Good day. Crypto die-hards have long said that if only more legacy businesses adopted the technology, its benefits would become clear and adoption would spread. A new startup’s private-equity-style game plan aims to make that a reality.

New York-based Inversion Labs plans to acquire low-margin companies, outfit them with blockchain to juice efficiency and then reap the profits that follow.  

Founded at the beginning of this year, the company has raised a $26.5 million seed round at a $100 million valuation led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly Capital. Investors including investment-management firm VanEck, and crypto venture firms ParaFi Capital, Faction Ventures and Wintermute Ventures participated in the financing.

“This technology is powerful, but the reality is crypto doesn’t have that many active users,” Inversion co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Santiago Roel Santos said. “Our North Star is to make crypto invisible to our users. They won’t see how the technology works, but they’ll feel the impact. It’s going to be faster, better and cheaper.”

The capital raised by Inversion will be used to fund Inversion’s business operations, not to make acquisitions. To finance the acquisitions, Inversion will raise a fund of at least $500 million held in a separate entity called Inversion Capital, Roel Santos said.

Institutional investors have demonstrated early interest in committing capital to finance Inversion’s acquisitions, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Suzanne Dannheim said, in part because their model offers crypto exposure that is less risky than holding coins or investing in crypto businesses. 

Read the full article.

And now on to the news...

Databricks boosts revenue forecast. Databricks, one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable private companies, is now set to make $4 billion in revenue for its fiscal year ending in January, up 50% from the prior year. The increased forecast is coming as the company is expected to close its latest round of financing on Monday. The company is raising $1 billion from investors including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners and United Arab Emirates state-backed investor MGX at a $100 billion valuation. The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported the new financing and valuation.

The clock is ticking on core federal cybersecurity legislation set to expire Sept. 30, as a divided Congress and a looming government shutdown threaten progress on a new bill that seeks to extend provisions encouraging cooperation in fighting hackers. The decade-old Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, set the legal framework aimed at protecting companies that voluntarily share cyber threat intelligence with other businesses and the federal government, shielding them from antitrust and liability charges.

Consulting firms over the past three years have wagered billions on the hope they would play an essential role in the AI boom, helping the world’s largest corporations transform themselves with the new technology. In the early days their pitch seemed to be working. But then reality set in.

• Clients quickly encountered a mismatch between the pitch and what consultants could actually deliver. They found that consultants, who often had no more expertise on AI than they did internally, struggled to deploy use cases that created real business value.

Funds

White Star Capital held the first $25 million close of its new North American Seed Fund, which has a target of $50 million.

People

Ad marketplace Nift appointed Saket Mehta as chief revenue officer. He most recently served as vice president of global advertising partnerships and revenue at Block.

Sierra, a San Francisco-based startup helping customer experience teams build AI agents, scored $350 million in new funding led by Greenoaks at a valuation of $10 billion.

Treeline Biosciences, a Watertown, Mass.-based biopharma startup currently conducting trials in patients with lymphoma, completed a $200 million Series A extension round from investors including GV and OrbiMed.

Baseten, a San Francisco-based AI inference infrastructure startup, secured $150 million in Series D funding at a $2.15 billion valuation. BOND led the round, which included participation from Greylock, CapitalG, Spark Capital and others.

Shift5, an Arlington, Va.-based operational intelligence platform for American defense and transportation systems, landed $75 million in Series C funding led by Hedosophia.

ProRataAI, a Pasadena, Calif.-based startup building AI search, advertising and attribution technology for content creators, closed a $40 million Series B round led by Touring Capital.

Hello Patient, an Austin, Texas-based provider of conversational AI technology for patient communications, collected $22.5 million in Series A funding. Scale Venture Partners led the investment, which included participation from 8VC, Bling Capital and others.

Revalia Bio, a startup providing drug developers with predictive insights from functional human organs, was seeded with a $14.5 million investment co-led by America's Frontier Fund and Sierra Ventures.

Xampla, a U.K. startup developing plant-based alternatives to single-use plastics, fetched a $14 million Series A round led by Emerald Technology Ventures.

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• Anthropic Agrees to Pay at Least $1.5 Billion in Landmark Copyright Settlement

• OpenAI, Broadcom Make $10 Billion Deal for Custom AI Chips

• The Billionaires Fueling the Quest for Longer Life

• Will AI Choke Off the Supply of Knowledge?

• Paying Kids to Stay Off Their Phones: Incentive or Bribe?

This newsletter was compiled by Matthew Strozier and Zachary Cole.

WSJ Pro Venture Capital is a premium service of The Wall Street Journal. We cover venture capital and the global startup ecosystem. Share your tips, comments and questions: vcnews@wsj.com

The Team: Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova, Brian Gormley and Marc Vartabedian.

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