Capital at Scale: The Deals Defining Global Fintech, Cleantech and AI Infrastructure

Key deals of the week (December 08 - December 12 2025)

Airwallex: The Fintech That Keeps Scaling While Everyone Else Cuts Back

Airwallex cemented its place among the top global fintech platforms with a $330M Series G that pushes its valuation to $8B and shows a clear intent: it’s going after the U.S. market with real force. The company, born in Melbourne and now anchored between San Francisco and APAC, has evolved from a cross-border payments tool into a full-stack operating system for global money movement — powering payments, treasury, FX, and expenses across 200+ countries. 

With Addition leading the round only six months after its last raise, Airwallex is gearing up to double its U.S. team and accelerate AI-driven product expansion as cross-border finance becomes more fragmented, regulated, and strategically important for global businesses.

Spark Cleantech: A Rare Industrial Climate Bet That Actually Makes Engineering Sense

Spark Cleantech pulled in €30 million to push one of the more practical decarbonization pathways heavy industry has seen in years. The Paris spin-out from CentraleSupélec is commercializing methane plasmolysis (a pulsed-plasma system that cracks natural gas into clean hydrogen and solid carbon before it’s burned). For steelmakers and other high-temp operators, that means a direct drop-in path to low-carbon heat without ripping out legacy equipment, plus a byproduct stream of carbon nanomaterials with real commercial value. The round led by 360 Capital and Taranis, combines €17M in equity with additional non-dilutive support and will fund Spark’s first industrial-scale module as the company begins live deployments with manufacturers under pressure to decarbonize fast.

State Street × Galaxy: Where TradFi and DeFi Finally Shake Hands

State Street and Galaxy are rolling out one of the most ambitious cross-market experiments yet: a tokenized liquidity vehicle built to operate around the clock. The new SWEEP fund, seeded with roughly $200M from Ondo Finance, will run on Solana first, with Stellar and Ethereum integrations already on deck. Subscriptions and redemptions will be settled in PYUSD, giving qualified investors a way to hold and move cash onchain without stepping outside the regulatory perimeter. State Street handles custody of the underlying treasuries; Galaxy provides the tokenization rails; Chainlink ties the cross-chain plumbing together. For a market that’s been stuck between two worlds, SWEEP is the clearest signal so far that institutional liquidity is preparing to live natively onchain rather than just interface with it.

Niobium: When Encrypted Compute Stops Being Theory and Starts Being Hardware

Niobium сlosed a $23M round to push encrypted compute from theory into silicon. The Dayton-based startup is building ASICs purpose-built for fully homomorphic encryption: chips that can run computations while data stays locked end-to-end. The new capital, backed by Fusion Fund, Morgan Creek, Analog Devices’ venture arm, and Korea Development Bank, gives the company the runway to lock its architecture, tape out its first chip, and widen pilot deployments with cloud and enterprise partners. If Niobium’s hardware delivers the throughput gains it’s targeting, it could shift FHE from academic curiosity to a practical layer for finance, healthcare, and state-level workloads where raw data simply can’t be exposed.

Israel Cybersecurity: Israel’s Security Ecosystem Breaks Funding Records

Israel’s cybersecurity machine just posted its strongest funding year ever: $4.4B raised across 130 rounds: up 9% from 2024 and nearly double the deal count. Seed activity stayed red-hot with $680M across 71 rounds, while Series A/B each cleared ~$920M and late-stage rounds pulled in a massive $1.9B. U.S. VCs dominated early checks, but Israeli firms held their ground, and co-led rounds hit double digits. Two clear trendlines: AI security is accelerating (12 seed companies vs. 8 last year), and endpoint security has come roaring back with 11 rounds. Heavyweights like Armis, Cato Networks, Cyera, Dream, and Island anchored the year with headline raises and acquisitions. A decade into YL Ventures’ tracking, the numbers show an ecosystem that’s consistently minting global category leaders.

The throughline across all these stories: the next era of value creation isn’t coming from apps or feature-layer plays — it’s coming from companies attacking deep infrastructure problems head-on. Payments that scale globally. Industrial heat without emissions. Liquidity that never sleeps. Compute that never decrypts. Security ecosystems that compound instead of cycle. Capital is moving toward the “picks-and-shovels" layer again, and the founders leaning into that shift are the ones defining the pace of the market rather than reacting to it.