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Taiko Raises US$37M from Top-tier VCs Ahead Of Mainnet Launch

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Taiko Labs raised a total of US$37 million across three rounds, with its most recent Series A round led by Lightspeed Faction, Hashed, Generative Ventures, and Token Bay Capital.Taiko is now the largest Discord community in the rollups space.Last month, Taiko launched a new testnet, Katla, which has seen >1.1M wallet addresses and >13M total transactions to date.Taiko recently announced an allocation of nearly US$30 million for its second round of the grants program, making Taiko the only Ethereum Layer 2 to commit such substantial funding to support the ecosystem during a testnet phase.

NEW YORK and LONDON and SINGAPORE, March 2, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Taiko, an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution provider, today announced the close of commitments for a US$15 million Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Faction, Hashed, Generative Ventures, and Token Bay Capital. Other notable participating investors in this latest round include Wintermute Ventures, Presto Labs, Flow Traders, Amber Group, OKX Ventures, GSR, WW Ventures, and more. The close of its most recent round brings Taiko’s total capital raised to US$37 million across three rounds. The closing of its Series A round comes just ahead of Taiko’s highly-anticipated mainnet launch. 

Taiko is an Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup, scaling Ethereum by supporting all EVM opcodes in a Layer 2 architecture that is decentralized, permissionless, and secure. Since it was founded in 2022, Taiko has successfully executed six testnets involving over 1,100,000+ unique wallets, 30,000+ proposers, and 14,000+ provers. There are over 100 live apps in the Taiko ecosystem today, supported by a vibrant community of 850,000+ members on Discord.

Taiko has conducted six testnets, each focused on different aspects of the protocol. In each of these testnets, Taiko received substantial support from hundreds of thousands of community members. These members contributed by building dapps, operating nodes, serving as proposers and provers, and engaging with the protocol in various ways — all permissionlessly.

Taiko launched its 6th testnet, Katla, early this year. Katla is the first testnet to use Taiko’s Based Contestable Rollup (BCR) design, a configurable, multi-proof rollup architecture that features a contestation mechanism and based sequencing. Katla serves as the foundation of Taiko’s upcoming mainnet launch.

In the future, Taiko will develop Based Booster Rollup (BBR), a design that tackles the liquidity fragmentation issue by allowing developers to deploy on Ethereum and scale natively across all L2s.

Quote from Lead Investors:

Lead investors praised Taiko for its vibrant community, based sequencing architecture, successful testnets, and more.

“Amongst an explosion of new Rollups, Taiko stands out due to its passionate community, paired with a based sequencing architecture, which uniquely simplifies the L2 value chain, streamlining trust assumptions and removing friction for developer adoption,” said Samuel Harrison, Founding Partner at Lightspeed Faction.

“Hashed is profoundly impressed by Taiko’s leadership in blockchain scalability with its Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup technology. The team’s achievements, including vibrant community engagement and successful testnets, underscore our confidence in their vision,” said Ryan Kim, Founding Partner at Hashed. “Our investment signifies our commitment to pioneering technologies that promise to transform Ethereum scaling and the broader blockchain ecosystem.”

Will Wang, the Managing Partner of Generative Ventures also added: “The scaling of Ethereum is an important prerequisite for the blockchain ecosystem to become the mainstream next-generation global financial system. Our continuous and firm support for Taiko demonstrated through three rounds of investment, reflects our recognition of Taiko’s philosophy and execution. Due to its positioning and capabilities in type1 and BBR, Taiko is a unique choice among the many Ethereum Layer 2 networks, and therefore, we are firmly optimistic about Taiko and will continue to build and invest into the Taiko ecosystem!”

“Taiko has been fully decentralized and permissionless from day one, staying true to crypto‘s original ethos,” said Lucy Gazmararian, Founder of Token Bay Capital. “These core values place Taiko in a strong position to become the default scaling solution for Ethereum, and we look forward to continuing our long-standing relationship with the team, helping them to scale across Asia and the Middle East from Token Bay’s hubs in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong.”

Quote from Taiko Co-Founders:

“Building the first Ethereum-equivalent based rollup is something we knew was going to be a multi-year adventure,” said Daniel Wang, Taiko’s Co-Founder and CEO. “Now, as we approach mainnet launch, we realize what a ride it has been. We’re determined to ship our products as soon as they’re ready and show the industry that what had been thought of as impossible, is indeed possible.”

“Our commitment to scale Ethereum in the most native way possible is something investors and partners have been very keen to support,” said Taiko’s Co-Founder and COO Terence Lam. “We want to thank everyone who shares our vision and continues to support us in our journey to bring Ethereum to the world.”

About Lead Investors

Lightspeed Factiona blockchain-focused venture capital firm, recently launched its inaugural US$285 million fund. Hashed is one of the largest crypto-focused venture funds and ecosystem builders in Asia, headquartered in South Korea. Generative Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on investing in companies working on decentralized networks and machine intelligence. Token Bay Capital is renowned for its expertise in blockchain investment strategies.

