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📊 Crypto Venture Weekly: September 8–12, 2025 $1.48B was raised across 24 projects this week, led by Figure’s $788M IPO and Rapyd’s $500M Series F. Forward Industries and Eightco Holdings added $1.94B in SOL and WLD reserves. Here’s what the top 7 are building 👇 🖱 Figure ($788M IPO, $5.29B valuation) Blockchain-native capital marketplace connecting origination, funding, and secondary markets. 🖱 Rapyd ($500M, General Catalyst, Spark, BlackRock, Dragoneer, Altimeter, Target Global) Global payments infrastructure platform bridging fintech and crypto rails. 🖱 Gemini ($50M, Nasdaq Ventures) Centralized exchange raising strategically ahead of its IPO. 🖱 Inversion ($26.5M, Dragonfly, HashKey, ParaFi, Mirana, MoonRock, Balaji Srinivasan) Private equity model applied to crypto, acquiring low-margin trad businesses and layering blockchain infra. 🖱 Tetra ($10M, Shopify, Purpose, Wealthsimple, National Bank Holdings) Canadian digital asset custodian building a regulated CAD-backed stablecoin. 🖱 Multipli ($5M, Pantera, Spartan, Sequoia, Avalanche Foundation) Yield platform for native, stable, and tokenized real-world assets. 🖱 Runesoul ($4M, Bitgo Capital, AccelByte, IGC Global) 3D card-based action RPG in Web3.

Investor focus this week was on stablecoin infra, regulated custody, tokenized yields, and gaming - while massive treasury moves and M&A reshaped the landscape.

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⚠️ xAI fires 500 annotators, then announces 10x hiring spree Elon Musk’s xAI laid off 500 data annotators overnight — roughly one-third of its annotation division, the company’s largest unit. Hours later, xAI posted that it plans to grow its “AI trainer” team by 10x. 🖱 Laid off staff were “general-purpose” annotators handling basic labeling tasks 🖱 Departures were abrupt - same-day emails, revoked access, rising complaints 🖱 New hiring targets domain experts in STEM, finance, medicine, security, and more 🖱 Suggests routine annotation is being automated, with humans reserved for complex work 🖱 Messaging framed as building “AI that seeks the truth”

The move highlights a shift from broad, manual labeling toward specialized human input raising the question: is this AI taking jobs, or creating new ones?

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📊 Gemini pops 14% in $425M Nasdaq debut Crypto exchange Gemini surged on its first day of trading, closing at $32 per share - a 14% jump from its IPO price of $28. The debut raised $425M, marking another win in crypto’s streak of successful listings. 🖱 Fully diluted market cap opened at $3.3B, well below its $7.1B peak valuation in 2021 🖱 IPO demand forced Gemini to raise its price range twice before pricing above it 🖱 Nasdaq invested $50M in a private placement at the IPO price, boosting confidence 🖱 Recent crypto IPOs like Circle, Bullish, and Figure also saw strong first-day gains 🖱 Despite mounting losses, investors piled in, underscoring appetite for crypto-native firms

Gemini’s public debut is a clear signal: traditional markets are warming up to crypto exposure, and the Winklevoss twins just scored their biggest validation yet.

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💼 Tesla board chair defends Elon Musk’s $1T pay package Tesla shareholders will vote in November on a 10-year, $1 trillion compensation deal for Elon Musk - the largest in corporate history. Board Chair Robyn Denholm, who helped craft the plan, dismissed criticism. 🖱 Performance-based: Musk gets nothing unless he hits future goals 🖱 Power over pay: Denholm says the real issue is Musk’s voting control, not the dollar figure 🖱 Timing: Proposal arrives as Tesla’s vehicle sales and profits are slipping 🖱 Dismissive tone: Denholm called the debate “a little bit weird”

Tesla positions the package as a bet on Musk’s ability to drive long-term growth, but with financial headwinds, the shareholder vote may be anything but smooth.

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⚡ Musk buys $1B in Tesla shares to boost control Elon Musk just purchased about 2.57M Tesla shares in open-market trades, spending nearly $1B to slightly lift his stake from 12.7% to 12.8%. 🖱 Paid between $372–$397 per share in the transactions 🖱 Tesla stock jumped over 8% pre-market after the disclosure 🖱 Musk has said he wants ~25% voting power at Tesla for long-term influence 🖱 Even this billion-dollar buy moves him only a fraction closer 🖱 Comes as Tesla pivots beyond EVs into robotaxis, AI, and robotics

The purchase signals confidence, but highlights the steep cost of Musk’s quest for control — raising the question: can he realistically reach 25% without massive new funding or board maneuvers?

