- Venture activity has been climbing week over week.
- This week’s largest deal was behind the artificial intelligence platform Planck, for $200 million.
Venture capitalists and other investors poured $644 million into crypto and DeFi deals this week amid renewed optimism in the crypto markets as Bitcoin breached $94,000.
This week’s venture activity was about 43% higher than the investments made last week, and almost five-fold above the activity of just two weeks ago.
So far this year, there’s been about $7 billion in deals, according to DefiLlama.
The key deals: investments in Planck Network, an artificial intelligence-focused blockchain; BitDeer, a Bitcoin mining company and chip manufacturer; and Upexi, a company looking to establish a Solana-reserve firm.
Let’s take a look:
Planck Network, $200 million
Planck Network wins the week in terms of deal size, with Rollman Management Digital being the only investor involved in this $200 million pre-token purchase.
Planck develops a Layer-1 blockchain intended as “the core infrastructure for building, training, and deploying AI models at scale,” according to a statement.
The Planck Network interacts with existing blockchains like Solana and Ethereum so that crypto assets and data can move back and forth between Planck and those chains.
The platform allows for users with a graphics processing unit in their computer to rent it out to the network for use in AI applications.
Bitdeer, $179 million
Singapore-based Bitdeer, a publicly listed Bitcoin mining chip manufacturer and data center firm, won $179 million in financing from loans and equity through its affiliate Matrixport.
Bitdeer operates data facilities in the US, Bhutan, and Norway. It has a market capitalisation of $1.6 billion.
“The financing highlights Bitdeer’s capital-intensive strategy to scale its ASIC manufacturing division, including investments in in-house chip development, as it seeks to challenge incumbents Bitmain and MicroBT,” the company wrote in a statement.
Upexi, $100 million
Perhaps the most interesting deal of the week goes to Upexi, a project following Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin-stockpiling approach at Strategy with one exception — Upexi is buying Solana.
To that end, it’s selling $100 million worth of shares, or “pre-funded warrants,” most of which will be used to buy, hold, and manage a large treasury of Solana.
The sale was led by GSR, with participation from investors including Delphi Ventures, Maelstrom, Anagram, Frank Chaparro, and Upexi CEO Allan Marshall.
UPXI stock jumped 13% on the news.
Also of note
Not to be outdone, there was a $55 million token purchase supporting LayerZero, a $29 million investment in staking platform Symbiotic and the raising of a new fund by RockawayX for $125 million.
Update May 1: This story has been updated to reflect that about $7 billion had been raised by crypto projects at the time of the original publication of this story.
Andrew Flanagan is a markets correspondent for DL News. Have a tip? Reach out to aflanagan@dlnews.com.