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Bitlayer Secures $9 Million in Extended A Round, Led by Polychain Capital

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Polychain Capital leads Bitlayer’s extended A round, ushering in a new era of verification capabilities for Bitcoin.

SINGAPORE, Oct. 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Bitlayer, the first Bitcoin Layer 2 based on Bitcoin finality, has recently closed a $9M extension to its previously announced Series A funding round. The extended A round is led by Polychain Capital and co-led by Franklin Templeton, with participation from SCB Limited, Selini Capital, G-20 Group and other renowned institutional investors.

 Bitlayer raised a $5M seed round in March, followed by a $11M series A round in July from leading investors including Framework Ventures, ABCDE, Franklin Templeton, StarkWare, OKX Ventures, Alliance DAO, UTXO Management, and more.

This round of financing expands the Bitlayer community to new stakeholders and individuals dedicated to the BTC ecosystem. It further solidifies Bitlayer’s position at the helm of the Bitcoin Layer 2 field, bringing Bitlayer’s total funding raised to $25 million.

Bitlayer has proposed and implemented OpVM, a future-proof Bitcoin Layer 1 verification solution that combines fraud proofs (BitVM) and validity proofs (based on OP_CAT). This solution significantly enhances the security level of various protocols within the Bitcoin ecosystem, enabling the Bitcoin Layer 1 to verify arbitrary computations.

Investors Comments:

“Our investment in Bitlayer reflects our profound belief in the transformative power of their groundbreaking solutions. Bitlayer has demonstrated an unparalleled commitment to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible within the Bitcoin space. The Bitlayer team, led by Kevin He and Charlie Hu, have assembled a diverse group of experts with a shared passion for innovation and a deep understanding of the market’s needs. The imminent launch of Bitlayer V2 is set to capture the industry’s attention and validate the immense potential of OpVM.”  – Polychain Capital.

Progressing Toward a Future of Bitcoin Finality

After launching Mainnet-V1 on April 15th, over 280 Dapps have deployed on the Bitlayer network, covering infrastructure and developer tools, wallets, DeFi, NFTs, gaming, metaverse, RWAs, and more.

Moreover, Bitlayer has established itself as a core ecosystem partner for over 30 Web3 platforms, fostering collaboration and shared growth. These partnerships include notable players such as Hacken, AWS Cloud, Ankr, Polyhedra, Babylon, Particle Network, and Meson.

Since its founding, Bitlayer has been fully dedicated to the pioneering research and development of BitVM and OP_CAT, focusing on pushing the limits of the Bitcoin ecosystem’s capabilities and striving to enhance its programmability and efficiency through these advanced technologies.

The newly injected capital will accelerate the development and deployment of Bitlayer, enhancing its scalability, efficiency, and user accessibility. This includes preparation for the imminent launch of Bitlayer V2, a Bitcoin-native rollup in which state transitions are protected by Bitlayer’s OpVM technique, a verification gadget that combines both validity proofs and fraud proofs.

“Bitlayer’s innovative approach to blockchain technology is exemplified by its utilization of OpVM,” Kevin He, co-founder of Bitlayer, said, “It empowers Bitcoin to seamlessly integrate into any programmable blockchain environment in a trustless manner, which will catalyze rapid development and widespread adoption of a decentralized application ecosystem based on Bitcoin‘s substantial liquidity.”

Bitlayer V2 will be the first native Bitcoin Layer 2 utilizing OpVM. This is only the beginning of this exciting new chapter for Bitlayer. More exceptional growth and extraordinary progress is on the way for both Bitcoin and the larger crypto community.

About Polychain Capital

Polychain Capital, founded in 2016 by Olaf Carlson-Wee, is a premier investor in cryptocurrency protocols and companies which utilizes its highly crypto-native team through a hands-on, participatory approach towards investments with the goal to accelerate the global adoption of crypto.

About Bitlayer

Bitlayer is the first Bitcoin Layer 2 based on Bitcoin finality.

Bitlayer provides developers and users with a native Bitcoin Layer 2 environment through its innovative technologies including OpVM, Finality Bridge, and RtEVM. This platform ensures Bitcoin-equivalent security, a trustless cross-chain bridge, and a real-time EVM programming environment.

