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AI security startup Mindgard announced the completion of a $30 million Series A funding round, led by Album VC, with participation from Karma Ventures, .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital, and Lakestar.Mindgard was founded by Dr. Peter Garraghan in 2022 and incubated at Lancaster University in the UK, with headquarters in Boston and London. The company's platform offers Shadow AI discovery, AI red team testing, and runtime AI protection capabilities, having helped disclose over 150 high-impact AI security vulnerabilities, including issues such as the Cursor IDE zero-day code execution vulnerability, Google Antigravity trusted workspace defects, and ChatGPT image generation protection failures.

AI code verification startup Blacksmith announced the completion of a $45 million Series B financing, led by Peak XV Partners, with follow-on investments from GV and Y Combinator, bringing the company's valuation to $550 million.

According to News1, South Korea will expand the registration review scope of Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) to include major shareholders starting from August 20. If there are changes to the major shareholders or the company's legal compliance framework, operators must notify the financial authorities 30 days in advance.The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) announced the revised registration manual at a briefing held in Seoul for virtual asset service providers and potential operators. The review targets not only the largest shareholders and major shareholders holding more than 10% of shares but also shareholders with special connections to the largest shareholders. If the largest shareholder is a legal entity, the largest shareholder of that entity and its representatives may also be included in the review scope.

Swedish Stockholm AI programming startup Lovable announced the completion of a $400 million Series C funding round, bringing its post-funding valuation to $13.3 billion. This round of financing was co-led by Menlo Ventures and the EU-backed investment institution Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT AB), with several venture capital firms participating, as well as new investors from Latin America and Asia, including Tencent Holdings.Lovable is dedicated to the field of AI-assisted programming and is accelerating its expansion to compete with larger rivals such as Anthropic.

According to Cointelegraph, Mauro Eldritch, the founder of cybersecurity company BCA LTD, and Heiner García, a network threat intelligence analyst at Telefónica Tech, jointly established a fake cryptocurrency startup "Ballena Azul," successfully luring suspected North Korean IT workers to work in a controlled virtual desktop environment for up to five weeks while monitoring their behavior throughout.Investigations show that the external servers used by the workers are linked to North Korean cyber operations that previously distributed malware such as InvisibleFerret, BeaverTail, and OtterCookie; the workers also heavily relied on ChatGPT for programming assistance and Google Gemini to forge identity documents. Researchers pointed out that North Korean IT workers obtained remote jobs by faking U.S. identities, with their earnings ultimately flowing into Pyongyang's weapons of mass destruction programs. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, such programs are expected to generate nearly $800 million for North Korea in 2024.

According to Bloomberg, former chief architect of Alibaba's flagship model, Lin Junyang, recently announced the establishment of a new company on the X platform, focusing on developing artificial intelligence agents for the digital and physical worlds.This comes less than six months after his unexpected departure from Alibaba. The company has received investment support from Tencent Holdings and several leading venture capital firms in China.

According to ChianCatcher news, crypto KOL KUAI DONG tweeted that, after verification from multiple sources, Bitget will restart its CNY / RMB related C2C business that has been suspended for 3 years. The exchange has recently recruited many related professionals with high salaries in the talent market, and internally considers this business as one of the most important this year after its US stock business. The underlying reason is to facilitate the entire process for those seeking to invest in US stocks, from depositing funds, obtaining stablecoins to investing in US stocks.Earlier, Bitget's Chinese region head, Xie Jiayin, tweeted, "The most important thing of this year is about to come, perhaps you will look forward to it, and you won't have to trouble yourself anymore."

Global venture capital firm Accel announced that it has raised a new fund of $3.5 billion for early-stage investments worldwide. A total of four funds were raised, including a global expansion fund of $1.35 billion for larger early rounds and follow-on investments; the U.S. fund and the European and Israeli funds are each $800 million, while the Indian fund is $550 million.Accel partner Harry Nelis stated that companies are raising funds more quickly in their early stages than ever before, which presents opportunities for investors, although the scale of risk still exists. Accel has invested in AI companies such as Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity.

