☀️ Raise and shine

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Ever had such a bad fallout with a friend (or former ally) that you went and started your own political party? Me neither. 

But that’s exactly what Elon Musk is doing with his newly announced America Party. Oh, and he also thinks that fiat is “hopeless,” so they plan to also embrace bitcoin. 

My question is, however, when will Tesla start accepting crypto again if traditional money’s doomed?

⬆️ Onwards and upwards

I’ve got some good news for you: Venture capital fundraising seems to be bouncing back after a slow May. 

According to Blockworks Research data, there was roughly $2.8 billion raised last month. 

If you remember from the last time we took a look at this data, VC funding topped off around $594 million in May. A dip from April, and quite a decline from March (which saw $2.9 billion in funding). 

As you can see in the chart above, even last month’s impressive numbers don’t top March, but they did come pretty close. 

The biggest rounds last month came from Kalshi (raising $185 million in a Series C), Digital Asset ($135 million), and Zama ($57 million). If you want to include private token sales, then World Liberty Financial joins the list after the UAE bought up $100 million of WLFI and a16z bought up $70 million worth of EigenLayer’s tokens. 

Per Tie Terminal data, 21 projects with a focus on artificial intelligence raised roughly $116 million last month. 

But while it had the most deals, it wasn’t the biggest category by amount raised…not by a long shot. Instead, that award goes to Prime Services, which is basically a fancy way to sum up firms offering a variety of financial services. 

Five prime services projects raised a collective $1.15 billion in funding last month. So while AI is the hot narrative, and we are seeing folks put their money where their mouths are, clearly the bulk of the funding is still going toward projects that offer financial services. 

Blockworks Research data also points to infrastructure still receiving a fair share of funding. Infra projects raised a whopping $881 million last month. 

But the most interesting data — for me at least — actually comes from the breakdown of the funding. Not by category, but rather by type. 

Looking back at Blockworks Research data, later-stage funding is on the rise. Pre-seed and seed rounds raised around $121 million, but Series B raised $127 million. And even later rounds, which go from Series C to F, raised $185 million. 

On average, in May, the biggest type of raise came from seed rounds, so clearly there was a shift. While it’s notable, especially as crypto continues to digest Circle’s IPO, it’s a bit too early to read much into it. It is, however, a data point I plan to keep a close eye on next month.

Overall, though, this was exactly the rebound I was looking for after examining May’s data last month. It shows that there’s still a lot of strength in certain categories, while things like AI are seeing more of a pickup when it comes to VC attention.

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• The Secret Service is making a push against crypto scams across the world. 

• 80,000 bitcoin were moved by Satoshi-era wallets last week. 

• Vitalik Buterin has a new proposal: a transactional gas limit that aims to make the network more resilient against some DDoS attacks.