For inquiries or comments contact press@bitlayer.org.

Follow Bitlayer to stay updated on protocol and ecosystem progress:

Website | Twitter | Discord | Medium | Github | YouTube

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SOURCE Bitlayer Labs

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Aolani and Rafay Collaborate on One of the Industry’s First NVIDIA DSX OS Deployments on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 Infrastructure

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The collaboration demonstrates how next-generation AI infrastructure can be transformed into production-ready AI platforms for enterprise and cloud providers.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and SINGAPORE, July 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Rafay Systems, a leading platform provider for modern infrastructure and AI workloads and a member of NVIDIA Inception, today announced a strategic collaboration with Aolani to deliver one of the industry’s first deployments of NVIDIA DSX OS running on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 infrastructure, helping demonstrate how next-generation AI infrastructure can move from installation to production-ready AI services.

As organizations continue investing in accelerated computing, the competitive advantage is shifting beyond acquiring GPUs. Success increasingly depends on how quickly providers can operationalize infrastructure, onboard customers, govern multi-tenant environments, and deliver AI services that developers and enterprises can consume immediately.

The collaboration between Aolani and Rafay addresses that challenge by combining Aolani’s next-generation AI infrastructure with Rafay Platform’s orchestration, automation, multi-tenancy, and lifecycle management capabilities to create a production-ready AI platform built on NVIDIA AI infrastructure.

Rather than delivering raw GPU infrastructure alone, the solution enables organizations to provision Kubernetes clusters, virtual machines, AI workspaces, and inference environments through a secure self-service experience while maintaining centralized governance, policy enforcement, and operational visibility.

“Aolani has always been committed to delivering faster time-to-value for our customers,” said Nicholas Chia, CEO of Aolani. “Our customers are at the bleeding edge of AI development, and they need to provision, govern, and scale from day one in an industry that moves at lightning speed. Building the next generation of AI cloud means solving for more than just compute capacity, but also production-grade platforms that enable operational readiness from the get go. That’s why we are so excited about this partnership with Rafay.”

The announcement reflects a broader transition taking place across the AI infrastructure industry. As cloud providers, enterprises, and sovereign AI operators deploy increasingly powerful GPU infrastructure, attention is moving toward the software layer that enables those investments to become secure, scalable, and commercially viable AI platforms.

“AI infrastructure has entered a new phase,” said Haseeb Budhani, CEO and co-founder of Rafay Systems. “The question is no longer how quickly organizations can deploy GPUs. It’s how quickly they can transform that infrastructure into a governed, self-service platform that developers can use and operators can manage at scale. We’re excited to collaborate with Aolani to help demonstrate what’s possible with NVIDIA AI infrastructure and accelerate the path from hardware deployment to production AI services.”

The deployment combines Aolani’s AI cloud infrastructure with the Rafay Platform to simplify infrastructure bring-up, automate lifecycle management, enforce enterprise governance, and provide developers with immediate access to production-ready AI environments. The result is a platform designed to support model development, training, inference, and future AI service delivery without requiring organizations to assemble the operational software stack themselves.

As next-generation AI infrastructure continues to scale globally, Aolani and Rafay are demonstrating how infrastructure providers can move beyond deploying GPU capacity to operating modern AI platforms that accelerate customer adoption, improve infrastructure utilization, and shorten time to value.

About Aolani

Where AI gets built in Asia. Founded in 2023, Aolani’s AI factories enable enterprises, AI natives, and sovereigns to build with confidence, scale ambitiously, and move at hyper-speed in the world’s fastest-growing AI market. Founded in Singapore and backed by compliant and purpose-built neocloud infrastructure, Aolani delivers the performance capabilities for next-generation AI. For more information, visit www.aolanicloud.com and follow @AolaniCloud on LinkedIn.