According to The Information, AI infrastructure startup Trajectory announced the completion of a $40 million financing round, with a post-money valuation of $300 million, co-invested by Sequoia Capital. The specific financing round and other investors have not been disclosed.Trajectory was founded by researchers from tech companies such as Google and Apple, and primarily helps businesses customize open-source AI models for specific business needs, as well as optimize the software toolchain that supports AI Agent operations (referred to as "Agent Harness"). As the costs of using closed-source large models continue to rise, more and more companies are looking for alternatives: on one hand, they are reducing costs by fine-tuning and customizing open-source models, and on the other hand, they are improving the Agent execution framework to enable AI models to more effectively call tools and execute tasks.This trend is driving a new wave of entrepreneurial enthusiasm around model adaptation and Agent infrastructure. Trajectory aims to address key issues faced by enterprises in deploying AI Agents, including model performance optimization, task execution reliability, and adaptation to enterprise scenarios. The company hopes to help businesses build more efficient and cost-effective AI applications by providing model customization and Agent operation infrastructure.Investors believe that as AI evolves from simple chatbots to Agents capable of autonomously executing complex tasks, a new layer of infrastructure around model optimization and Agent engineering will become an important market. In recent years, Sequoia has also continued to increase its investment in the AI infrastructure sector, including investments in AI Agents and enterprise AI applications.

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. defense technology startup Neros has completed a $250 million equity financing, raising its post-money valuation to $2.5 billion, led by Sequoia Capital and the American Strategic Technology Fund, with participation from existing investors such as Thiel Capital.Neros plans to accelerate the research and development and mass production of the attack drone Archer and the interceptor drone Bandit, and promote localized manufacturing among allies. The company's current annual production capacity is about 14,000 units, with a goal to increase Archer's annual production capacity to 1 million units by 2028.This round of funding will also be used to expand the employee count from about 200 to 350 and upgrade the handheld terminals used to control the drones and the Archer AI model, enabling it to maintain target lock in GPS-denied environments and coordinate with other drones.

According to Fortune, the prediction market trading infrastructure startup River Markets announced the completion of a $8.5 million seed round financing, led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, and Qube Research Technologies.The new funds will primarily be used to expand the engineering team, enhance the speed and security of the trading system, and grow institutional clients, while also developing new tools to support large-scale fund management and cross-platform trading.In recent years, prediction markets have attracted the attention of institutional investors. Industry platform data shows that institutional trading demand is rapidly increasing. For example, the prediction market platform Kalshi previously stated that its institutional trading volume grew by approximately 800% within six months. Meanwhile, market participants have begun to hedge risks through prediction markets, including establishing trading positions around real economic variables such as carbon emission allowances and GPU rental prices.

CME Group announced that 24-hour trading for silver will start on September 11, expanding the around-the-clock trading range to 100 ounces of silver futures.

According to a report by Fortune, the cybersecurity startup Corma, established in 2025, announced the completion of a $60 million seed round financing, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Coatue.Corma is headquartered in Tel Aviv and San Francisco, and six weeks ago, it deployed its first AI model to several Fortune 100 and 500 companies across various industries (covering healthcare, financial services, energy, critical infrastructure, and retail).Unlike current cybersecurity models primarily trained by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc., for "offensive" purposes, Corma's trained model focuses on "defensive" strategies, concentrating on log and audit data analysis, identifying threats among massive events, and maintaining consistent strategies across thousands of operations. According to the company, its model has helped clients reduce threat response times by 94%.

SK Hynix has restarted the construction of its second NAND flash memory factory in Dalian, expecting to increase the monthly production capacity in the region by about 50%. The new production line is designed for a monthly capacity of approximately 50,000 wafers, combined with the existing Dalian Plant 1's monthly capacity of 100,000 wafers, bringing SK Hynix's total NAND production capacity in China to about 150,000 wafers per month. The factory began construction four years ago but was paused due to the downturn in the memory chip market and U.S. export restrictions on equipment to China, having only completed the structural framework.The investment in Dalian Plant 2 is driven by SK Hynix's NAND subsidiary Solidigm, with equipment installation expected to start as early as November this year, and plans to establish a mass production system in the first half of next year. Driven by the expansion of AI data centers, demand for enterprise-level SSDs has surged, with NAND prices rising nearly tenfold compared to a year ago, prompting the restart of investments. SK Hynix will adopt a dual-track strategy: the Dalian factory will use Intel's mature floating gate architecture to produce NAND at the hundred-layer level, while domestic factories like Cheongju M17 will focus on advanced NAND production of over 300 layers, the latter having announced an investment of 19.1 trillion won. Industry insiders expect that the equipment configuration of Dalian Plant 2 will be similar to that of Plant 1, maintaining a monthly production capacity in the range of 40,000 to 60,000 wafers.

U.S. AI data center startup Global AI announced the completion of $441 million (approximately 626 billion Korean won) in funding, led by JPMorgan Chase.Founded in 2024, Global AI positions itself as "the world's first sovereign AI hyperscale service provider," specifically designing, building, and operating dedicated AI data centers that are physically isolated (Air-gapped) from external networks for national and enterprise clients, focusing on high-security sensitive task processing scenarios.

