New York-based venture capital firm Sharp Alpha Advisors has secured $25 million for its second fund, which will primarily invest in early stage software companies in the sports, gaming, and entertainment sectors. The fund aims to invest between $1 million and $2 million in 15 startups that fall under the category of "competitive entertainment," such as technology firms catering to sports betting, fantasy sports, streaming platforms, and video games. Sharp Alpha has already invested in London-based technology startup C15 Studio, which operates and distributes streaming channels for Formula 1 and One Championship, and plans to make further investments over the next three to five years. Additionally, the firm has a sidecar vehicle for limited partners to invest more money in individual companies within the fund.

On May 14th, TheoriqAI, a modular AI agent infrastructure, announced on X platform that it has completed a $6.2 million Super-Seed round of financing. Hack VC led the investment, with participation from Foresight Ventures, HTX Ventures, Figment Capital, HASH CIB, Inception Capital, Antalpha Ventures, NewTribe Capital, Stateless Ventures, Bitscale Capital, Construct Ventures, Hypersphere, IOSG Ventures, LongHash Ventures, HashKey Capital, SNZ Holding, Chainlink.

Niobium, a custom encryption chip provider specializing in zero-trust computing, has announced the completion of a $5.5 million seed round of financing, led by Fusion Fund, with participation from Morgan Creek Capital, Rev1 Ventures, Ohio Innovation Fund, and Hale Capital. It is reported that Niobium is building a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) accelerator chip and will commercialize it. The new funds will be used to explore the commercial applications of FHE in industries such as healthcare, finance, and blockchain, and also plan to showcase the solution and launch pilot projects in the fourth quarter of this year.

According to distributed GPU cloud computing AI training model project RunPod announced the completion of a $20 million seed round of financing, jointly led by Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Julien Chaummond, Nat Friedman, Adam Lewis and others. RunPod uses global distributed GPU cloud computing services to train, deploy, and scale AI models, thereby reducing the workload of developers. According to its official website, RunPad accepts cryptocurrency payments, but reminds users to strongly recommend setting up a crypto.com account as part of the risk management process and conducting any necessary KYC checks in advance.

Web3 AI platform ChainML has announced the completion of a $6.2 million seed round of expansion financing, led by Hack VC, with participation from Inception Capital, HTX Ventures, Figment Capital, Hypersphere Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. The platform also announced the launch of its agent-based foundation layer, Theoriq.

Baby Shark Universe project, a metaverse project, has completed a seed round of financing with a valuation of $34 million. Participating investors include Animoca Brands, CREDIT SCEND, Sui Foundation, Comma3 Ventures, Creditcoin, GM Ventures, Neuler, Notch Ventures, X+, and Planetarium. The specific amount has not been disclosed, and the new funds will be used for development and global marketing. According to reports, Baby Shark Universe is an open-world role-playing game where players can create their own game content (items, maps), enjoy content created by other players, and expand the game's narrative based on their choices and actions.

The Bitcoin lending protocol Zest has raised $3.5 million. The seed round was led by billionaire investor Tim Draper, with participation from Binance Labs, Flow Traders, Trust Machines, and others. The Zest protocol uses the Nakamoto upgrade and bridging asset sBTC (pegged to Bitcoin 1:1) on the Bitcoin Layer 2 stack to create a fully native lending experience on the world's largest blockchain network.

Web3 social infrastructure UXLINK announced the completion of a new round of $5 million financing, led by SevenX Ventures, INCE Capital, and HashKey Capital. It is reported that UXLINK's total financing has now exceeded $15 million.

According to official sources, SevenX Ventures has announced investment in UXLINK, a leading global group-based Web3 social platform. UXLINK is the first user-driven Web3 social platform and infrastructure, featuring familiar social relationships (similar to Facebook/WeChat) and Web3 group models.Since its launch in April 2023, UXLINK has registered over 5.5 million users, with over 100,000 groups and over 1 million DAPP daily active users and over 200,000 daily active users on the chain. In addition, UXLINK's first season airdrop is currently underway, with plans to cover 10% of the best users, with a scale of over 500,000.Jon, the founding partner of SevenX Ventures, said, "We are optimistic about UXLINK's ability to issue and trade assets through socialization, becoming a key central hub linking Web3 infrastructure and application scenarios."

SoftBank Group (SBG) Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son's "AI revolution" has begun. SoftBank Group plans to expand its business into industries such as data centers, robots, and power generation using AI semiconductors as a breakthrough. The expected investment amount could reach up to 10 trillion yen (approximately RMB 464.09 billion). American companies such as Microsoft are also making huge investments in the AI field, indicating a trend of global tech giants entering this growing field. (Nikkei News)