About Rafay Systems

Rafay Systems is a leading software provider powering the operators building the AI cloud, including neoclouds, telecommunications providers, enterprises, and sovereign AI operators. The Rafay Platform lets these organizations operationalize GPU and compute infrastructure with self-service automation, governance, and multi-tenancy, spanning bare metal provisioning, infrastructure lifecycle management, virtual machines, Kubernetes, GPU PaaS, AI development environments, and Token Factory  for publishing AI models as token-metered inference services. By simplifying orchestration and operations across this stack, Rafay helps operators increase GPU utilization and turn raw infrastructure into monetizable, production-ready AI services, all while maintaining security, consistency, and control. For more information, visit rafay.co.

Media Contact
H/Advisors on behalf of Aolani Cloud
klareco-aolani@h-advisors.global

Angela Shugarts
Rafay Systems
angela@rafay.co 

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SOURCE Rafay Systems

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Lianlian DigiTech and UnionPay International Partner to Deploy AI-Agent Payments for Global Procurement

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HANGZHOU, China, July 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Lianlian DigiTech and UnionPay International signed a strategic cooperation agreement on July 18 to develop AI-agent payment applications for cross-border commerce. Sun Dali, Co-President of Lianlian DigiTech, attended and signed on behalf of the company.

The partnership combines Lianlian DigiTech’s AI-agent platform with UnionPay International’s global payment network. Initial focus areas include global procurement and AI Token replenishment, with AI-assisted procurement workflows connecting directly to cross-border payment infrastructure. The broader collaboration will also encompass overseas merchant acceptance expansion and joint AI technology R&D.

Launching Deployment Global Procurement

Building on the existing B2B payment business cooperation between Lianlian DigiTech and Union Pay International, the partnership will be further extended into AI-Agent payment Scenarios. The inaugural application introduces a Human-in-the-Loop AI-agent payment solution for global procurement, which will effectively address enterprises’ pain points in cross-border B2B payments.

Cross-border purchasing has long suffered from structural inefficiencies—protracted settlement cycles, exchange-rate volatility, layered compliance demands, and manual reconciliation.

The partners will integrate AI-agent capabilities throughout the procurement workflow—from supplier matching and product selection to payment execution. Under the Human-in-the-Loop model, the AI agent executes procurement tasks autonomously while users retain final approval authority, marrying AI-driven efficiency with human judgment.

The partners will use global procurement as the initial deployment, refining the experience and architecture based on real-world feedback, with a longer-term ambition to drive industry-wide standardization and broader adoption of AI-agent payment solutions across additional business verticals.

Long-Term Technology Collaboration

Beyond expanding AI-agent payment applications internationally, the two companies will collaborate on AI technologies for financial services through ongoing technical exchanges and joint development, advancing innovation and broader industry adoption.

Lianlian DigiTech said the partnership reflects its long-term commitment to integrating AI with cross-border payments. As an AI-native company building global financial infrastructure, it views this collaboration as an important step in bringing AI-agent payment technologies into commercial use, and will continue working with industry partners to provide businesses with more intelligent global payment services.

UnionPay International noted that as AI reshapes financial services, intelligent and digital transformation have become essential to sustainable industry growth. Drawing on its global payment network and seamless B2B digital payment solutions, including Virtual Commercial Card Program, it will work with Lianlian DigiTech to promote standardization and scaled adoption of AI-agent payments, ensuring AI-driven financial innovation supports the real economy.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/lianlian-digitech-and-unionpay-international-partner-to-deploy-ai-agent-payments-for-global-procurement-302834571.html

SOURCE Lianlian DigiTech

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Siemens advances self-verifying agentic AI workflows for semiconductor and PCB design

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Combines Siemens’ EDA expertise and software with NVIDIA AI infrastructure and software to improve result quality, time-to-results, tool-calling reliability and token efficiency for long-running engineering workloadsEnables agentic AI workflows that help engineers improve productivity and design quality across the electronic design automation (EDA) lifecycleDelivers more predictable, trusted outcomes through physics-based EDA software validationIntegrates with Siemens’ Intelligence Center X, supporting agent creation and orchestration, and intelligence into broader enterprise reasoning across design, manufacturing and supply chain operations

PLANO, Texas, July 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Siemens today announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with NVIDIA to deliver self-verifying agentic AI workflows to EDA, helping semiconductor and printed circuit board (PCB) engineering teams move from autonomous task orchestration toward more trusted, continuously validated engineering outcomes. The new capabilities build on Siemens’ recently introduced Fuse™ EDA AI Agent system and add new NVIDIA AI technology to help long-running, domain scoped, AI agents reason, act and continuously validate decisions against deterministic, physics-based EDA engines.

