Financing Weekly Report | 14 public financing events; decentralized AI startup Nous Research completes $50 million Series A financing, led by Paradigm

Highlights of this issue

According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 14 investment and financing events in the global blockchain last week (April 21-April 27); the total scale of funds exceeded US$220 million, and the inflow of funds decreased compared with the previous week. The overview is as follows:

• DeFi announced one investment and financing event. Symbiotic, a cryptocurrency staking protocol, completed a $29 million Series A financing round led by Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures.
• The Web3 game track announced one investment and financing event. MagicBlock completed a $7.5 million seed round of financing, led by Lightspeed Faction.
• The Web3+AI field announced one investment and financing event. Decentralized AI startup Nous Research completed a $50 million Series A financing round led by Paradigm.
• The Infrastructure & Tools track announced 6 investment and financing events, and the interoperability project Analog completed a new round of financing of US$15 million;
• In other applications, two investment and financing events were announced. London-based financial technology company WineFi completed a seed round of financing of approximately US$2 million, led by Coterie Holdings;
• The centralized financial sector announced three investment and financing events, among which Alpaca, an API platform focusing on stock and cryptocurrency trading, completed a $52 million Series C financing.

DeFi

Symbiotic Completes $29 Million Series A Funding, Led by Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures

Symbiotic, a cryptocurrency staking protocol, has completed a $29 million Series A financing round, led by Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures, with participation from more than 100 institutions and angel investors including Aave, Polygon and StarkWare. The financing will be used to launch the "Universal Staking Framework", a blockchain security coordination layer. The framework allows any combination of cryptocurrencies (including L1/L2 chain assets) to participate in network verification. It has been adopted by 14 networks including Hyperlane, and is expected to connect to 20 ecological projects.

Web3 Games

MagicBlock Completes $7.5 Million Seed Round, Led by Lightspeed Faction

MagicBlock, a Solana-based gaming company, announced the completion of a $7.5 million seed round of financing, aiming to build real-time, non-fragmented infrastructure for decentralized games and applications through Ephemeral Rollups technology native to Solana. This round of financing was led by Lightspeed Faction, and investors included Maven11, Delphi Digital, Robot Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Equilibrium and Pivot Global. The angel investor lineup includes Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko, Mert Mumtaz and Tristan Yver. a16z participated in early investments, and the total financing amount has now reached $10.5 million. MagicBlock plans to expand the engineering team, promote the development of the Solana application ecosystem, and optimize its real-time execution architecture.

AI

Decentralized AI startup Nous Research completes $50 million Series A financing, led by Paradigm

Decentralized AI startup Nous Research has completed a $50 million Series A financing round led by Paradigm (this financing was almost entirely provided by Paradigm). This round of financing values ​​Nous's token at $1 billion. The funds raised will be mainly used to increase computing power reserves and expand the research team. Previously, the company had raised approximately $20 million in a seed round of financing, with investors including Distributed Global, North Island Ventures, Delphi Digital and other institutions. It is worth noting that this is Paradigm's largest investment in the AI ​​field since the FTX crash in 2022, indicating that crypto capital is accelerating its layout in the cross-cutting field of cutting-edge technology.

Nous was founded in 2022 by a group of AI researchers, focusing on developing open source large language models. Its innovation lies in using the Solana blockchain to coordinate global distributed computing resources and encourage users to contribute idle GPU computing power to participate in model training through incentive mechanisms. The Hermes series of open source models developed by the team have been recognized by the community, and have published multiple research papers in collaboration with Diederik P. Kingma, a founding member of OpenAI.

Infrastructure & Tools

Interoperability project Analog completes $15 million in new round of financing

Analog, a blockchain project that unifies liquidity across multiple networks, announced that it has raised $15 million through a token sale. Digital asset financing company Bolts Capital completed the token purchase, bringing Analog's total support to $36 million. Analog plans to use the funds to develop interoperability tools such as the Omnichain Analog Token Standard (OATS), which supports the transfer of fungible and non-fungible assets across blockchains. Also in the works is Firestarter, a real-world asset (RWA) marketplace for tokenizing real estate, collectibles, and income-generating items.

