Intel Deals as Giotto.ai Courts Unicorn Status and AI Tokens Regroup

Today, AI capital went vertical, Nvidia inked monster deals, two startups pulled in serious war chests, and AI linked crypto tokens bounced back from last week’s slide. From Wall Street to venture streets to the crypto frontier, one thing’s clear, this sector isn’t cooling down, it’s compressing time.

📈 AI Market Movers & Trends

Intel’s (INTC) deal with Nvidia marks a subtle surrender to the AI silicon reality. Despite its own Gaudi chips, Intel playing nice with Nvidia signals a recognition that their future AI relevance hinges more on partnership than disruption.

Zooming out, OpenAI’s sheer purchasing power, dropping a cool $100B on compute, is an alarm bell for anyone doubting the “supercycle” narrative. This is what a trillion dollar IPO pipeline looks like warming up. And it’s warping everything from chip design to cloud pricing in real time.

💸 Funding Watch

Welcome to the AI startup gold rush, Series B rounds that look like pre IPO raises, and valuations going vertical.

Two standouts today, Switzerland based Giotto.ai, reportedly angling for a $200 million raise at a lofty $1 billion+ valuation, and U.S. based Distyl AI, which just nabbed $175 million in a Series B, pushing its valuation to $1.8 billion, a 9x leap since its last round.

Giotto.ai is particularly spicy. Sources say the startup is positioning itself as a serious AGI contender, with early emphasis on scientific discovery and enterprise reasoning engines. If you're thinking “OpenAI for Europe,” you're not far off. And it's drawing heavy inbound interest from soft power capital , including the rumor mill naming both UK and Saudi sovereign arms.

Distyl AI's pitch is different but equally potent, enterprise native automation that talks to your ERP, CRM, and BI tools like a human analyst, but works 24/7 and doesn’t miss forecasts. Salesforce Ventures kicked in, alongside new growth equity players like Durable Capital. If Distyl keeps this velocity, it could challenge UiPath’s category stronghold.

Worth watching, Rocket AI scooped $15 million in early stage funding from Salesforce Ventures and Accel. It's targeting the middle layer layer of LLM development, think AI glue between raw models and consumer SaaS. The real signal? Salesforce doubling down across funding layers. From Rocket to Agentic AI (another recent check writer move), Marc Benioff’s empire wants to be the default operating stack for machine led business software.

The floodgates aren't just open, they're shattering.

🪙 Crypto Moves

AI linked crypto tokens, quiet last week, swung back into the green as alignment between AI infra and blockchain security narrative gained steam. The AI token index on CoinMarketCap rose 5.6%.

What’s driving the rebound? Call it the convergence premium. As OpenAI’s $100B appetite for compute hits front pages, decentralized compute and AI model verification protocols are back in the conversation. Several DePIN tokens (that’s “Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network,” for the non Degen crowd) saw volume spikes, including Render (RNDR), which is positioning as the GPU market’s decentralized Robin Hood.

Also worth tracking, dHealth Intelligence launched a privacy first medical AI agent tethered to cryptographic audits. It’s trying to build HIPAA compliant agents on chain, something the traditional AI startups haven’t tackled seriously. Privacy preserving compute models are white space, and token native protocols like dHealth are sprinting into it.

Kraken’s AI token index also flashed a “buy” indicator for the first time in two weeks, echoing momentum that may link to this week’s TradFi AI glow up. Traders should tread lightly, but another crossover narrative, AI safety tooling on chain, is picking up capital and dev talent.

For crypto builders, the message is clear, infrastructure convergence is no longer a moonshot, it's a creeping inevitability. If you’re not building for AI, you may be building for irrelevance.

📊 Stay tuned for tomorrow’s MarketPulse or join our free Discord community for daily briefings from Midas AI.