AI Funding Heats Up as Crypto Awaits Its Regulatory Green Light

This Week Overview (July 20 - July 24, 2026):

• Meshy raised nearly $400M Series B at a $1.5B valuation, the largest round to date for a company built specifically on AI-powered 3D generation, led by IDG Capital, Matrix Partners China, and Monolith Management.

• Augustus raised $180M Series B led by Tiger Global at a $1B valuation to build a federally chartered “Global Dollar Bank” giving international fintechs stablecoin-and-SWIFT access to USD, on the back of a fresh OCC conditional national bank charter — total raised now $210M.

• Glow emerged from stealth with $180M Series A (Sequoia, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, Redpoint, Index) at a $1.2B valuation, building AI-native endpoint security for a world where AI agents sit on the corporate laptop.

• Movement Labs, the team behind the Movement Layer-2 network, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reported this week, after its MOVE token collapsed roughly 94–99% following a market-maker token-distribution scandal that got it delisted from major exchanges.

Meshy: the largest check AI 3D generation has ever seen

Three-dimensional content has been the industry’s obvious-but-unsolved AI application for years: every other modality (text, image, video, voice) got its foundation-model moment, and 3D lagged because the data, the tooling, and the use cases were messier. This week that gap closed with the single largest funding event AI 3D generation has recorded.

Meshy closed nearly $400M in Series B funding at a $1.5B valuation, its first publicly disclosed number, led by IDG Capital, Matrix Partners China, and Monolith Management, with existing shareholders Granite Asia, HongShan, BAI Capital, and Source Code Capital all returning. The company builds foundation models that generate print-ready, game-ready 3D assets directly from text, images, or sketches — collapsing what used to be a multi-day modeling workflow requiring specialized software and specialized humans into a prompt.

The traction numbers explain why investors leaned in at this size: annual recurring revenue is growing roughly 12x year over year, the platform has more than 12 million registered users, and users have generated over 100 million models to date. Those aren’t hobbyist numbers — they describe a tool already embedded in real production pipelines across gaming, e-commerce, and manufacturing, categories where a usable 3D asset has direct, measurable economic value the moment it’s produced instead of weeks later.

Alongside the round, Meshy shipped the “Meshy 3D Agent” — an agentic workflow that takes a rougher input (a sketch, a reference photo, a text description) and autonomously handles the multi-step process of turning it into a finished, usable model, rather than a single-shot generation the user has to iterate on by hand.

Text and image generation got their infrastructure-scale rounds years ago; video followed. 3D was the modality everyone assumed would eventually get its moment once the underlying models were good enough — and this week’s round is the market declaring that the technology has crossed that threshold, with real revenue and real usage to back the price tag rather than pure narrative.

Augustus: a bank charter as the moat, stablecoins as the product

If Meshy is this week’s proof that a new AI category just became investable, Augustus is proof that the oldest financial category — dollar banking — is being rebuilt with crypto-native rails underneath a very traditional wrapper.

Augustus closed a $180M Series B led by Tiger Global, with Hummingbird, QED, and the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle, and Deel all participating, at a $1B valuation, bringing its total raised to $210M. The company is building what it calls the “Global Dollar Bank”: a federally chartered U.S. bank giving international fintechs and banks direct USD account access and payment rails spanning SWIFT, ACH, SEPA, and stablecoin settlement.

The real asset isn’t the round size, it’s the charter. In May, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted Augustus preliminary conditional approval for a full national bank charter, making it only the eighth company since 2010 to receive that approval. Fintechs have spent a decade routing around the need for a charter through sponsor-bank partnerships; Augustus chose to become the bank instead, which lets it offer dollar access on its own terms.

The use of funds tells you where the demand actually lives: expansion into Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, regions where local fintechs and banks have the hardest time getting reliable, affordable USD rails, and where a stablecoin-backed dollar account solves an expensive, everyday problem rather than a speculative one. Augustus is the least “crypto-native”-looking story in this roundup, wrapping a stablecoin settlement layer inside the most conservative possible institution — and arguably the clearest evidence yet of what stablecoins are actually being used for in 2026.

Glow: securing the endpoint now that AI agents live there too

Cybersecurity spending follows wherever the attack surface just moved, and this week the attack surface moved onto the AI agents now running on employee laptops.

Glow emerged from stealth with a $180M Series A at a $1.2B valuation, an unusually large debut round backed by Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures, and Lux Capital, among others. Founders Roi Tiger (former Meta VP of Engineering), Omer Singer (former Snowflake cybersecurity strategy lead), Ophir Arie (former Claroty VP of R&D), and Arnon Joseph (former Meta engineering leader) built the company around a single premise: endpoint security, as a category, was designed for a world where humans and static software occupied a device — not autonomous AI agents holding standing permissions and the ability to act on their own.

“If you think of the past decade, everything was moving to the cloud and SaaS. Suddenly, AI lands on the endpoint” — Roi Tiger, Glow co-founder

That prevention-first posture matters because the threat model flipped in both directions at once: AI tools give attackers a faster way to craft convincing, adaptive attacks, and AI agents given broad device permissions are themselves a new kind of insider risk if compromised or simply misconfigured. Traditional endpoint detection, built to flag known malware signatures, was never built to reason about an autonomous process with legitimate credentials doing something it was technically allowed to do.

Glow already has paying customers in healthcare, retail, and financial services, sectors with the least tolerance for a security model built for the last decade’s threats, and employs close to 100 people, 70% based in Israel. A $1.2B valuation on a stealth debut says Sequoia and company think “AI on the endpoint”; it’s the default problem every enterprise is about to have.

Movement Labs: what happens when a token scandal actually reaches bankruptcy court

Not every story in a VC roundup is a raise, some are the other end of the cycle, and this week crypto got a reminder of what that looks like when it goes all the way to bankruptcy court.

MVMT Labs, the development team behind the Movement Layer-2 blockchain network, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, according to reporting this week. The filing reported liabilities of up to $10M against roughly $500K in assets, a startling gap for a project that had raised a $38M Series A led by Polychain Capital in 2024 and a roughly $100M Series B in early 2025 at a valuation near $3B.

The collapse traces back to a controversial market-maker agreement around the initial distribution of 66 million MOVE tokens, which triggered mass liquidations and got the token banned from major exchanges including Binance. MOVE has since traded down as much as 94–99% from its highs, and the largest creditor in the bankruptcy filing is co-founder Rushi Manche himself, with a claim exceeding $1.6M.

The court has set September 14, 2026 as the deadline for creditors to file claims, with a formal restructuring plan due by October 13, 2026.

Why this belongs in a roundup alongside four funding rounds: Movement Labs raised from serious, credible investors (Polychain led its seed round) at a serious valuation, and still ended up in bankruptcy court within roughly two years — not because the underlying technology failed, but because of a token-distribution and market-making structure that blew up the community’s trust before the product ever got a fair test.