Arch Labs Completes $13 Million Series A Funding, Led by Pantera Capital

Bitcoin infrastructure company Arch Labs has completed a $13 million Series A financing round, with a valuation of $200 million. This round of financing was led by Pantera Capital, with other strategic investors also participating. The funds will accelerate the development and release of ArchVM, which can realize fast, secure and fully verifiable smart contract functions on Bitcoin.

According to reports, Arch Labs is a software development company and a core contributor to Arch Network. Arch Network is a bridgeless execution platform that can implement smart contract-like functions on Bitcoin. Previously, Arch Labs raised $7 million, led by Multicoin Capital.

DAO infrastructure provider Tally completes $8 million Series A financing, led by AppWorks and others

DAO infrastructure provider Tally has completed an $8 million Series A financing round, aiming to expand its governance technology to more crypto-native decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). This round of financing was led by AppWorks and Blockchain Capital, with participation from companies such as BitGo. According to reports, Tally's most famous product is the Tally protocol, which provides support for infrastructure to help leading protocols conduct effective on-chain governance of their DAOs, including Arbitrum, Uniswap DAO, ZKsync, Wormhole, Eigenlayer, Obol, and Hyperlane. The platform was originally a DAO governance tool and has now grown into the most widely adopted software stack for on-chain organizations on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. Tally had previously raised $7.5 million in two rounds of financing in 2021.

Inco completes $5 million strategic round of financing, dedicated to on-chain privacy technology

Inco announced the completion of a strategic round of financing of $5 million led by a16z crypto CSX and participated by Coinbase Ventures, bringing the total financing to $10 million. Inco focuses on solving blockchain privacy issues and is committed to allowing users to perform operations such as salary payments and Texas Hold'em on the chain without disclosing sensitive information. Currently, its first product "Inco Lightning" has been launched on the Base Sepolia test network.

Web3 infrastructure startup Catalysis completes $1.25 million Pre-Seed round of financing

Catalysis, a decentralized service infrastructure startup, has completed a $1.25 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Hashed Emergent, which focuses on the Indian Web3 ecosystem, with participation from Presto Labs, Spaceship DAO, Funfair Ventures, Cosmostation, and Crypto Times. The funds will be used to develop a "security abstraction layer" for re-staking protocols, which aims to simplify the process for developers and node operators to obtain economic security from re-staking ecosystems such as Eigenlayer.

Co-founder Abhishek said that the current integration of shared security protocols is highly fragmented, and Catalysis' core products will lower the development threshold of AVS (Active Verification Service) applications through standardized interfaces. The company has cooperated with mainstream re-staking platforms such as Eigenlayer and Symbiotic, and plans to launch a public test network in the second quarter of 2025. The application scenarios cover Web2 service fields such as cross-chain bridges, oracles, zero-knowledge proofs, and medical data systems.

Payment gateway Inflow completes $1.1 million seed round of financing, with participation from Rockstart and others

Payment gateway Inflow has completed a $1.1 million seed round of financing, with participation from Rockstart, GnosisVC, Alliance, Plug And Play, and Stake Capital. Angel investors include Ledger co-founder Nicolas Bacca, Primonial REIM co-founder Stephanie Lacroix, and TEMPUS SHOP founder Tempus.

other

Blockchain-backed wine platform WineFi completes £1.5 million seed round

London-based financial technology company WineFi announced the completion of a £1.5 million (approximately $2 million) seed round of financing, led by British boutique wine group Coterie Holdings, with participation from SFC Capital, Founders Capital and an angel investment consortium. The new capital will accelerate product development, including enhanced valuation models and real-time market data feeds. It is reported that the company was co-founded by former Fidelity International and JPMorgan Chase asset managers Oliver Thorpe and Callum Woodcock, and is committed to providing high-net-worth clients with structured channels for high-quality wine investment. In order to improve liquidity and transparency, WineFi has taken a strategic move to work with digital asset provider Lympid to segment high-quality wine assets on a blockchain platform.

