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Tracxn: VC funding for Indian startups fell 17% YoY to $10.5B in 2025 across 1,518 deals, down ~39% YoY; AI startups raised $643M, up 4% YoY, across 100 deals (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/27/india-startu…

India startup funding hits $11B in 2025 as investors grow more selective | TechCrunch
Startup funding rounds in India fell sharply in 2025 as investors concentrated capital into fewer companies.

Seneca, which is developing autonomous firefighting drones, raised $60M in seed and Series A rounds led by Caffeinated Capital and Convective Capital (Christopher Marquis/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/…

How Seneca’s Firefighting Drones Signal A New Era Of Climate Adaptation
Seneca’s firefighting drones show how adaptation tech is shaping a resilience economy amid rising climate risks and billion-dollar wildfire disasters.

The 🇧🇪 Belgian postal service claims to be the first emission-free postal service in a European capital. All deliveries in the 19 municipalities of the Brussels capital region are now made on foot, by bike (some with e-trailer) or in an electric van.
https://

bpost makes Brussels the first European capital with emission-free daily postal deliveries
On October 1st, 2025, bpost completed the transition to zero-emission last-mile delivery for its regular letter and parcel rounds across the 19 municipalities of Brussels. The Belgian capital, the capital of Europe, is now the first major European metropolis where daily delivery rounds by postmen and postwomen are emission free.

Kraken raised $200M at a $20B valuation, after raising $600M at a $15B valuation in Sept.; prior to the two rounds, Kraken raised only $27M in venture capital (Ben Weiss/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/11/18/kraken-citadel-securities-ken-griffin-…

Exclusive: Crypto exchange Kraken raises $200 million from Ken Griffin’s Citadel to notch $20 billion valuation
Once skittish about digital assets, Citadel has warmed towards the crypto business in 2025.

BATTLE for Bitcoin: Capital-Efficient Optimistic Bridges with Large Committees
Sergio Demian Lerner, Ariel Futoransky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06468 https://

BATTLE for Bitcoin: Capital-Efficient Optimistic Bridges with Large Committees
We present BATTLE for Bitcoin, a DoS-resilient dispute layer that secures optimistic bridges between Bitcoin and rollups or sidechains. Our design adapts the BATTLE tournament protocol to Bitcoin's UTXO model using BitVM-style FLEX components and garbled circuits with on-demand L1 security bonds. Disputes are resolved in logarithmic rounds while recycling rewards, keeping the honest asserter's minimum initial capital constant even under many permissionless challengers. The construction is fully…