Broadcom Gets an AI Credit Bump, While Kleiner Perkins Eyeballs Voice AI and Crypto Whales Chase DeepSnitch

The AI economy flexed across the board today, with institutional tailwinds boosting Broadcom, Kleiner Perkins returning to early stage bets, and crypto whales chasing AI trading alpha. From chip stocks to speech startups to tokenized intelligence, one thing’s clear, the AI arms race is pivoting hard into infrastructure and interfaces.

📈 AI Market Movers & Trends

Broadcom just picked up a rare Wall Street upgrade, and it wasn’t for its networking backbone. S&P Global bumped the chipmaker to ‘A ’ on the back of “sustained AI momentum,” handing Broadcom its highest credit rating since before the cloud era. It’s a subtle but strong signal, the market is no longer treating Broadcom as just a legacy semiconductor firm. It's now priced as AI core infrastructure, one step below Nvidia, but moving up fast.

And speaking of Nvidia, its Berlin traded shares (NVD.BE) slipped 2.1% today after a jittery week of headlines hinting that Beijing could formally restrict purchases of high end AI chips. The result? A short term chill in Nvidia exposure, and a heatwave for domestic Chinese chipmakers. Shanghai listed names like Cambrian and SMIC rallied hard, with speculative froth pushing some names up more than 10% intraday.

Meanwhile, Meta’s “smart” Ray Bans got their first AI powered field test, and flubbed it. At a glitzy demo, CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to show off real time object recognition. The glasses failed to identify a dog. Still, Meta’s stock held flat, signaling investors are more focused on the eventual platform potential than first gen friction.

Zooming out, markets overall wobbled in the wake of the Fed’s latest rate cut, an expected move that still left Asian tech indices confused and largely flat. But rate softening narratives are already boosting AI infra and capex darlings, Taiwan Semi gained 1.7% today, positioning itself perfectly in the semiconductor supply squeeze.

Bottom line, AI isn’t a hype bubble anymore. It’s a balance sheet strategy. Watch the capital flows and ratings, the real tells are no longer in product demos.

💸 Funding Watch

Kleiner Perkins is going back to its roots, seeding a bold voice AI startup betting that call centers are just bad UX waiting to be replaced. Keplar, a new player aiming to become the GPT of customer calls, locked in $3.4M in seed funding led by KP this week. Its pitch? Replace the “How may I help you today?” experience with deeply personalized AI agents rooted in enterprise specific RAG and LLMs. Boring? Maybe. But a lucrative wedge into the $400B+ global call center market. Quietly, this kind of vertical AI, voice first, business embedded, ruthlessly focused, is exactly what founders should be watching.

Bigger ripples came from Nscale, a beefy AI infra startup that just raised a monster $700M round straight from the big guns, Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Nscale isn’t just riding AI, it wants to be the backbone. The firm builds modular data centers and custom silicon optimized for frontier models, positioning itself as an arms dealer in the inevitable model cloud war. Nvidia’s name on the cap table makes this one feel like Lambda Labs 2.0, but with more political insulation.

Elsewhere, LA based MarqVision raised $48M to tackle online brand protection using AI powered watermarking and counterfeit detection, while Vanara Capital led a $100M Series B into Invisible Technologies, a company specializing in human in the loop AI pipelines for training data. Take note, the infrastructure layer quietly became the new battleground for VCs sick of consumer AI toys and enterprise LLM wrappers.

M&A is heating up too. Minute Media, backed by BlackRock, snapped up an Indian AI content startup for $250M, signaling that content ops, especially in emerging markets, are still very much in play. If you think “generative media” is dead, look where proven distribution meets automation talent.

Conclusion? The checkbooks are heavier, the bets are narrower, and the message is clear, winner takes most competition is forcing investors to pick infra, not interfaces.

🪙 Crypto Moves

Crypto’s dark horse thesis, that AI will birth a new class of money, took another step out of the shadows today. DeepSnitch, a little known AI analytics token, started hitting whale radars thanks to its trading intelligence layer and surprisingly sticky community engagement. No meme token here, DeepSnitch is built for on chain analysis, using AI models to track trade patterns and asset behavior in real time. Echoes of Numerai, but more decentralized and less hedge fund cosplay.

Meanwhile, the broader “AI token” sector is outperforming. According to CryptoRank data, names like TAO (from Bittensor), NEAR, and Filecoin all outpaced ETH and BTC today, a rare alignment of fundamental traction and market performance. TAO has become the quiet juggernaut in decentralized model training, while NEAR is pushing toward Layer 1 AI native compute. Filecoin? Still betting hard on decentralized AI data storage, a good call if you believe every fine tuned model is just a legal threat waiting to happen.

Also notable, DeAgentAI, a soon to launch platform token, is teasing cross chain LLM inference support, basically trying to be an OpenAI x Chainlink hybrid. That alone could open the door for smart contracts that make decisions on the fly based on natural language queries, terrifying, thrilling, or both.

Regulatory clouds remain, though. Trump's former “AI and crypto czar” is now under Senate investigation for dubious contracts. And Amazing AI PLC, a publicly listed AI firm, announced a new crypto treasury policy this morning, allocating up to 25% of its reserves into volatile AI linked crypto tokens. Pricier playground, indeed.

Takeaway? AI is slowly becoming the thesis in crypto, but unlike 2021, the noise is lower and the alignment is sharper. Projects that build at the convergence of compute, compliance, and coordination are getting oxygen. Everything else? Still LARPing.

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