Note: Certain investments remain subject to regulatory approval.

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Silicon Valley Stars Gather for Dreame’s San Francisco Debut

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Dreame Technology, a global high-end technology company, confirmed the guest lineup for DREAME NEXT, the company’s largest-ever international launch event, running April 27 to 30, 2026, in San Francisco. The roster brings together figures who have shaped the trajectory of autonomous driving, personal computing, and professional sports: Sebastian Thrun, Steve Wozniak, and Dwyane Wade will all attend.

The breadth of expertise on the guest list reflects the reach of DREAME NEXT itself. Over four days, Dreame will stage product launches across smart mobility, smart home appliances, personal devices, and premium personal care, the first time a single event from the company has spanned its full product ecosystem. The event is organized around five themed segments: Drive Next, Living Next, Connect Next, Self Next, and Humanity Next.

Over the course of the four-day launch event, DREAME NEXT will bring together leading voices from across technology, academia, investment, and innovation to explore the next stage of industry transformation. Discussions will center on how AI-driven applications are reshaping products from the ground up, whether the age of AI requires products to be fundamentally reimagined, how intelligent technologies will redefine the foundations of manufacturing productivity, and what the next decade of human technological evolution may look like.

Featured speakers include AI pioneer Sebastian Thrun (Google X, Udacity), tech futurist Robert Scoble (Microsoft), Meta design leader Julie Zhuo, AI strategist William Fong (Microsoft), and business veteran James W. Keyes (7-Eleven, Blockbuster). The lineup also features Turing Award winner David Patterson, NASA rocket scientist Sylvia Acevedo, Stanford GSB’s Yossi Feinberg, economist Barry Eichengreen, tech journalist Rebecca A. Fannin, engineering leader Jim Chen, and Fremont Mayor Emeritus Lily Mei, alongside former Google DeepMind AI researchers and the co-founders of Robot Launch. These global leaders will share insights on AI, technology, innovation, economics, and entrepreneurship.

Demonstrating Dreame’s growing global influence, the event will also welcome standout guests from beyond the technology sector, including Apple co-founder and personal computing pioneer Steve Wozniak; and three-time NBA champion Dwyane Wade.

The guests in attendance at DREAME NEXT reflect where the company is headed; that leaders from autonomous driving, personal computing, and professional sports are all in the same room for a single company’s launch event speaks to the scale and ambition of what Dreame is building. DREAME NEXT is not just a product launch but the opening chapter of the company’s next ten years.

Dreame’s product portfolio now spans categories that, until recently, belonged to entirely separate industries. DREAME NEXT is designed to demonstrate that these categories are connected by core technologies, including high-speed motors, intelligent algorithms, and bionic robotic arms, which are now being applied across smart mobility, personal devices, home appliances, and personal care. It represents not only the next generation of products and lifestyles, but also the beginning of Dreame’s vision for the next decade.

DREAME NEXT runs April 27 to 30, 2026, in San Francisco. Media, partners, and invited guests are welcome to attend.

Please stay tuned for the latest updates from the event through the official website or the social accounts on X: @DreameGlobal, Facebook: Dreame Tech, and Instagram: @dreame_tech.

About Dreame Technology

Founded in 2017, Dreame Technology is a global high-end technology brand built on a foundation of high-speed digital motors, intelligent algorithms, and bionic robotic arms. The company’s product portfolio spans smartphones, smart vehicles, smart home appliances, intelligent cleaning appliances, outdoor smart devices, and personal care, designed to simplify daily life and give users more time for what matters. Dreame operates in more than 120 countries and regions with over 6,500 offline stores and serves more than 42 million households globally. As of December 31, 2025, the company has filed more than 10,000 patents worldwide and holds over 3,000 granted patents.

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WisPaper Enables Parallel Scientific Exploration, Moving Research Beyond Sequential Workflows

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SINGAPORE, April 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — WisPaper, an AI-powered academic research agent, today introduced a new approach to scientific workflows that supports concurrent research execution. The development addresses a longstanding constraint in research—the reliance on sequential, step-by-step processes—by enabling multiple lines of inquiry to progress in parallel, allowing researchers to expand both the speed and scope of exploration.

Breaking the Limits of Sequential Research

Traditional research follows a linear structure, where literature review, hypothesis formation, experimentation, and validation are carried out sequentially. This model limits researchers to advancing a single direction, as each stage requires manual effort.

WisPaper shifts this structure by reducing dependencies between stages. Tasks that once required sequencing can now proceed more independently, allowing different research threads to move forward without waiting for earlier steps.

Enabling Concurrent Exploration

With this approach, WisPaper supports a more parallel mode of research. Researchers can initiate multiple hypotheses or problem statements simultaneously, while the system advances processes such as literature analysis, experimental setup, and result generation across these directions.

This enables a higher density of exploration within the same time frame. Instead of focusing on a single hypothesis over an extended period, researchers can evaluate multiple possibilities, compare outcomes, and adjust direction more efficiently.

