AnotherBall $16M Debt Financing Round⚡️ 📑 About: @anotherball_jp is a virtual entertainment platform for VTubers, avatars, and digital creator ecosystems. 🤝 Investors: Mizuho Financial Group, MUFG, @smbc_midosuke, and Shoko Chukin Bank

83 startups ranked this week. Five open free: Aurelius Systems @aureliuslasers, counter-drone lasers Metal Morph, wastewater metal recovery Remepy, drug plus digital therapy Centricity WealthTech @CentricityWT, advisor platform Erco Energía @ErcoEnergia, Colombian solar EarlySignals scores new startups the week they raise, launch, or leave stealth, on a potential score and a scoop score across team, product, traction, market, moat, and capital. Aurelius Systems, United States. Two founders who ran an NFT tooling startup until early 2024 now run live-fire laser tests with the Army's 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii. The turrets weigh under 30kg and track drones autonomously. A $10 million seed in September 2025 was followed by a $40 million Series A in August 2026, co-led by Draper and KAS, alongside a mobile integration partnership with American Rheinmetall. 73 on potential, 72 on scoop. Metal Morph, United Kingdom. Six water utilities covering 56 percent of the UK market have signed agreements, and no full-scale plant has run yet. The company pulls aluminium and iron coagulants back out of wastewater using Donnan dialysis in container-sized modules, validated so far at a Cranfield University pilot. Funding is a 700,000 pound pre-seed plus a 100,000 pound Ofwat innovation grant. 88 on scoop, the highest of the five firms we opened, and 68 on potential, held down by traction that is still contracts rather than plants. Remepy, Israel. A 41-patient Parkinson's Phase IIa trial moved motor scores 9.7 points on the MDS-UPDRS scale against 1.95 points for levodopa alone, published in Brain Communications this year. Remepy builds prescription digital protocols designed to work alongside existing drugs. Merck KGaA's M Ventures led a $36 million Series A in August 2026, taking total funding to $62 million. There are no named customers and no revenue, which is where a company sits before Phase III. 73 on potential, 78 on scoop. Centricity WealthTech, India. Former private bankers from IIFL Wealth, Citibank, and Kotak run an open platform connecting independent financial advisors to 80 to 85 alternate asset managers, manufacturing none of the products itself. It now carries 20,000 partners and roughly 15,000 to 16,000 crore rupees in assets, up from 4,500 distributors and 4,500 crore at seed. SMBC's Asia Rising Fund led a 280 crore rupee Series A in August 2026. 80 on potential, the highest of the five, and 72 on scoop. Erco Energía, Colombia. Two mechanical engineering graduates from EAFIT turned their 2012 capstone project into a distributed solar developer with more than 320 MWp installed or in progress, including a 26.4 MW plant dispatched in August 2025 and a 14.96 MWp site carrying 4.5 MWh of storage. Norfund, CFM, and Axon backed a $129 million Series C in August 2026, one of the largest local equity rounds in Colombia. 79 on potential, 82 on scoop. 78 more firms sit behind the subscriber wall in the August 17 issue: 16 in Europe, 13 in Canada, 13 across Israel and the Middle East, 10 in Asia-Pacific, 9 in Africa, 9 in the United States, and 7 in Latin America. Research notes, not investment advice.

A traveler taps her card at a market thousands of miles from home. The payment feels instant, simple, straightforward. It’s not. Behind that tap, money may need to move across currencies, banks, payment providers, and borders. Traditional systems often require companies to park funds in local accounts before they are needed, leaving capital stagnant for long periods of time where it’s not able to earn a return or be put to work. Members of the Avalanche Payments Collective are building a more efficient global payments model, one that keeps capital productive up until the moment it needs to move. Here are five members working across different parts of cross-border payments and treasury infrastructure: @AxiymFinance provides payment and treasury infrastructure that helps institutions route liquidity and settle transactions without pre-funding every market. Its technology supported Hyundai Motor America’s stablecoin payment to its Mexico affiliate, completed on Avalanche in minutes instead of days. @nonco_otc helps institutions exchange currencies and stablecoins by requesting prices directly from a network of professional liquidity providers. That gives them access to more competitive rates while allowing both sides of the transaction to settle together onchain. SMBC, Japan’s second-largest bank, is exploring stablecoin infrastructure for wholesale institutional payments. It is also working alongside MUFG and Mizuho on a potential yen-pegged stablecoin initiative built on Avalanche. @StraitsX is working with KBank through Project BLOOM to develop payment infrastructure that can improve settlement across Southeast Asian corridors where moving money remains particularly slow and expensive. AeraTech helps multinational companies manage cash across subsidiaries, offset internal obligations, and settle inter-company payments without unnecessarily routing every transaction through external banks. These different companies all represent or engage with different parts of the payment and treasury stack. But they all have a shared goal: keep capital working longer, move it when it is needed, and make cross-border payments faster and more efficient. That is what the Avalanche Payments Collective is bringing together. Frictionless, borderless payments that really are instant, simple, and straightforward.