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Promptwatch raises €6M to help brands appear in ChatGPT, and the week funding split into three tiers. A seed round for AI chatbot visibility, a $1B non-equity deal for a longevity drink, and stablecoin payments close a $38M Series A. Published July 15, 2026 The capital markets are still open, but the check sizes this week tell three different stories. On one end: a €6 million seed round for a startup that wants your brand to show up when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation. On the other: a $1 billion deal that doesn't involve equity at all, just a beverage company co-founded by a retired footballer. In between, there's a $38 million Series A for stablecoin payment rails, which is the sort of thing that makes sense only if you believe cross-border B2B payments are still broken enough to justify another layer. Promptwatch wants brands to rank in AI chatbots. Promptwatch raised €6 million in a seed round led by Seed + Speed Ventures, with Blum Ventures and Arches Capital also backing the Amsterdam startup. The pitch: help brands improve their visibility inside conversational AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and whatever Google is calling Gemini this week. The company has already opened an office in New York and says it will use the funding to expand there. The idea isn't particularly new - SEO consultants have been saying "optimize for LLMs" since late 2023 - but turning it into a funded SaaS product with enterprise contracts is the next logical step. If people are using chatbots instead of search engines to find restaurants, hotels, or software tools, then brands need a way to ensure they show up in those answers. Promptwatch is betting that most companies don't know how to do that yet and will pay someone to figure it out for them. Whether this becomes a durable category or just a feature that OpenAI and Anthropic eventually build into their enterprise tiers is the open question. For now, there's clearly investor appetite for "AI discovery" infrastructure. Velocity closes $38M to put stablecoins into business payments. Velocity announced a $38 million Series A led by Dragonfly and Firstmark, with participation from Coinbase, Capital One Ventures, QED Investors, Activant Capital, Ripple, and Wintermute. The London-based payments company is building tools that let businesses integrate stablecoins into customer checkout flows and cross-border invoicing. This is the kind of round that makes sense if you've spent any time watching a wire transfer sit in limbo for three days or trying to pay a contractor in another country without losing 4% to FX spreads and intermediary fees. Stablecoins are supposed to fix that - instant settlement, transparent fees, no correspondent banking network. The hard part has always been making it easy enough for a mid-market business to actually use without hiring a crypto-native payments engineer. Velocity's investor list is a mix of traditional fintech funds (QED, Capital One) and crypto infrastructure players (Dragonfly, Coinbase, Ripple). That split suggests the company is threading the line between "this is just better payments infrastructure" and "this only works if you believe in on-chain rails." The $38M will likely go toward compliance, integration partnerships, and convincing CFOs that stablecoin invoicing is less risky than it sounds. IM8 gets $1 billion in non-equity financing from General Catalyst. Here's where the week gets weird. IM8 secured $1 billion from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, which is not a traditional venture fund - it doesn't take equity. Instead, it provides financing to companies in exchange for revenue share or other non-dilutive terms. IM8 is a longevity vitamin-drink startup co-founded by David Beckham, which makes this one of the stranger capital allocation decisions of the year. The structure suggests IM8 either didn't want to give up board seats or couldn't raise a traditional round at a valuation it liked. General Catalyst's fund is designed for companies with strong unit economics that need capital for manufacturing, inventory, or distribution - things that don't require giving up control. Whether a celebrity-backed beverage startup fits that profile is debatable, but $1 billion is $1 billion. This is also a signal that large institutional funds are experimenting with non-equity structures, especially for companies in categories (CPG, hardware, physical infrastructure) where venture's traditional "grow at all costs, exit in 7 years" model doesn't fit cleanly. The rest of the funding roundup. A few other deals worth noting: * Monorale AI raised £4 million in a Series A after hitting 40,000 users in eight months. The British AI platform didn't disclose what it does, which is becoming a genre. * Flex raised $70 million led by Halo Fund to build AI-powered banking tools for mid-sized business owners, per Reuters. * TYLSemi closed $43 million to help companies design their own AI chips, founded by former AlphaWave executives. * Cyera raised $600 million at a $12 billion valuation in June for AI-enabled enterprise security, especially around AI agents. The pattern: seed rounds are getting smaller and more focused, Series A checks are going to infrastructure plays (payments, chips, security), and the billion-dollar deals are either non-equity or happening in China. If you're raising right now, the tier you're in matters more than the category.

