Institutional Roundup: Binance backs five projects, Mistral AI raises €105m

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

Binance backs five projects

Binance invested in five “the most effective projects” as part of the fifth season of its incubator programme.

Among the selected startups:

• Bracket Labs. A project that creates structured on-chain products using leverage. The company’s main focus is the BracketX.fi trading platform;
• DappOS. A protocol to lower barriers to entry into Web3 through solutions that improve usability and accessibility of applications;
• Kryptoskatt. A company that simplifies Web3 finance through a comprehensive set of solutions including accounting, portfolio management and tax reporting. The project supports more than 2000 DeFi protocols, 100 exchanges and 50 blockchains;
• Mind Network. A fully encrypted network built on the Adaptive Fully Homomorphic Encryption platform. It is used as a decentralised confidential data storage;
• zkPass. A decentralised solution for anonymous identity verification in Web3, based on multi-party computation technologies and zero-knowledge proofs.

In this season, more than 900 companies applied and only 2% were admitted to participate.

AI startup Mistral AI raises a record €105m in Europe

The Paris-based AI project Mistral AI raised €105m in a seed round. The sum is a record for this stage of financing in Europe. According to the FT, the round valued the startup at €240m.

Journalists say the size of the investment reflects the AI boom and Europe’s desire to create a viable alternative to Silicon Valley firms such as OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, or Google’s DeepMind.

“There is a growing realisation that this technology is transformative, and Europe needs to do something with it as regulator and as customer and investor,” said Arthur Mensch.

A former DeepMind researcher founded the firm together with Timothe Lacroix and Guillaume Lample.

The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Investors included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, billionaire Xavier Niel and the French state investment bank Bpifrance.

Mistral AI currently has no product. The first employees started at the company in the first half of June. In early 2024 the startup plans to launch a “large language model” analogous to the “generative AI” underpinning the ChatGPT app.

Gensyn cross-chain compute AI network raises $43m

The blockchain-based compute network provider for AI platforms Gensyn raised $43 million in a Series A round led by a16z. Participants included CoinFund, Canonical Crypto, Protocol Labs, Eden Block and other investors.

The London-based startup is building a marketplace protocol that lets owners of small data centres and even individual devices provide compute power for machine learning. Buyer-seller relationships are settled on the blockchain.

Gensyn acknowledged that the AI boom, sparked by the success of ChatGPT, helped drive the funding.

According to a16z, Gensyn’s solution can increase available power for machine learning by 10-100x.

Cosmos-based Neutron blockchain raises $10m

Neutron — a blockchain project in the Cosmos ecosystem Cosmos — closed a seed round of funding for $10m led by Binance Labs and CoinFund. Other investors include: Delphi Ventures, LongHash, Semantic Ventures and Nomad.

Neutron offers an “economical and secure environment” for creating smart contracts and decentralised applications. The infrastructure and tools are built on Cosmos SDK and CosmWasm technologies, ensuring compatibility with 51 appchains in the ecosystem.

“Neutron was created to address three main problems faced by Cosmos smart-contract developers: lack of security, reliable neutrality and access to cross-chain infrastructure,” said one of the platform’s co-founders Avril Duteil.

The project started in May and was the first Cosmos blockchain launched with Replicated Security. This feature allows so-called “consumer chains” to connect to validators of the Cosmos Hub for safe operation of applications.

According to the team, the funds will be directed to expanding the Neutron ecosystem and to spur the development of new dapps.

Connext cross-chain protocol raises $7.5m

Connext raised $7.5m in a strategic financing round, with a valuation of $250m.

Investors include: Polychain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, NGC Ventures, Ethereal Ventures, Polygon Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, KXVC, a_capital, No Limit Holdings, 1k(x), #Hashed, Factor, Scalar Capital and Dokia Capital.

The funds will go toward creating the Connext Foundation to fund ideas aimed at scaling the project, community initiatives and other long-term growth strategies.

Connext reported 20,000 users and over 1.2 million transactions processed. The project’s total funding to date stands at $23.5m.

Also on ForkLog:

• Amazon allocated $100m to the development of generative AI.