Weekly Funding Report | Stripe to Acquire AI Company OpenRouter for More Than $7 Billion; AI Chip Company Etched Raises $700 Million

In the AI chip and data center sectors, Etched raised $700 million and reached a valuation of $21 billion, while DataVita raised approximately $400 million and signed a 15-year data center lease agreement with CoreWeave. Several other major funding rounds were also announced. Groq raised $350 million, and its valuation was revised downward to $3.5 billion. Starcloud raised $25 million in new funding to support the commercial deployment of satellite GPUs and research and development for next-generation data center satellites. Muon Space completed a $250 million Series C, while Starcloud received investment from NVIDIA and others.

Expansion of the AI application ecosystem was also active. Higgsfield raised $400 million, Wispr completed a $28 million Series B, and Rillet reached a valuation of more than $1 billion through a $100 million Series C. Callosum raised $100 million in a round led by Atomico. NeoSoul completed an $11 million pre-Series A round and is working to expand its agent-based trading platform.

In robotics and embodied AI, SoftBank invested $200 million in Gravis Robotics, while 中科第五纪, 眸深智能 and Current Robotics, among others, disclosed funding rounds. Current funding trends are moving toward accelerating the development of AI agent infrastructure and real-world applications. In M&A, Stripe is expected to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, while OpenAI was reported to have acquired the InstantDB team to strengthen its AI agent infrastructure. Cypherpunk Mining acquired Winklevoss assets and aims to expand as a Zcash mining company.

In crypto funding, notable transactions included twyne's $2.5 million seed round, Beldex's $8 million raise and Blueprint Finance's completed funding round. Fortune Protocol has raised more than $4 million in total and plans to use the funds to expand its on-chain financial infrastructure.