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💼 Robinhood opens VC fund to retail investors Robinhood is launching Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI), a closed-end, publicly traded venture capital fund designed to let everyday investors buy into private companies, a space long reserved for institutions and the wealthy. 🖱 Managed by new arm Robinhood Ventures, filed with the SEC 🖱Open to Robinhood’s 26.5M customers 🖱 Targets private firms as public listings keep shrinking 🖱 Offers long-term, illiquid stakes with higher potential upside (and risk) 🖱 Pitched as democratizing access to Silicon Valley-style investing

The fund pushes the “retail revolution” into venture capital, but raises the question: will broad access to risky, illiquid startups empower small investors, or expose them to hazards they can’t hedge?

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🔐 Google releases VaultGemma: a differentially private LLM Google unveiled VaultGemma, a 1-billion parameter model trained from scratch under strong differential privacy (DP) constraints, with weights open to the public. 🖱 Establishes new scaling laws for DP-LLMs, quantifying trade-offs among model size, compute, data, and noise levels. 🖱 VaultGemma uses sequence-level DP (ε ≤ 2.0, δ ≤ 1.1×10⁻¹⁰) over sequences of 1024 tokens. 🖱 Shows little to no memorization of training data under tests, indicating strong privacy in practice. 🖱 Performance is comparable to non-private models from ~5 years ago, though still behind modern non-DP ones. 🖱 Released on Hugging Face and Kaggle, plus technical report, to accelerate community work in private AI.

The launch marks a big step: balancing utility and privacy in large language models — but asks the question: how quickly can that utility gap be closed for real-world use?

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👟 Under Armour’s tech pivot that almost broke the brand In the 2010s, Under Armour tried to reinvent itself as a “health-focused tech company”, inspired by Nike+, Strava, and Fitbit. It spent $700M+ acquiring fitness apps to build a connected ecosystem, but the bet collapsed. 🖱 Acquired MapMyFitness, Endomondo, and MyFitnessPal (then the biggest calorie tracker) between 2013–2015. 🖱 Vision: collect user data, sell connected sneakers, personalize gear, and monetize via subscriptions + device partnerships. 🖱 Reality: MyFitnessPal sold in 2020 at half price, MapMyFitness lost users, Endomondo shut down, stock fell as Nike/Adidas surged. 🖱 Core mismatch: UA’s audience were performance athletes, not casual wellness users, they already relied on Garmin, Apple, and niche pro tools. 🖱 Engagement in UA apps stayed weak; no rollout of premium features like personalized training or online coaching.

Data alone isn’t enough, success comes from turning it into insights your audience values and monetization that actually works.

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🌐 SpaceX buys $17B spectrum stake to supercharge Starlink direct-to-cell service SpaceX has acquired $17 billion worth of satellite spectrum licenses from EchoStar to boost Starlink’s ability to deliver broadband directly to cellphones, especially in under-connected areas. 🖱 Deal split: $8.5B paid in cash, $8.5B in SpaceX stock. 🖱 Spectrum includes the H-block (1915-1920 MHz), used for 4G/5G mobile services, plus AWS-4 from EchoStar. 🖱 EchoStar’s prior plan to build its own LEO 5G constellation is scrapped. 🖱 Starlink’s direct-to-device service launched in 2024 for text transmission; this spectrum boost promises much greater throughput, up to 20× more vs current satellites. 🖱 The deal also closes an FCC investigation of EchoStar’s use of that spectrum.

This is a big step toward eliminating “dead zones” for mobile connectivity, pushing broader broadband access, especially in remote areas. If SpaceX delivers, the gap between on-ground mobile networks and space-based connectivity keeps shrinking, but scaling performance, latency, and cost effectively will be the real test.

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💰 Alphabet’s market cap tops $3 trillion for the first time Google now joins the elite club alongside Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple. Next in line is Amazon, with a market cap of $2.4 trillion.

Takeaway: The trillion-dollar race is no longer rarefied air, it’s becoming the new benchmark for Big Tech dominance.

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