Institutional Bulletin: Northern Data to raise €575m from Tether, Anthropic to receive $2bn from Google

The cryptocurrency industry is attracting an increasing number of institutional players. This is evident in both new investments in infrastructure and the growing attention companies are giving to Bitcoin as an asset class. The most important events of the past few weeks are in ForkLog’s roundup.

Bitcoin miner Northern Data to raise €575m from Tether

The German mining company Northern Data signed a credit facility with Tether for €575 million.

The firm will allocate the funds primarily to purchasing equipment for the Taiga Cloud division, which offers cloud computing services to generative AI projects in Europe.

There are also plans to expand data centres operating under the Ardent Data Centers brand.

Finally, the company will use the financing to scale its Bitcoin mining operations using liquid cooling technology for its Peak Mining.

IBM launches $500m AI-focused venture fund

The company IBM announced the creation of a venture fund — IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund — with a size of $500 million, aimed at AI projects.

«[The organization] will invest in current and future AI leaders who help enterprises around the world realise the potential of the technology for business», — the press release says.

IBM is the sole investor in the Enterprise AI Venture Fund.

According to IBM’s Vice President of Software and Commercial Director Rob Thomas, the fund intends to use the launched in May watsonx platform. The development is intended to help companies integrate AI into their business for data management.

WSJ: Google to invest $2bn in AI startup Anthropic

The company Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, according to WSJ citing sources.

The deal provides for an initial funding of $500 million and a further $1.5 billion later.

Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei in 2021. They were among those who left the company over internal disagreements, including on cooperation with Microsoft.

In February, media reported that Anthropic raised $300 million from Google. In March Spark Capital invested a similar amount in the AI startup. At that time its valuation reached $4.1 billion.

In August Anthropic raised $100m from South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom. In September Amazon announced strategic investments in the startup worth up to $4bn.

Standard Chartered and SBI Holdings to allocate $100m for crypto startup investments

The bank’s subsidiary SC Ventures and the Japanese conglomerate SBI Holdings will create in the UAE a company with a $100 million capital, specialising in investments in cryptocurrency projects.

The joint venture will invest in the development of:

• decentralised finance;
• tokenisation;
• infrastructure solutions;
• payments;
• metaverses.

The company will focus on projects at various stages of their lifecycle—from seed rounds to Series C.

Lightspeed Faction launches a $285m venture fund for blockchain startups

The venture firm Lightspeed Faction announced the launch of a $285 million fund to invest in early-stage blockchain-industry projects.

The structure is designed for long-term collaboration as the supported startups scale.

According to the statement, in addition to funding the fund will provide teams with help across a wide range of issues—from tokenomics to business management.

Lightspeed Faction is a joint venture between Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners and Faction.

Ethereum scaling startup Stackr raises $5.5m

Indian startup Stackr Labs raised $5.5m in a seed round led by Archetype.

Other participants include: a16z CSS, Lemniscap, Superscrypt, Spartan, Scalar Capital, a_capital and a number of angel investors.

The team has built a modular platform that enables creating Web3-applications for EVM networks using traditional programming languages.

«Thanks to our developer tools, new teams and existing enterprises using Web2 applications can easily migrate to decentralised solutions», the project team explained.

Apps built with the platform are referred to as “micro-rollups” (micro-rollups).

The funds raised are being used to expand the team, prepare for the launch of the first version of the product, and develop a developer ecosystem around it.

Modulus project for AI-on-chain integration raises $6.3m

The Modulus Labs startup, developing a secure solution for bringing AI on-chain to decentralised applications, raised $6.3m in a seed round.

It was led jointly by Variant and 1kx. Among participants: Floodgate, Inflection.xyz, Alliance, Bankless, Stanford, GCR and other investors.

The team argues that developers of dapps seeking access to AI capabilities are currently forced to give up decentralised security and accept centralisation risks.

The proposed Modulus solution uses zero-knowledge proofs to prevent potential manipulation in networks by AI-product providers through their algorithms.

The developers are confident this will give an edge to dapps using secure AI capabilities when interacting with users.