Startups & VCs - Web3 AI SaaS

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: Ссылка скрыта

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: Ссылка скрыта 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. 👉 Ссылка скрыта 👈 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

🚀 $100K IN GRAFANA CLOUD CREDITS FOR STARTUPS If you're building a startup, keeping an eye on your product, infrastructure, and user experience is essential. Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, an observability platform that brings logs, metrics, traces, profiles, and more into one place. It has also been recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms, making this a perk worth a closer look. And now, eligible startups can get up to $100,000 in Grafana Cloud credits 🎁 The credits can be used across Grafana Cloud services, including managed logs, metrics and traces, performance testing, profiling, incident response, frontend observability, and synthetic monitoring. 💡 The offer includes: • $100K in credits for 12 months or until your next funding round, whichever comes first • 20% guaranteed discount after the credits run out, with deeper discounts possible based on consumption • A simple application with just 4 questions, taking around 2 minutes This can be especially useful for startups scaling their infrastructure, teams moving from Grafana OSS to a managed setup, or founders who want a full observability stack without adding a big infrastructure bill. One thing to keep in mind: if you're planning to raise soon, timing matters because the credits end when your next funding round closes 👉 Check the Grafana Labs perk on InnMind and apply And this is only one of the perks available to founders. 🚀 Explore InnMind’s Perks Club to discover more useful offers designed to help startups save resources and scale smarter. Build more. Spend smarter. Scale faster. 💪

The market is tough. But seems you can still raise on a launchpad… if you choose the pad wisely 😉 Ссылка скрыта Apply to AlphaMind here