News linked to both this project and an event.
Odaily News: The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has announced sanctions against Tehran-based crypto exchange BitBank, alleging that the platform transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). According to OFAC, BitBank is controlled by Iranian financier Babak Zanjani, who was designated in January of this year, and who used the platform to complete transfers between June and July. The designation was made pursuant to Executive Order 13902. The sanctions also cover three executives of BitBank's software developer Pishtaz Simorgh and its parent company Dot One. U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent stated that using cryptocurrency to finance the Iranian regime does not fall outside OFAC's jurisdiction. OFAC also alleged that Hormuz Safe, a Tehran-based institution that sells safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, has been transferring payments it received through BitBank since June; the institution was sanctioned in July. OFAC did not disclose the relevant wallet addresses.
According to STAR Market Daily, Shanghai-based embodied touch company Qianjue Robotics announced the successful closure of two consecutive rounds of strategic financing totaling hundreds of millions of yuan. Previously, Qianjue Robotics had announced the completion of a funding round exceeding 100 million yuan, with investors including embodied AI industry partners, Tianji Capital, and Jide Electric Appliances. Qianjue currently counts among its shareholders financial investment institutions such as Hillhouse Capital Ventures, Origin Capital, and Futeng Capital, as well as industry players in the embodied intelligence and industrial sectors like Li Auto, Zhiyuan Robot, and Jide Electric Appliances. The proceeds from this round will be primarily allocated to product upgrades, business expansion, and industrialization, accelerating the iteration and large-scale delivery of high-precision vision-tactile sensors, refining real-world interaction data collection, tactile simulation, and dataset construction, and continuously advancing the R&D of tactile embodied models and tactile world models.
Singapore-based payment company Dtcpay announced the completion of a $25 million Series A funding round, led by Vertex Ventures with Japanese financial group SBI Group joining as a strategic investor, aimed at driving stablecoin payment applications.
Odaily News: Singapore-based compliant stablecoin payment company Dtcpay has announced the completion of a $25 million Series A funding round, led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, with SBI participating through two Singapore investment entities. Dtcpay provides stablecoin and fiat currency acceptance, storage, and trading services.The funds from this round will be used to expand its merchant network, build infrastructure, develop enterprise portal and consumer application features, and enter more regulated markets. Dtcpay has integrated with WalletConnect and launched a Visa-linked stablecoin-to-fiat card. (Bitcoin.com News)
Singapore-based payment service provider dtcpay announced the completion of a $25 million Series A funding round. Led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, the round saw participation from SBI Group through its SBI Ventures Asset and the SBI-NTU-Kyobo Digital Innovation Fund. Genedant Capital and existing investor Kwok Leng Tat also joined. The funds will be deployed to expand stablecoin payment products, the merchant network, and footprint in regulated markets, while advancing feature upgrades for enterprise service portals and consumer applications.
According to EU-Startups, the Münster-based German proptech startup syte has closed a €9 million Series A funding round, with plans to use the funds to expand its land and real estate AI analysis platform across Europe. The round was led by Amberra, with NRW.BANK participating as a new investor.
Galaxy Research reports that in Q2 2026, 384 venture capital transactions were completed in the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector, raising approximately $5.68 billion. This represents sequential growth of 10% and 31%, respectively, with the increase primarily driven by later-stage funding. Exchanges, investment firms, and lending entities secured around $3.523 billion, accounting for roughly 60% of the quarter's total investment; U.S.-based companies captured 73.5% of the investment funds.
According to EU-Startups, Berlin-based AI services company Integral announced the closing of an €18 million Series A financing round, co-led by Mosaic Ventures and Reid Hoffman, with Cherry Ventures, General Catalyst, and Puzzle Ventures participating. Since its founding in 2024, the company has raised over €30 million in cumulative funding. Integral specializes in providing AI-driven accounting, tax, and payroll services for SMEs. It leverages AI agents to handle invoice reconciliation, bookkeeping, payroll calculation, and tax filing, with every document reviewed and signed by licensed professionals. Currently, over 50% of its clients have achieved fully automated accounting processes, shortening the monthly accounting cycle from several weeks to just a few hours.
According to EU-Startups, Lyon-based AI-driven Vulnerability Operations Center (VOC) Hackuity has announced the completion of a €16 million funding round (approximately $19 million), led by Forgepoint Capital International alongside Bright Pixel, Bpifrance, and Seventure Partners, bringing its cumulative funding to €32 million. The funds will be allocated toward product innovation, AI capability enhancements, and expansion into European and Asian markets. Hackuity’s platform integrates data from over 130 security tools, automating vulnerability prioritization and remediation through a proprietary risk scoring engine. It currently serves more than 6,000 users, protects over 2 million assets, and manages 1 billion security findings, with enterprise clients including ENGIE, BPCE, and Orange Cyberdefense.