The updates to Siemens’ Fuse EDA AI Agent are designed to help the semiconductor and PCB industry move beyond simple automation and deliver trusted and verifiable outcomes that improve result quality, time-to-results, tool-calling reliability and token efficiency across long-running engineering workloads. The Fuse EDA AI Agent system is now integrated into Siemens’ recently launched Intelligence Center X, supporting agent creation and orchestration in Siemens’ enterprise industrial AI environment. Intelligence Center X delivers AI-driven, coordinated processes across design, manufacturing and supply chain – enhancing the comprehensive Digital Twin to support smarter execution and more trusted outcomes.

“Our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA enhances our domain-specific industrial AI, physics-based EDA engines and accelerated computing to create trusted, self-verifying AI workflows,” said Amit Gupta, senior vice president and chief AI strategy officer, Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “By enabling autonomous and long-running EDA AI agents to continuously validate their decisions against proven engineering tools accurately and efficiently, we help customers accelerate development, improve design quality and increase confidence in trusted engineering outcomes.”

“Semiconductor and PCB design are among the most complex engineering challenges in the world, and AI agents need trusted tools to reason, act and verify their work,” said Timothy Costa, vice president and general manager of computational engineering at NVIDIA. “Siemens is combining its EDA software with NVIDIA accelerated computing, AI software and Nemotron open models to create self-verifying agentic workflows that improve design quality, speed up results and give engineering teams greater confidence in every step of the process.”

Enabling trusted self-verifying AI agents for semiconductor and PCB design

The Fuse EDA AI Agent solution now combines Siemens engineering intelligence and trusted verification capabilities with NVIDIA AI infrastructure technologies to execute complex semiconductor design tasks with enhanced speed and precision:

Optimized EDA agents built with NVIDIA NeMo Gym open library for agentic environments improve result quality, speed and token efficiency for semiconductor and PCB design. This empowers customers with EDA design flows that get smarter over time with self-verifying agents which learn from every project to automatically improve execution strategies, optimize workflows and make better use of accumulated context.The NVIDIA OpenShell secure runtime enables enterprise scale design teams to run autonomous agents across their entire EDA environment with enterprise-grade security, access controls and audit trails within governed runtime environments.Advanced reasoning with the latest NVIDIA Nemotron models and Switchyard accelerates design with AI agents that understand complex engineering trade-offs at the speed of AI reasoning and supports complex engineering workflows with improved performance and token efficiency.NVIDIA accelerated computing and CUDA-X libraries helps design teams achieve signoff-quality results in hours instead of days, powering both AI reasoning and EDA engines for dramatic speedups without sacrificing accuracy.

Together, these capabilities enable secure and token-efficient multi-agent coordination, real-time feedback and improved convergence across semiconductor and PCB design and verification flows, helping customers achieve trusted engineering outcomes.

Comprehensive end-to-end design automation

Building on these capabilities, Siemens’ Fuse EDA AI Agent orchestrates workflows across the semiconductor and PCB lifecycle. Domain-specific agents collaborate across synthesis, verification, implementation and validation processes to optimize outcomes holistically.

The new offering spans Siemens’ EDA technologies across the full semiconductor and electronics lifecycles, from high-level synthesis with Catapult, verification with Questa One and Veloce, and custom IC design and verification with Solido, through to physical implementation with Aprisa, signoff verification with Calibre and design-for-test with Tessent. It also supports advanced 3D IC integration using Innovator3D IC and PCB design with Xpedition.

