation aims to free up Bitcoin liquidity and inject it into the decentralized finance ecosystem, potentially driving growth in both sectors.
OpenLedger, $8 million
One of the big winners in this week’s venture capital activity was AI company OpenLedger, which raised $8 million in seed funding to build permissionless, data-centric infrastructure for AI development.
The funding round was led by Polychain Capital and Borderless Capital, with contributions from Finality Capital and Hashkey Capital, among others.
The project aims to improve AI model performance by decentralizing data pipelines, with plans to launch its infrastructure on the mainnet in the next quarter.
Mamori.xyz, $5 million
The somewhat quiet week also saw Mamori.xyz, an automated value mining system based on the blockchain, raise $5 million in seed funding.
Led by Blockchain Capital, the round included investments from Velocity.Capital and Web3.com. Notable angel investors Antonio Viggiano, Shujia Liang, and Grigore Rosu also participated.
Mamori.xyz focuses on addressing security challenges in the web3 space, leveraging machine learning to create a path to blockchain security.
Trevor $2.6 million
We conclude our venture capital tour with Trever, a company that provides an enterprise operating system for digital assets. Believer €2.4 million ($2.6 million) in seed funding.
The round was co-led by TX Ventures CH and Market One Capital LUX, with additional investments from Blockchain Founders Capital DE and Dr. Alex von Frankenberg.
Trever software provides the infrastructure for financial institutions to manage digital assets, catering to the needs of banks, brokers and funds. With clients across the DACH region, Trever is looking to expand across Europe, providing software solutions for the digital asset market.