According to The Information, citing informed sources, the AI startup Applied Compute, founded by former OpenAI researchers, is discussing a new round of financing, with a valuation expected to reach around $3 billion, more than doubling the valuation announced four months ago during the last financing round. The company is dedicated to helping businesses utilize their own data to run and customize open-source models.This financing is taking place against the backdrop of the company's recent strong revenue growth. Informed sources indicate that Applied Compute's current annualized revenue is approximately $50 million, nearly quadrupling the revenue level disclosed by its CEO Yash Patil last November. According to the sources, investor Elad Gil is negotiating to lead this round of financing, with the expected amount reaching several hundred million dollars. It is still unclear whether this valuation includes the newly injected funds. This round of financing has not yet been finalized, and specific terms may still change.

According to ChianCatcher news, OKX founder Star tweeted that the team completed a significant engineering milestone last week, successfully migrating a high-traffic core trading system from one country to another with zero user-visible downtime. The only impact was a temporary increase in latency of about 30-40 minutes. The team believes this may be the first achievement of its kind in the industry at this scale. Migrating a key trading system while maintaining uninterrupted service, data integrity, and trading continuity is extremely challenging.

Websea officially announces the launch of a new community representative group------Websea Star Goddess Group. The first batch of members consists of five highly representative community forces: Websea "Wave Goddess," "Star Sea Goddess," "Guardian Goddess," "Escort Goddess," and "Trust Goddess."As the core business card of the brand image and a bridge connecting global users, the Websea Goddess Group will break the boundaries between the platform and users, injecting strong vitality into global communities around core dimensions such as deep interaction, content co-creation, ecological promotion, and community building.In the future, the Websea Star Goddess Group will deeply participate in Websea Global Summit, online and offline community activities, and ecological cooperation, growing together with global users and jointly creating a next-generation Web3 trading ecosystem that is warmer, more immersive, and more inclusive.

According to exclusive reports from CTech (Calcalist), Israeli AI startup Decart is in deep negotiations with an international tech giant for a sale, with a valuation of about $6 to $7 billion, and the deal could be signed next week. Founded in 2023, Decart focuses on the development of real-time video generation AI models, employing around 100 people, and has raised approximately $450 million to date. The company just completed a $300 million funding round in May, with a valuation of $4 billion. Initial negotiations were with NVIDIA, and as they were nearing an agreement, another giant intervened, prompting the founder to shift focus to the new buyer. Industry speculation suggests the new buyer could be SpaceX, but Amazon and Nebius are also reportedly interested in participating.Decart's technological advantage lies in its ability to generate videos at a cost far lower than its competitors. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has maintained regular contact with co-founder Dean Leitersdorf since experiencing the game Oasis developed based on Decart's technology in 2024. Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire (who organized Musk's post-war trip to Israel) has been investing in the company since the seed round. If the buyer is SpaceX, it will establish its first R&D center in Israel. Previously, SpaceX had acquired AI programming startup Cursor for $60 billion after its IPO, and acquiring Decart would further strengthen its position in the AI infrastructure sector.

Yushu Technology officially launched online and offline subscriptions on August 10, with an issue price of 150.80 yuan per share. The total market value after issuance is approximately 60.993 billion yuan, with total fundraising of nearly 6.1 billion yuan, and the issuance price-to-earnings ratio is 219.23 times, significantly higher than the industry average of 38.56 times.Meituan holds a total of 9.65% of Yushu's shares before issuance through its three subsidiaries, making it the largest external institutional shareholder; Sequoia China holds a total of 7.11%, ranking second. Based on the issue price, the two institutions will receive substantial paper returns. Sequoia first participated in the capital increase in December 2019 with 15 million yuan, at which time the post-investment valuation was only 150 million yuan.A fund under DJI planned to invest 10.1286 million yuan in 2018 for a corresponding shareholding of about 17%, and completed the business registration, but chose to withdraw its investment in 2019. If this investment had been retained until now, the corresponding market value would be approximately 3.7 billion yuan based on the issue price. DJI did not explain the reason for the withdrawal, but in 2019, the company announced an anti-corruption notice, disclosing the handling of 45 employees suspected of corruption, which led to a complete halt of the investment department's work.Among other major shareholders, Jingwei Venture Capital holds 5.45%, Shunwei Capital holds 4.42%, and CITIC Securities holds a total of 4.49%. In terms of strategic placement, DeepSeek received 933,400 shares (subscription of 141 million yuan), and Shanghai Qishan Investment, a subsidiary of Tencent, received 903,300 shares. CITIC Securities, as the sole sponsor, will receive approximately 145 million yuan in sponsorship underwriting fees and will be allocated 808,900 shares through co-investment. Yushu also reminds that the issuance price-to-earnings ratio is significantly higher than the industry average, posing a risk of stock price decline. The deadline for payment for successful applicants is August 12.