Accelerating custom integrated circuit (IC) design with agentic AI

The expanded collaboration enhances Siemens’ Solido Characterization Suite with agentic AI capabilities. These agentic workflows automate library characterization by automatically generating and verifying Liberty files by running Solido Characterizer with Solido LibSPICE, Solido Generator and Solido Analytics. The solution delivers production-proven results for advanced-node standard cell, memory and custom IP libraries while reducing characterization turnaround times by more than 10X and achieving over a 5X to 10X reduction in token costs.

These agentic capabilities extend further into the custom IC design flow with the new Solido Layout Analyzer, an AI-powered measurement-aware solution for visualizing, exploring and analyzing parasitic and layout-dependent effects in post-layout designs. Integrated with Fuse EDA AI Agent, Solido Layout Analyzer dramatically boosts design quality and engineering productivity by enabling natural language prompting with results analysis, fixing recommendations, and report generation.

“For STMicroelectronics’ non-volatile memory team, the ability to relate layout insight directly to electrical behavior is critical. Rather than discovering layout dependent effects late in the process, Solido Layout Analyzer brings this analysis earlier into the flow, improving design confidence and helping cut down the time we spend debugging complex design blocks by weeks. We are planning to test and validate the advantages in our on-going design activity,” said Gianbattista Lo Giudice, Non-Volatile Memory Design manager, STMicroelectronics.

Accelerating digital verification with agentic AI

With verification consuming up to 70 percent of design time and complexity, the industry faces an unprecedented productivity crisis. Building on the recently announced Questa One Agentic Toolkit, Siemens is extending these domain-scoped agentic AI workflows with NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 Ultra reasoning model, designed for complex, long-running agents. In agentic RTL benchmarking with the ACE-RTL agent, Nemotron 3 Ultra leads among open models. Its reasoning and efficiency help autonomous agents evaluate engineering trade-offs while continuously validating designs against golden test harness. This enables teams to identify issues earlier, accelerate verification closure, and deliver trusted outcomes faster.

“We’re at an inflection point where the complexity of AI chips, chiplets, and 3D ICs has outpaced traditional verification methodologies,” said Abhi Kolpekwar, senior vice president and general manager Digital Verification Technologies, Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software, “agentic AI is the natural path forward that scales with this complexity—agents that can orchestrate multi-domain verification, reason across billions of test scenarios, and deliver production-quality results in timeframes that were impossible just two years ago.” path forward that scales with this complexity—agents that can orchestrate multi-domain verification, reason across billions of test scenarios, and deliver production-quality results in timeframes that were impossible just two years ago.”

Availability

Siemens’ expanded AI-driven EDA capabilities will be available in forthcoming releases of Siemens’ AI-native EDA portfolio. To learn more about how Siemens is bringing the power of Agentic AI to the EDA industry, visit https://www.siemens.com/en-us/products/fuse-eda-ai-system/agent/

Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.

Siemens Digital Industries (DI) empowers companies of all sizes within the process and discrete manufacturing industries to accelerate their digital and sustainability transformation across the entire value chain. Siemens’ cutting-edge automation and software portfolio revolutionizes the design, realization and optimization of products and production. And with Siemens Xcelerator – the open digital business platform – this process is made even easier, faster, and scalable. Together with our partners and ecosystem, Siemens Digital Industries enables customers to become a sustainable Digital Enterprise. Siemens Digital Industries has a workforce of around 70,000 people worldwide.

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a leading technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, mobility, and healthcare. The company’s purpose is to create technology to transform the everyday, for everyone. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers customers to accelerate their digital and sustainability transformations, making factories more efficient, cities more livable, and transportation more sustainable. A leader in industrial AI, Siemens leverages its deep domain know-how to apply AI – including generative AI – to real-world applications, making AI accessible and impactful for customers across diverse industries. Siemens also owns a majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers, a leading global medical technology provider pioneering breakthroughs in healthcare. For everyone. Everywhere. Sustainably.

In fiscal 2025, which ended on September 30, 2025, the Siemens Group generated revenue of €78.9 billion and net income of €10.4 billion. As of September 30, 2025, the company employed around 318,000 people worldwide on the basis of continuing operations. Further information is available on the Internet at www.siemens.com.

Note: A list of relevant Siemens trademarks can be found here. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners.

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SOURCE Siemens Industry Software

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