Who's raising, who's buying, who's exiting — the capital flowing into AI labs, agent startups, and Web3 protocols.
The newest funding announcements — seed to mega-rounds.
Sierra closed a $950M Series E at a $15.8B valuation on May 4, led by Tiger Global and GV with Benchmark, Sequoia, and Greenoaks participating. Bret Taylor's enterprise AI agent platform hit $150M ARR in 8 quarters and counts 40% of the Fortune 50 as customers.
Japan's second-largest telecom, KDDI, will spend $65M on 28.5M newly issued Coincheck Group shares at $2.28 each, plugging Japan's largest crypto exchange into 72M mobile subscribers and 39.67M au PAY wallets — and launching a joint-venture Web3 wallet by summer 2026.
Digital Asset Holdings is closing a ~$300M growth round at a ~$2B valuation, led by a16z Crypto Fund 5 with strategic checks from Visa, Goldman Sachs, and DRW — pricing Canton Network's privacy-first institutional blockchain as the definitive tokenization infrastructure bet of 2026.
IREN Limited signs a $3.4B, five-year managed GPU cloud contract with Nvidia — and hands Jensen Huang's firm a $2.1B equity option at $70/share. The former Bitcoin miner's total AI commitments now exceed $13B, cementing its identity as a frontier-AI infrastructure landlord, not a crypto shop.
Payward, Kraken's $20B parent, agreed to acquire Hong Kong stablecoin payments firm Reap Technologies for $600M — its first Asia infrastructure deal. Reap nearly tripled revenue in 2025 and spans HK, Singapore, Mexico, Africa. The move plants a regulated payments stack at the core of Kraken's pre...
Kalshi's $1B Series F at a $22B valuation — doubling in five months — arrives as institutional trading volume surged 800% and annualized volume tripled to $178B. The raise signals prediction markets are transitioning from retail novelty into regulated Wall Street infrastructure, with Morgan Stanl...
The agent platforms and tooling startups raising to ship autonomous workflows.
Sierra closed a $950M Series E at a $15.8B valuation on May 4, led by Tiger Global and GV with Benchmark, Sequoia, and Greenoaks participating. Bret Taylor's enterprise AI agent platform hit $150M ARR in 8 quarters and counts 40% of the Fortune 50 as customers.
IREN Limited signs a $3.4B, five-year managed GPU cloud contract with Nvidia — and hands Jensen Huang's firm a $2.1B equity option at $70/share. The former Bitcoin miner's total AI commitments now exceed $13B, cementing its identity as a frontier-AI infrastructure landlord, not a crypto shop.
Q1 2026: $394M GAAP loss, transaction revenue -40% YoY despite an all-time-high 8.6% market share. Two stories live inside one earnings print — the slow death of the trading-fee model and the early-stage emergence of a stablecoin-and-agent-infrastructure business that could be worth far more.
Ethos has closed a $22.75M round led by a16z to build an AI-native expert network that onboards 35,000 specialists every week using voice technology — signaling that the next battleground for institutional knowledge isn't search, it's structured human intelligence at machine speed.
Altara raised $7 million in a seed round led by Greylock to build AI agents for physical sciences R&D — semiconductors, batteries, and advanced materials. The company's agents condense weeks of manual data triaging into minutes, targeting failure analysis and experimental design at facilities whe...
Bret Taylor's Sierra raised a $950M Series E led by Tiger Global and Google Ventures, pushing valuation to $15.8B and total capital raised past $1B. Sierra hit $150M ARR in February and counts one in three of the world's largest banks as customers.
DeFi protocols and Web3 infra raising — and the funds writing the checks.
Solana yield exchange Exponent raised $5 million seed led by Multicoin Capital, with Solana Ventures, RockawayX, L1D and angels Anatoly Yakovenko and Nick Ducoff. Total raised: $7.1M. The platform has cleared $2B+ in yield volume across 35,000+ users since late 2024.
Liquid, the always-on trading platform backed by Paradigm, closed an $18M round led by Left Lane Capital and Neo to expand cross-asset coverage and U.S. distribution.
Aave-led DeFi United relief fund crossed $300M Monday after Consensys and Joseph Lubin pledged 30,000 ETH. Lido is sending up to 2,500 stETH, Compound up to 3,000 ETH, EtherFi 5,000 ETH — all to restore rsETH backing after Kelp DAO's $292M exploit.
DeFi TVL dropped $13B in 48 hours after Kelp DAO's $292M exploit, but most of that wasn't real capital leaving — it was looping strategies unwinding. Spark TVL meanwhile jumped from $1.8B to $2.9B, suggesting capital rotation, not abandonment.
3F — built on Morpho lending rails — closes a $4M angel round backed by DeFi insiders to ship one-click leveraged exposure to tokenized real-world assets.
Codenamed 'Timeless,' Kalshi's new product uses the CFTC margin-trading license it recently won. Launch event April 27 in New York; first contracts tied to Bitcoin and other major tokens.