🦄Startups & VCs (Web3, AI & SaaS) 🕘 история названий (1)

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Am I really seeing this? 😳 From “software is eating the world” to “full steam ahead to socialism”. Marc, blink twice if the Politburo took over the account. 😉

AI agents got crypto wallets. Banks moved money onchain. Crypto VC capital kept flowing, but toward fewer startup teams. 👉 The August Techstars Web3 Startup Digest is live, curated by InnMind. What founders should pay attention to: ☁️ Cloudflare is building stablecoin wallets for AI agents, with delegated budgets, spending caps & merchant controls. ⚖️ The US published concrete proposals for stablecoin licensing & token fundraising. 💸 July crypto funding looked healthy on the surface, but the 10 largest rounds captured 85% of disclosed VC investment. 🔐 Most stolen value came from infra & operational failures, not the smart-contract exploits founders usually obsess over. The useful question is no longer “which chain?” It is: who needs to move value, what permissions do they need & why should they trust you? Read the full founder briefing: https://read.letterhead.email/techstars-web3/78mqnogzt8

FYI: 5 web3 VCs that actually deployed in July 2026 💸 #VCrating 58 rounds closed in web3 & crypto last month, $2.01B disclosed. July 2025 had 69 rounds & $2.67B. Fewer deals, smaller total, & money still moved every week of the month. Here is who was actually writing cheques, & into what. 1️⃣ Coinbase Ventures, 5 deals. The busiest fund of the month: - Venice AI (private AI inference) $65m Series A - Velocity (stablecoin treasury & settlement) $34m Series A - Cyclops (crypto payments for PSPs) $20m Series A - ZeroDelta (multichain clearing) $6.8m seed - Tenor (non-custodial lending) seed, amount undisclosed It led none of them. Coinbase Ventures joins rounds that someone else prices, so treat it as your second call, never as your anchor. 2️⃣ Dragonfly Capital, 2 deals, led both: - Venice AI $65m Series A - Velocity $34m Series A Two leads in one month, both Series A, both AI or stablecoin rails. If that is your category & you have revenue, this is a fund setting terms right now. 3️⃣ Becker Ventures, 3 deals, all strategic rounds: - Memecoin.Fun (token launch platform) $3.5m, as lead - SwarmBase (onchain identity & coordination) $7m - Alphea (AI-native L1) $5m Small cheques, quick decisions, consumer & AI friendly. A realistic first name on a pre-seed list. 4️⃣ SBI Holdings, 2 deals, led both: - Gauntlet (institutional DeFi vaults) $125m Series C - EDX Markets (institutional exchange infra) $76m Series C Japanese corporate capital led the two biggest institutional rounds of the month. Late stage only, so file it for your Series B+ path. 5️⃣ Tether, 2 deals, led both: - Mercado Bitcoin (Brazilian digital asset platform) $20m strategic - Pact Labs (payroll & payments infra) $7m Series A Also on 2 deals each: Variant (led Infinia & Tenor), Bain Capital Crypto, Castle Island Ventures, Ripple, Animoca Brands, Hack VC, MH Ventures, Nascent. What July says about the VC trends in web3: ▪️ DeFi & CeFi took 21 of 58 rounds & $837m. Still the largest block. ▪️ AI & data: 12 rounds, second by count. ▪️ NFT, gaming & metaverse: 1 round. $4m. In the whole month. ▪️ Strategic rounds (16) outnumbered seed rounds (11). Exchanges, corporates & protocols are buying positions directly, so a pure "VC list" misses half the buyers. ▪️ 17 of 58 rounds published no lead at all. Those rounds were assembled cheque by cheque, & those are the ones a warm intro can still get into. 👉 Deals happen even in a slow month. Missing them is usually a targeting problem: pitching funds that stopped deploying, or writing to info@ instead of the partner who led a round like yours. That is what we built PitchPop for. Paste your deck & get matched to funds by real deal activity, with the named partner & a working route to them. First 3 investor matches free, no signup: https://app.pitchpop.app/ August rating drops next week. Which fund do you want us to break down? 👇

Another round closed in your niche last week. Did you know the investors backing it? Twyne raised a $2.5M seed. Cyber.Fund led the round, Ethereal Ventures co-led. Have you ever pitched them? Did you know they're actively deploying into DeFi at seed right now? Most founders don't. Because public web3 investor data is a mess: half the "active" funds on any list stopped writing checks a year ago, and a fund name alone tells you nothing about who inside leads deals like yours. So founders keep pitching investors who’re never going to reply, & the rounds in their niche keep closing without them. That's exactly what we built PitchPop to fix. Paste your deck and it matches you against: ▪️ 579 Web3 investor orgs, tracked by real deal activity ▪️ 517 of them with a named partner on file, not info@ ▪️ 203 verified rounds closed in 2026, every one with a source & facts You get the funds deploying in your niche right now, the partner who leads your kind of deal, a working route to them, & best converting outreach message written for that specific person. First 3 targets fully open. for Free, no signup, no card to test. 👉 https://app.pitchpop.app/ 👈 Public beta, still get’s improved daily. Fundraising support features & deals updated weekly. Become the early user to benefit from it all at min price! The rounds are closing either way. The question is whether the right investors know you exist. Be there at the right place & time.

