According to BlockBeats statistics, there were a total of 4 financing deals last week, which is a decrease compared to previous weeks. The total amount raised was approximately 73.6 million US dollars, with an average financing amount of 18.4 million US dollars. The Web3.0+AI sector dominated the majority of the deals, followed by the infrastructure sector. There were relatively few deals in the metaverse/GameFi sector, and no financing deals were reported in the NFT/digital fashion sector, DeFi sector, social/creator economy sector, digital asset management/payment sector, and other sectors. The following chart shows the financing distribution across different sectors last week:

Metaverse/GameFi

There have been a total of 1 funding in the Metaverse/GameFi industry, with the total amount undisclosed.

Abyss World

On January 4th, according to an official announcement, Abyss World announced that it has received strategic round additional financing from 2Moon Capital. This move will help the game officially enter the market this year. Prior to this, Abyss World developer Metagame Industries completed a strategic round of financing, with investors including Sui developer Mysten Labs, Swiss gaming platform Xterio, game publisher Funplus, investment company 2moon Capital, and Big Brain Holdings.

Abyss World is an action role-playing game developed by Metagame Industries based on the Sui Layer 1 blockchain. It combines cross-chain gaming for both web2 and web3 users, allowing players to experience immersive gameplay in a virtual world. Abyss World is also the first 3A-level APRG game incubated by the decentralized cloud gaming protocol Portalverse in Octopus Network's multi-chain ecosystem. With a distributed edge cloud rendering network built on Portalverse, players can enter Abyss World anytime, anywhere with any device to explore the mysterious "Nordinia" and receive unique rewards.

The various characters, maps, and plots in the game will be supported by Sui blockchain technology, allowing players to create a real game world. In order to alleviate the power imbalance between casual and professional players in the entire game ecosystem, Abyss World allows the two types of players to depend on each other economically, while allowing them to participate freely in their favorite game activities. These two types of players do not participate in the same in-game activities. They only communicate with each other economically to avoid casual players feeling dissatisfied or unbalanced due to monetization.

Related reading: "Will Abyss World, supported by AMD and Epic Games, become the flagship chain game of the Sui ecosystem?"

Infrastructure

There were a total of 2 undisclosed financing deals in the infrastructure sector.

PowerPod

On January 4th, DePIN's PowerPod shared charging pile project completed a seed round of financing of $1 million. Waterdrip Capital led this round of financing, with participation from Iotex, Future Money Group, JDI Group, Future3 Campus, and Wagmi Venture. The funds will mainly be used to strengthen hardware development and testing, verify the minimum closed loop of the business model, and build the community ecosystem. PowerPod aims to build a globally open and interconnected charging network to help accelerate the goal of low-carbon emissions in the global transportation sector.

PowerPod is a global electric vehicle (EV) charging network aimed at quickly forming and maintaining low maintenance costs through a decentralized organizational structure, GameFi gameplay, and a positive revenue model. The first phase of PowerPod will focus on charging gun adapters. By adding detachable adapters to the top of charging piles that cannot share data, key data during the charging process can be accurately captured and securely sent to the blockchain. The second phase of hardware will be high-performance home AC chargers. The third phase of hardware is the "mobile charger," which allows car owners to charge using regular sockets (current is 10-16A) in emergency situations.

PowerPod adopts a token model similar to Hivemapper and Dimo: points + tokens. Within PowerPod, PT is a point-based currency generated algorithmically based on various incentivized positive behaviors, with no total supply limit. Another token, PPD, is the native governance token of the ecosystem. The total supply of PPD is 100 million, with 12.5 million produced in the first year and halved every 4 years. Specifically, 45% of PPD will be used for incentivizing positive behaviors, 15% will be allocated to developers, 18% to investors, 2% to advisors, and 20% to the ecosystem.

Related reading: "Detailed explanation of the automotive DePIN business represented by Hivemapper".

Gelato

On January 4th, Xiao Ray, Senior Director of IOSG Ventures, revealed on social media that Gelato, an Ethereum smart contract automation tool, recently completed its extended round of financing with IOSG Ventures as the lead investor.

Gelato Network is an Ethereum robot network that can automatically execute any smart contract for users on Ethereum and other blockchains, focusing on smart contract automation. In short, it is a tool for automatically executing Ethereum smart contracts and is the infrastructure of the autonomous field on the blockchain. Gelato aims to design an open and decentralized relay network to automatically execute users' smart contracts, addressing the pain point of the lack of automation in smart contracts on Ethereum. It can serve as a key part of the Web3 middleware stack to ensure trustless and automated value flow between smart contracts on top of Web3.

Gelato has been selected as one of the top 10 projects in the BSC MVBIII program, which is the most valuable builder accelerator program initiated by BSC. Without running any underlying server infrastructure, Gelato can automatically execute transactions based on the instructions specified by developers, providing an easy-to-use DeFi application building platform for developers. Gelato supports simple on-chain API access and is a decentralized and reliable on-chain Bot-as-a-Service API. The entire page is simple and clear, making it very user-friendly for operators. Currently, this project has been reviewed and provides strong support for the next generation of DeFi, NFT, and gaming applications in web3.

Related reading: "Gelato Network: Smart Contract Automation Tool | Project Introduction".

Web3+AI

There was a total of 1 funding in the Web3+AI industry, with a total amount exceeding $7360, accounting for 100% of the total funding last week. This includes:

On January 5th, AI startup Perplexity completed a Series B funding round with a valuation of $520 million and raised $73.6 million. The round was led by IVP, with participation from A-round investors NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Databricks, as well as new investors including Nvidia, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Balaji Srinivasan, Guillermo Rauch, Austen Allred, among others. Perplexity's total funding has now reached $100 million.

Perplexity was founded in 2019. The company's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, previously interned at DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI before becoming a research scientist at OpenAI. Perplexity's CTO, Denis Yarats, has worked at Facebook and Microsoft.

With the help of Perplexity's search tool, users can immediately obtain reliable answers to any question, including complete sources and citations. There is no need to click on different links, compare answers, or endlessly dig for information. In an era where misinformation and AI illusions are receiving increasing attention, Perplexity's philosophy is that accuracy and transparency are prerequisites for AI-driven search to be ubiquitous.

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Original article link in English.

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