Velocity raises $38M to wire stablecoins into enterprise treasury systems. Velocity secures $38M from Dragonfly, FirstMark, and Coinbase Ventures to build enterprise stablecoin treasury and payment workflow software. Velocity, a startup building stablecoin-native treasury infrastructure for corporations, has closed a $38 million funding round backed by some of the most recognized names in crypto-focused venture capital - Dragonfly, FirstMark, and Coinbase Ventures. The raise signals a broader and accelerating institutional conviction that stablecoins are no longer peripheral instruments in corporate finance - they are becoming foundational plumbing for enterprise treasury and payments operations. The infrastructure gap stablecoins created. For years, the promise of stablecoins in enterprise contexts has outpaced the tooling required to make that promise operational. Corporates exploring dollar-pegged digital assets for cross-border payments, liquidity management, or supplier settlements have repeatedly encountered the same friction: existing treasury management systems were built for correspondent banking rails, not programmable, blockchain-native money. Velocity's core proposition is to close that gap - offering software that allows businesses to embed stablecoins directly into treasury workflows and payment operations without requiring deep blockchain engineering expertise in-house. The startup's approach reflects a maturation in how the enterprise market is beginning to engage with digital assets. Rather than treating stablecoins as a speculative holding or an isolated treasury experiment, Velocity enables organizations to operationalize stablecoin flows at the software layer - connecting them to existing financial processes, reconciliation frameworks, and payment approval chains. This is precisely the kind of pick-and-shovel infrastructure that serious institutional adoption demands, and it is the reason why the investor roster for this round reads like a who's-who of credible crypto venture capital. The backers and what their presence signals. The composition of the investor syndicate deserves careful attention. Dragonfly is one of the most strategically sophisticated crypto-native funds operating today, with a consistent track record of backing foundational infrastructure plays at scale. FirstMark brings deep enterprise software expertise and a portfolio that spans some of the most durable business-to-business (B2B) software companies of the past decade. Coinbase Ventures, the investment arm of Coinbase, adds a strategic dimension that goes beyond capital - it represents a vote of confidence from the operator most responsible for mainstreaming regulated digital asset access in the United States. Together, the three backers provide Velocity with financial resources, enterprise distribution credibility, and deep crypto-native network effects simultaneously. That convergence of traditional enterprise venture and crypto-native capital in a single $38 million round is itself a data point worth examining. It suggests the market is no longer segmenting stablecoin infrastructure as a purely crypto-adjacent investment thesis. Instead, these investors are treating Velocity as an enterprise software company - one that happens to be built on digital asset rails, and whose total addressable market includes the vast global corporate treasury landscape that processes trillions of dollars in cash movements annually. Why enterprise treasury is the next stablecoin frontier. The timing of Velocity's raise is not incidental. Regulatory clarity around stablecoins has been advancing in key jurisdictions, most notably in the United States, where legislative frameworks are progressively establishing clearer rules for dollar-backed digital assets. In parallel, multinational corporations facing persistent inefficiencies in cross-border payments - slow settlement cycles, fragmented correspondent banking networks, and foreign exchange (FX) conversion costs - are actively seeking alternatives. Stablecoins, when properly integrated into treasury software, offer near-instantaneous settlement, programmable payment logic, and dramatically reduced transaction friction across borders. Velocity's software addresses the operational realities that prevent most enterprises from making that transition unassisted. Integrating stablecoins into treasury management without dedicated tooling typically requires bespoke blockchain development, compliance overlay, and custom reconciliation logic - a set of capabilities most corporate finance teams do not maintain internally. By packaging that complexity into deployable enterprise software, Velocity lowers the entry barrier substantially and positions itself as a necessary middleware layer between the legacy treasury stack and the emerging stablecoin economy. What this round means for the stablecoin infrastructure market. Velocity's $38 million raise is a benchmark transaction for the emerging category of enterprise stablecoin infrastructure software. It validates that there is meaningful institutional demand - and meaningful venture appetite - for startups solving the workflow integration problem rather than simply issuing stablecoins or building wallets. The companies likely to dominate the next phase of enterprise digital asset adoption will not be those that simply custody tokens or provide exchange access; they will be those that make stablecoins interoperable with the operational realities of corporate finance at scale. Velocity, now equipped with fresh capital and a marquee investor base, is positioning itself as a primary architect of that layer. Whether it can execute on that ambition at enterprise scale will determine whether this round is remembered as a prescient infrastructure bet or a well-funded early-stage experiment in a still-maturing market. Elena rosato. Italian fintech analyst. Covers EU payment regulation and the Mediterranean banking sector. § Comments Open discussion no account needed

Velocity secures 38 million to scale stablecoin payments. TrendPulse AI Analysis This article covers business trends, sourced from Fortune. Its AI system has analyzed the key points and extracted the most relevant insights for decision-makers. Below is the structured breakdown of the original content. Quick summary. * London-based fintech Velocity raised $38 million in a Series A funding round led by Dragonfly to accelerate stablecoin integration for global enterprises. * The startup aims to modernize inefficient cross-border payment infrastructure by providing businesses with a familiar, compliant gateway to on-chain transactions. * New capital will support global expansion into Africa and Latin America, alongside the development of secure asset custody and yield-generating financial products. Key details. Founded in 2025, Velocity is positioning itself as a critical bridge between traditional corporate finance and the rapidly expanding stablecoin ecosystem. The Series A round attracted significant institutional backing, including Coinbase, Capital One Ventures, and Wintermute, signaling strong investor confidence in the shift toward blockchain-based settlement rails. CEO Eric Queathem, a veteran of the payments giant WorldPay, launched the firm to address the systemic inefficiencies he observed in traditional banking infrastructure. While consumer-facing payment apps often appear seamless, the underlying settlement processes for businesses remain slow and costly. Velocity seeks to replace these legacy foreign exchange and banking hurdles with faster, more transparent stablecoin alternatives. What Velocity has built is what Trendpulse think is the easiest, most comprehensive set of solutions for these businesses to come on-chain and to do [so] in a way that's familiar to them. Why this matters. Velocity's funding highlights a broader trend: the transition of stablecoins from niche crypto-assets to essential tools for corporate treasury management. As global firms face pressure to reduce transaction costs and settlement times, the ability to move capital across borders instantly is becoming a competitive necessity rather than a luxury. By focusing on the "familiarity" of the user experience, Velocity is lowering the barrier to entry for non-crypto-native institutions. Furthermore, the entry of major players like Stripe, Visa, and BlackRock into the stablecoin space validates the market's long-term viability. For investors and executives, this signals that the infrastructure layer of the digital asset economy is maturing. Companies that successfully integrate these rails now will likely gain a significant operational advantage over those relying on legacy banking systems that are increasingly unable to keep pace with global trade demands. The bottom line. Velocity is successfully bridging the gap between traditional corporate finance and blockchain technology, positioning stablecoins as the new standard for global cross-border settlement. Original source: Fortune This article has been processed and analyzed by TrendPulse AI for informational purposes. Content may have been summarized or restructured for clarity.