According to EU-Startups, Rome-based Physical AI cybersecurity company Exein has announced the completion of a new funding round totaling €234 million (approximately $270 million), valuing the firm at €1.4 billion (around $1.7 billion) and making it Europe's most highly valued cybersecurity startup. The round was led by Headline, with participation from Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank, KfW Capital, and T.Capital, while J.P. Morgan concurrently expanded its revolving credit facility.
According to Fortune, New York-based payments company Fin.com has announced the closing of a $20 million seed round, completed in August and led by Expa and Uber co-founder Garrett Camp, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Tenet Fund, the founder of Figure, Mesh founder Bam Azizi, Second Sight Ventures, and Gulf and African sovereign and royal family offices. Founded by Bangladeshi founder Nabeel Alamgir and Pakistani founder Mustafa Dar, Fin.com aims to solve the "last mile" challenge of converting stablecoins into local bank accounts or digital wallets, providing white-label payment infrastructure to financial institutions, consumer platforms, and prediction markets. Its client platforms collectively serve over 800 million users. The company focuses on the South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern markets, and currently maintains offices in New York, Las Vegas, Dubai, Dhaka, Bangalore, and Lahore.
According to Bloomberg, Shanghai-based Biren Technology is considering a new round of equity sales to raise approximately $1 billion to support the expansion of its artificial intelligence business. As one of the GPU chip developers heavily backed by Beijing, the company has banks in preliminary stages, currently sounding out potential investors for interest.
According to EU-Startups, Vilnius-based Lithuanian legal tech startup EnforceShield has announced the closing of a €1.7 million seed funding round led by Vendep Capital, with participation from FIRSTPICK VC. Founded in 2024 by practicing lawyer Rytis Rudzinskas, EnforceShield specializes in autonomous corporate IP enforcement. Its platform enables continuous cross-platform detection, legal analysis, verification, takedown execution, and infringement monitoring, fully automating the end-to-end process from discovery to resolution without requiring manual, case-by-case handling.
According to Business Insider, Seattle-based artificial intelligence company Nuance has announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Accel, NVIDIA's NVentures, South Park Commons, and Define Ventures. Founded last year by three former Apple researchers, Nuance aims to develop multimodal AI models with enhanced emotional understanding capabilities. The company completed a $10 million seed round led by Accel in July of last year.
According to EU-Startups, Stockholm-based Swedish health tech startup Tandem Health has closed a €86.49 million (approximately $100 million) Series B funding round, led by EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund alongside Kinnevik, Northzone, Amino Collective, and Visionaries. This brings the company's total cumulative funding to €138 million (approximately $160 million).
According to EU-Startups, Zurich-based preventive healthcare company Aeon announced the completion of its seed extension financing round and the simultaneous acquisition of German blood diagnostic platform Aware Health, bringing its total seed funding to over €12 million (approximately $14 million). The round was co-led by Araya Ventures, with existing investors Concentric, GoHub Ventures, Kadmos Capital, Calm/Storm Ventures, N&V Capital, and Bigwave Capital participating.
enterprise AI company Clay has announced the completion of a $115 million Series D funding round, led by Wellington, with participation from Sequoia Capital, StepStone, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Perennial, Meritech, DST, CapitalG, and others. The post-money valuation has risen to $7.1 billion.Clay stated that its AI agents can build real-time business and customer profiles based on internal and external data such as CRM, and automatically construct and execute workflows according to enterprise goals. Currently, companies including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Stripe have adopted its products. (Reuters)
Odaily reports: Shaunda Devens stated that PumpFun's annualized revenue is approximately $677 million, with PUMP's price-to-sales ratio at about 2.8x, lower than comparable revenue-generating tokens; based on current revenue and price, 50% of protocol revenue is used for programmatic buybacks and burning of PUMP, equivalent to repurchasing about 17.6% of the circulating supply annually, while approximately 77% of tokens already allocated to the team and investors have not yet moved. PUMP's official documents explicitly state that the token does not represent equity in PumpFun, nor does it grant holders rights to income, profits, dividends, or cash flows; PumpFun's approximately $2 billion treasury is owned by Baton Corp, and the existing buyback arrangement will expire in April 2027. Under its base-case scenario, PUMP's valuation range is $0.0108 to $0.0205, approximately 2.3 to 4.4 times higher than the September 9 price; if business activity declines and valuations continue to contract, the price could fall by 59% to 76%.
Odaily News: Dell Technologies is seeking to raise approximately $4 billion through an investment-grade bond issuance to refinance existing debt. Sources familiar with the matter said the final issuance size has yet to be determined and will be adjusted based on market demand. The bond sale comes amid continued growth in AI-driven server demand, as Dell benefits from the AI infrastructure investment boom, boosting its performance. (Bloomberg)
According to EU-Startups, London-based AI precision machining software startup CloudNC announced it has closed a €17.2 million (approximately $20 million) funding round led by U.S. venture capital firm Nimble Ventures, with participation from Calculus Venture Capital, Entrepreneur First, and Lockheed Martin's venture capital fund, LM Ventures.