UXLINK received investment from UFLY Labs and reached a strategic cooperation with Solv Protocol

Web3 social platform UXLINK announced a strategic partnership with Solv Protocol and received investment from UXLINK ecological fund UFLY Labs.

Centralized Finance

Alpaca, an API platform focused on stock and cryptocurrency trading, completes $52 million in Series C financing

Alpaca, an API platform focusing on stock, options and cryptocurrency trading, announced the completion of a $52 million Series C financing. 850 Management, Derayah Financial, National Investments Company, Portage Ventures and Unbound participated in the investment. According to reports, Alpaca is a self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure company headquartered in the United States. Its business covers stocks, ETFs, options and cryptocurrencies, and has raised more than $170 million in funds. Alpaca's investors include Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund and Y Combinator.

Quantitative trading startup Theo completes $20 million in financing, led by Hack VC and others

Theo, a quantitative trading startup, has completed a $20 million financing. The platform is committed to providing ordinary investors with the returns of strategies that originally belonged to high-frequency trading companies. The company was co-founded by former Optiver traders Abhi Pingle and TK Kwon. In March 2024, it received a $4.5 million seed round of financing led by Manifold Trading, and in April 2025, it received an additional investment of $15.5 million led by Hack VC and Anthos Capital. Other investors include Flowdesk, Selini Capital and individual investors from companies such as Citadel, JPMorgan Chase, Jane Street and Optiver.

Since its launch in June 2024, the Theo platform has attracted $50 million in deposits, with an average user yield of 7%-8% in the last three months and an annual yield of 18%-20%. The platform's name is derived from the trading term "theoretical price". It is currently mainly connected to DeFi protocols such as Aave, but plans to expand its business to centralized exchanges such as Binance. The founder said that the deposit limit will be lifted at the end of April, and traditional financial markets will be connected in the future. Both rounds of financing were in the form of token warrants, and the company's valuation was not disclosed.

Digital asset trading platform BitradeX completes £12 million Series A financing, led by Bain Capital

AI-driven digital asset trading platform BitradeX has completed a £12 million (approximately $15.96 million) Series A financing round, led by Bain Capital. The financing will be used to establish a global AI strategy laboratory and upgrade compliance infrastructure. According to reports, BitradeX was founded in 2022. Its core product ARK trading model ARK trading model is based on a trillion parameter architecture and integrates the methodology of DeepSeek and Qianfan, which can provide high-frequency trading execution with sub-second latency. The platform holds the UK FCA and US MSB licenses. Its pioneering AI protection pool mechanism uses 100 BTC as the initial reserve funds.

Venture Capital Fund

Solana’s Early Backer RockawayX Launches New $125 Million Fund

Prague-based crypto venture capital firm RockawayX announced the completion of its second early-stage fund raising of $125 million. The fund closed in the first quarter of this year and will mainly invest in Solana ecosystem startups. The firm, which invested in the unlaunched Solana in 2018, currently manages assets of approximately $2 billion, has offices in Prague, Dubai and London, and two-thirds of its 45 employees are engineers. RockawayX CEO Victor Fischer said that two-thirds of the new fund will be used for seed round investments, and the rest will be allocated to liquid assets.

Although the amount of crypto venture capital in the US market fell by 22% in the first quarter, RockawayX's fund return in 2021 has exceeded 5 times, mainly benefiting from early investments in Solana, market maker Wintermute and lending protocol Morpho Labs. The institution has invested in more than 15 Solana ecosystem projects and will jointly launch the accelerator center "Solana City" in Dubai with the Solana Foundation and development company Helius Labs on May 1.

Astra Fintech Launches $100 Million Fund to Support Solana’s Growth in Asia

Astra Fintech, a global blockchain payment provider, announced that it has established a $100 million fund to support the development of the Solana ecosystem in Asia. Through the fund, Astra Fintech plans to invest funds to accelerate the development of related projects and establish partnerships with developers, companies and regulators. The fund's operating base will be based in South Korea. The fund will focus on projects and developers working on PayFi solutions, a series of systems that use blockchain technology to facilitate payments.