VC funding is up. Seed funding is down 42%. H1 2025 → H1 2026: All venture funding: $56.5B → $58.7B Seed: $6.5B → $3.8B Series C+: $23.9B → $31.8B So no, early-stage founders are not imagining it. There is more money in venture than before. There is just much less of it available at seed stage.☹️ The market is not recovering evenly. It is concentrating at the top. Source: Carta

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The market is tough. But seems you can still raise on a launchpad… if you choose the pad wisely 😉 https://t.me/alphamind_official/643 Apply to AlphaMind here

🚀 August 2026 Seed Deals: Where Is Web3 VC Money Going? August is not over yet, and bringing some interesting signals for Web3 founders. Capital is flowing into startups connecting blockchain with real financial activity, infrastructure, data and established industries. Here are the seed-stage deals worth watching 👇 💰 Dow Protocol | $10.5M Seed Dow Protocol is building a PayFi and RWA platform that helps e-commerce merchants access working capital faster. The $10.5M round was led by MH Ventures, Mapleblock, Animoca Brands, Arcane Group, HSKChain, Essentia Partners and Quartet Group. 🌍 Vangrid | $9M Seed Amsterdam-based Vangrid is building a DePIN network that turns smartphone-captured locations into verified 3D spatial data for robotics, Physical AI, government and defense. The $9M round was structured as a SAFT, with HashKey, Borderless, Crypto.com Capital, Animoca Brands, Gate Labs and Mapleblock Capital among the key investors. 📈 River Markets | $8.5M Seed River Markets is building institutional trading infrastructure for prediction markets, helping professional traders access and manage liquidity across venues such as Kalshi and Polymarket. The $8.5M seed round was led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, Qube Research Technologies and angel investors from Google, Nvidia, Novig, JPMorgan and Citadel. ✈️ Entravel Group | $7.5M Seed Entravel provides crypto-native travel infrastructure, embedding hotel booking into fintech apps and crypto exchanges serving around 300M users. The $7.5M round was co-led by Ethereal Ventures and Finality Capital, with GSR, Varrock, G1 Ventures, Seier Capital, Veris Ventures, Funfair Ventures and WTG Ventures also participating. 📱 Memebook | $1M Seed Memebook is a Solana-based social platform combining an Instagram-style experience with wallet-based identity and verification. The startup raised $1M from TOF Ventures. 💡 What can other founders learn from these deals? The strongest fundraising stories are increasingly built around a real problem, real customers and measurable demand. For Web3 founders, the key is to show why blockchain makes the solution better, where your distribution comes from and which investors can bring strategic value beyond capital. The bigger signal from these August deals? Web3 is increasingly becoming infrastructure for real economic activity. 🔥

🎯 How to Pitch Your Web3 Startup in a Conversation with an Investor Got a meeting with a VC? Great. Now forget the 30-slide pitch deck for a moment. A strong investor conversation is about one thing: making the investor quickly understand why your project matters and why you can build it. Here are the rules founders should keep in mind 👇 🔥 Start with the problem, not the technology. Skip the long explanation of your protocol, architecture or token mechanics. Tell the investor what painful problem exists, who has it, and why your solution can solve it better. 📊 Bring proof, not promises. “Massive market” and “huge potential” are easy to say. Real traction is harder to fake. Talk about revenue, users who actually use the product, retention, transaction activity, fees, pilots, partnerships or other signals that show people want what you are building. 💡 Make your story easy to follow. A good conversation should feel like a dialogue, not a technical lecture. Explain the business first. Then let the investor dig deeper into the technology, token model or infrastructure when they want to. 🎯 Know your fundraising story. Be ready to answer three simple questions: • How much are you raising? • What instrument are you using? • What specific milestone will this round unlock? If you need a token, explain why it is essential to the network. If the product can work perfectly well with stablecoins or traditional rails, be prepared to explain the strategic reason for a token. 👀 Expect difficult questions. A serious investor may ask about token utility, TVL quality, regulation, unit economics, competition, security or your long-term moat. Don't try to dodge these questions. A clear answer, including what you still need to figure out, can build much more trust than a perfect-looking story. 🚀 And remember: the goal of the first conversation is momentum. A great meeting ends with a clear next step: another call, a data request, an introduction, or a defined diligence process. “Sounds interesting, let's keep in touch” feels nice. A concrete next step is what you should look for. Stay sharp—every tough question is a chance to stand out and prove your vision 😉