Startups & VCs - Web3 AI SaaS

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? 👇