Redefining the Researcher’s Role

As execution becomes less constrained by manual coordination, the role of the researcher shifts toward higher-level decision-making. Researchers can focus on defining questions, setting priorities, and interpreting results across multiple ongoing investigations.

This model mirrors how larger research teams operate, where parallel efforts are coordinated toward shared objectives. By enabling similar capabilities at the individual level, WisPaper expands how research can be structured and managed.

Implications for Knowledge Production

Parallel exploration introduces a different rhythm to scientific work. By allowing more research paths to be tested within a given period, it may influence how quickly new findings emerge, particularly in areas where validation is time-intensive.

As research workflows continue to evolve, approaches that balance depth with broader exploration may play an increasing role in shaping how knowledge is produced.

About WisPaper

WisPaper is an AI-powered academic research agent designed as a full-chain research accelerator. It supports literature retrieval, analysis, experiment design, execution, and paper writing within a unified workflow, helping researchers manage complex scientific tasks more efficiently across disciplines. For more information, visit http://wispaper.ai/?utm_source=news.

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Pony.ai Announces New Generation Autonomous Driving Compute Platform Built on NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion

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GUANGZHOU, China, April 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Pony AI Inc. (“Pony.ai”) (NASDAQ: PONY; HKEX: 2026) today announced its new generation autonomous driving domain controller, a high-performance compute system designed for both Pony.ai’s L4 autonomous driving platform and a broader set of customer applications across autonomous mobility. Developed in collaboration with NVIDIA, the new controller is built on the NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion platform and powered by NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor with NVIDIA NVLink, supporting Pony.ai’s next phase of commercialization in robotaxis and its growing domain controller business.

The new system is designed to deliver significant gains in AI computing performance, energy efficiency and support for the latest AI models, while meeting core L4 requirements such as multi-sensor fusion, full-scenario perception and high-complexity scenario understanding. It is also engineered to further enhance safety redundancy, system robustness and deployment flexibility.

Pony.ai expects the new platform to support a portfolio spanning multiple compute tiers and cooling solutions, enabling deployment across a wide range of autonomous applications. With flexible single-chip and multi-chip configurations, the platform is expected to incorporate NVIDIA NVLink to enable high-speed, low-latency communication between the two DRIVE Thor system-on-a-chips (SoCs), achieving a combined maximum computing performance of 4000 FP4 TFLOPS.

“Our collaboration with NVIDIA has supported several critical milestones in Pony.ai’s autonomous driving journey,” said Dr. James Peng, Founder and CEO of Pony.ai. “The next-generation domain controller built on NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion will be a key enabler for the continued evolution of our L4 autonomous driving products and help accelerate large-scale commercialization.”

“Autonomous driving systems are rapidly increasing in complexity, driving the need for scalable, high-performance compute platforms,” said Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive at NVIDIA. “Pony.ai has been a long-standing NVIDIA DRIVE customer and ecosystem partner, and we’re pleased to see them build their next-generation domain controller on NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion with DRIVE Thor accelerated compute to support advanced L4 autonomous driving applications.”

The new platform builds on a long-standing collaboration between Pony.ai and NVIDIA that began in 2017. In 2022, Pony.ai launched its in-house developed automotive-grade computing unit powered by single or multiple NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin SoC, which was deployed in its sixth-generation Robotaxis. In 2025, the company began mass production of the world’s first L4 Robotaxi domain controller equipped with four NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin SoCs. That controller now powers Pony.ai’s seventh-generation (Gen-7) Robotaxis and provides a strong foundation for scalable, fully driverless operations.

As one of the few L4 autonomous driving companies globally with full-stack, in-house capabilities across both software and hardware, Pony.ai brings deep expertise in domain controller design. Its software-hardware co-design approach enables system-level optimization across performance, safety and cost.

Over the past year, Pony.ai has seen growing demand for its automotive-grade domain controllers across low-speed delivery, robosweeping, logistics, mining, autonomous shuttles and other robotics and intelligent mobility applications. Shipments of its “Fangzai” domain controller in 2025 surged by more than 500% year over year. Customers are spread across dozens of countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, and Switzerland.

Building on Gen-7’s gains in cost efficiency, safety and reliability, Pony.ai has also achieved significant milestones in robotaxi commercialization, including unit-economics breakeven in two of China’s major metropolitan markets. The company aims to expand its robotaxi fleet to more than 3,000 vehicles and its geographic footprint to more than 20 cities globally by the end of 2026.

About Pony AI Inc.

Pony AI Inc. is a global leader in achieving large-scale commercialization of autonomous mobility. Leveraging its vehicle-agnostic Virtual Driver technology, a full-stack autonomous driving technology that seamlessly integrates Pony.ai’s proprietary software, hardware, and services, Pony.ai is developing a commercially viable and sustainable business model that enables the mass production and deployment of vehicles across transportation use cases. Founded in 2016, Pony.ai has expanded its presence across China, Europe, East Asia, the Middle East and other regions, ensuring widespread accessibility to its advanced technology.

Contact
Pony.ai: media@pony.ai

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SOURCE Pony AI Inc.

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