Crypto Funding Hits $2.4B in October, Powered by Kalshi's $1B Round

Web3 startups and companies raised about $2.4 billion in October 2026, up from $1.43 billion in September, according to Incrypted's estimates. Kalshi's $1 billion Series G led the month, and the prediction market platform's valuation hit $40 billion after the round.

Incrypted's editorial team recorded 59 investment deals in October, with 38 disclosing funding amounts. Wellington Management and Sequoia Capital co-led Kalshi's round, with Baillie Gifford, Stripes, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Layer Global, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, CapitalG, Hudson River Trading and Balyasny Asset Management also participating. Kalshi plans to spend the capital on new exchange products, a wider range of markets and trading infrastructure.

How did Strive and HIVE rank?

Strive, the corporate bitcoin reserves company, raised $630 million through Series SATS preferred shares and another $208 million from warrant exercises, for a combined $838 million. Barclays Capital and Cantor Fitzgerald served as placement agents. The company uses bitcoin as its primary reserve asset and will deploy the capital mainly for further accumulation of the asset.

HIVE Digital Technologies took third place with $129 million in debt financing secured through its subsidiary BUZZ Alpha Cloud. An unnamed institutional lender provided the facility at a fixed 9% annual rate. The funds will buy NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 server systems to fulfill a three-year contract with AI company Cohere.

Together, Kalshi, Strive and HIVE accounted for about 82% of all capital Incrypted recorded in October, underscoring how a handful of mega-deals shaped the month.

Where did the money come from?

Venture deals supplied 57.1% of October's capital, roughly $1.37 billion. Corporate financing contributed 42.7%, or $1.02 billion, while OTC transactions stayed below 1%. The editorial team logged 11 M&A deals, all with undisclosed terms.

Blockchain services drew the most deals at 17, followed by CeFi with 13 and DeFi with 12. Investor attention also concentrated on artificial intelligence, bitcoin treasury companies and compute infrastructure.

Token sales looked far weaker. More than 13 campaigns raised a combined $12 million, with predict.fun ($5.8 million) and 1win Token ($3.9 million) dominating. Strip out those two and the sector's remaining projects raised about $3 million. Offerings of $600,000 and $20,000 still made the month's top five.

How did the month unfold week by week?

Between October 1 and October 17, Incrypted recorded 34 deals — 23 with disclosed details — totaling $492.5 million. From October 17 to October 24, 11 deals brought in $691 million, with more than 95% coming from corporate financing. The final week, October 24 to October 31, produced 14 deals worth $1.21 billion in disclosed amounts.

The closing week's notable rounds:

• PhotonPay, $40 million — Series C led by Blockchain Capital, with SBI Group, IDG Capital, GL Ventures and Lightspeed Faction. The stablecoin payments company will build multi-currency wallets, expand card issuance and develop AI-agent payment infrastructure.
• Luxor, $16 million — strategic round led by CMT Digital, with Canaan, MicroBT, Halo and Steelhead participating. The Bitcoin mining infrastructure firm will develop Luxor AI, cloud infrastructure and hashpower financial products.
• Predicate, $8 million — Series A led by Blockchain Capital, with Paxos, 1kx and Tribe Capital. Total funding reached $15 million; the startup embeds sanctions screening and identity checks into smart contracts.
• Cancore, $7.2 million — seed round via SAFT at a $60 million fully diluted valuation for the future CNRX token, backed by Paper Ventures, dao5 and others. The platform trades tokenized assets between Canton and public chains including Ethereum, Arbitrum and BNB Chain.
• Spicenet, $5 million — Series A led by dao5, with Babylon and Astrarizon; total funding hit $8 million. Proceeds will launch the Spice Edge platform and SPICE token.
• Mochatrade, $4.87 million — seed led by CoinFund, with Coinbase Ventures and Niki Montana. The India-focused platform lets users fund accounts in rupees and trade perpetual futures on US stocks including Nvidia, Tesla and Apple.
• Birch Hill, $4 million — seed led by Multicoin Capital, with ParaFi Capital, Castle Island Ventures and Nascent; total funding reached $6.5 million. The platform connects US credit markets with onchain liquidity.

Which undisclosed deals mattered?

Several strategic transactions came without price tags. Trade[XYZ], a perpetual futures platform on the Hyperliquid blockchain, received investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the New York Stock Exchange operator. The pair plans a regulated US market for perpetual contracts with ICE as exclusive operator, pending approvals.

Lending platform Ibis closed a pre-seed round led by FalconX with Anchorage Digital and Innovizing Capital participating, plus a $250 million credit facility from FalconX. Payments infrastructure developer Fun took money from IOSG Ventures; its API connects fiat and crypto rails for Polymarket, Lighter and Aave. Marketnode, backed by Euroclear, HSBC, SGX Group and Temasek, raised from the Stellar Development Foundation to expand tokenized asset distribution in Asia-Pacific.

RedotPay acquired Japanese crypto exchange BTCBOX, operating since 2014 and registered in Japan since 2017, on undisclosed terms.

What pulled capital into AI?

AI deals kept accelerating, Incrypted reports, fueled by expectations that Anthropic and OpenAI will go public. The largest:

• DeepSeek, $15.9 billion — a second round joined by Tencent, CATL, Meituan, Geely, NetEase and more than 10 other investors. The Chinese model developer's valuation exceeded 600 billion yuan.
• Waymo, $5 billion — debt financing with PIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street as lead lenders and Goldman Sachs as arranger, aimed at expanding the Alphabet unit's robotaxi footprint.
• Axiom Solutions International, $2 billion — Flex's data center power and cooling unit sold Series A convertible preferred shares to General Catalyst and Koch Equity Development at a $37.5 billion enterprise value. Flex plans to spin the unit off in Q1 2027.
• Tenstorrent, $1 billion — Series E led by Trace Capital and Innovation X at a $6.2 billion valuation, with ARK Invest, Fidelity, Tether Investments and Sandisk. The AI chipmaker will scale manufacturing and deploy Galaxy servers.
• Flapping Airplanes, $1 billion — Series A co-led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital at a $6 billion valuation. Founded in 2025, the startup trains AI models with less data and compute.

September's $1.43 billion total suggests momentum is building rather than peaking — and with AI listings on the horizon, October's concentration in prediction markets, bitcoin treasuries and compute looks set to shape year-end allocation.