The United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has revealed a roadmap to help asset managers adopt blockchain technology for fund tokenization. In a Tuesday announcement, the regulator said the initiative aims to “provide firms with additional clarity” to adopt tokenization and “drive innovation and growth in asset management.” “Tokenization has the potential to drive fundamental…
Kazakhstan has established a state-backed crypto reserve in partnership with Binance, marking the country’s latest move into digital assets. The initial digital asset in the fund’s portfolio is BNB (BNB), the utility token that drives transactions, fees, and governance on Binance’s blockchain, according to a Monday announcement on the Kazakhstan government’s website. The announcement did…
Eight U.S. and Indian venture capital and private equity firms — including storied investors Accel, Blume Ventures, Celesta Capital, and Premji Invest — have formed an unusual coalition to back India’s deep tech startups, pledging more than $1 billion over the next decade to strengthen U.S.-India tech ties. The alliance addresses longstanding funding concerns. In…
Crypto lobby group DeFi Education Fund has called on the US Senate Banking Committee to rethink how it plans to regulate the decentralized finance industry after reviewing its recently published discussion draft on a key crypto market-structure bill. The response, signed on behalf of DeFi Education Fund (DEF) members including a16z Crypto, Uniswap Labs, and…
Strategy, the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder, is launching a new kind of stock offering, aiming to raise more funds to invest in the world’s first cryptocurrency. Michael Saylor’s Strategy announced plans to conduct an initial public offering of 5 million shares of Strategy’s Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock (STRC). Strategy will…
Investing in Y Combinator startups can lead to significant returns to investors. “If you look at the data: 6% of YC companies become unicorns, and of that 6% a quarter become decacorns,” Kulveer Taggar told TechCrunch. Taggar is a two-time YC alum best known for founding Zeus Living, a property management startup that raised over…
Hong Kong-based crypto investment firm HashKey Capital announced the launch of an XRP fund, with plans to convert it into an exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the future. According to an April 18 announcement, the fund, officially titled the HashKey XRP Tracker Fund, is reportedly “the first investment fund in Asia designed to track the performance…
Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+ along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI startups. In a blog post Amazon shared with TechCrunch…
Since its founding in 2021, OpenAI Startup Fund has raised $175 million for its main fund and secured an additional $114 million through five separate special purpose vehicles, which are investment pools for specific opportunities. Unlike many sizable tech companies, OpenAI says it doesn’t use the company’s money to invest in startups. The ChatGPT maker…
Former NBA athlete Omri Casspi has raised $60 million for his latest venture fund, Swish Ventures, which will invest in early-stage cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and AI startups. The fund plans to back 10 companies, and will invest $5 million to $7 million per deal. Swish Ventures is Casspi’s second fund following the launch of Sheva…