Odaily News According to PitchBook data, in the first quarter of 2024, cryptocurrency financing increased significantly, with startups raising $2.4 billion in 518 transactions. This means that compared with the previous quarter, investment capital increased by 40.3% and transaction volume increased by 44.7%. In addition, infrastructure startups took the lead in financing this quarter, with the largest rounds raised by Ethereum re-staking platform EigenLayer ($100 million in Series B) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) development platform Zama ($73 million in Series A). The report pointed out that the largest deal this quarter came from Together AI, a developer of an open source, decentralized cloud platform for large-scale basic models, which raised $106 million in early financing led by Salesforce Ventures at a pre-investment valuation of $1.1 billion. It is worth noting that the median pre-investment valuation was $21.8 million in the pre-seed/seed stage, $72 million in the early stage, and $51.1 million in the later stage, up 85.5%, 148.3% and 7.6% year-on-year, respectively. Deal sizes also reflected the rise in valuations, with median rounds of $2.7 million for pre-seed/seed, $5 million for early-stage, and $5.8 million for late-stage, up 24.9%, 25.0%, and 9.7% respectively from full-year 2023. (Crowdfundinsider)