Topic: venture capital
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VCs Are Underestimating the AI Transformation Challenge
Venture capital firms are using AI to transform traditional service industries by acquiring companies, automating operations to reduce labor costs, and consolidating sectors to replicate software-like high margins. General Catalyst leads this strategy with a $1.5 billion fund, incubating AI-nativ...
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VCs Are Pouring Money Into AI Startups - Here's Why
Venture capital is increasingly flowing into AI, with projections showing it will account for over half of all VC funding by 2025, highlighting a major shift in investor focus away from other sectors. AI startups have received $192.7 billion in investments this year, making up a significant porti...
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From YouTube to $12M: French VC Funds Y Combinator Startups
Gabriel Jarrosson's Lobster Capital exclusively invests in Y Combinator graduates, a focused strategy that has grown his assets to over $12 million and led to a second fund. This approach is based on Y Combinator's superior performance metrics, including a 4.5% unicorn rate and 45% Series A succe...
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VCs Ditch AI Hype, Back Real Innovation
Venture capital investment hit a ten-quarter high of €108.3 billion in Q1 2025, with over €44.6 billion driven by artificial intelligence. Investors are becoming more discerning, demanding tangible proof of functionality and market readiness rather than just AI-related buzzwords. Despite a 21% de...
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Europe's VCs: Embrace Risk or Lose the AI Race to the US
European AI startups are lagging behind due to local venture investors' excessive caution, slow decision-making, and a deeply ingrained culture of risk aversion, which limits capital flow into innovative sectors. The region's funding tends to favor less complex businesses like e-commerce and fint...
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AI's New Investing Playbook: A Game Changer for Your Portfolio
AI is fundamentally transforming investment by shifting from reliance on personal networks to data-driven insights, enabling more efficient and objective decision-making. The technology enhances workflows through data orchestration, micro-pattern detection, and process acceleration, allowing real...
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Hong Kong's 2026 Innovation Fund: A New Era for Startups
Hong Kong will launch an Innovation & Technology Industry-oriented Fund in 2026 to boost its startup ecosystem and strengthen its position as a global innovation hub. The government is expanding existing programs, including scaling up the Innovation & Technology Venture Fund and introducing a Pil...
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Europe's Unicorn Boom: Over 10 Startups Hit $1B in 2025
Europe's startup scene is experiencing a significant rise in unicorn companies, with over ten ventures reaching billion-dollar valuations in the first half of 2025, reflecting strong investor confidence. These high-value startups span cutting-edge sectors such as artificial intelligence, biotechn...
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Expand North Star: Scaling Startups from 180 Countries
Expand North Star 2025 is the world's leading startup and investor event, featuring over 2,000 startups and 1,200 investors from 180 nations, and it plays a key role in scaling the global digital ecosystem after a year of $368 billion in venture capital investment. Brazil is the event's first off...
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Inside Tim Draper's 'Meet the Drapers' Pitch Show Experience
"Meet the Drapers," a business competition show featuring Tim Draper, offers startups significant exposure and a chance to win a $1 million investment, touring cities to highlight diverse entrepreneurs. The show blends entertainment with entrepreneurship, allowing founders to share their stories ...
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Mubadala-Backed AAF's Winning Strategy for Hot Startup Deals
AAF Management maintains smaller fund sizes to prioritize investor alignment and returns, using a hybrid model of direct startup investments and stakes in emerging venture funds. The firm's latest $55 million Axis Fund supports emerging managers and invests in startups from pre-seed to pre-IPO st...
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Goldman Sachs to Buy Industry Ventures in $965M Deal as VC Exits Soar
Goldman Sachs is acquiring Industry Ventures for up to $965 million, signaling a strategic shift in venture capital as firms increasingly turn to secondary markets and buyouts due to difficult IPO conditions. The deal includes $665 million in cash and equity with potential for $300 million more b...
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Insight Partners Notifies Clients of Ransomware Data Breach
Insight Partners disclosed a ransomware attack that began in October 2024, was detected in January 2025, and compromised personal and financial data of over 12,000 individuals. The breach resulted from a sophisticated social engineering attack, leading to data theft and system encryption, though ...
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The Golden Age of Robotics Startups Is Here (And It's Not Just AI)
Venture capital investment in robotics has surged, with $6 billion deployed in the first seven months of 2025, driven by tangible commercial successes and clearer market applications. The sector's growth was catalyzed by Amazon's 2013 acquisition of Kiva Systems, which inspired new companies and ...
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Databricks Hits $100B Valuation Milestone with $4B ARR
Databricks has reached a $100 billion valuation after securing $1 billion in new funding, highlighting its rapid growth in the AI and data analytics sector. The funding will support development of a database platform to compete with Supabase, targeting AI agent applications, as automated data gen...
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Deel Raises $300M, Hits $17.3B Valuation
Deel raised $300 million in Series E funding, reaching a $17.3 billion valuation, with investments led by Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz despite legal disputes with Rippling. The company is profitable with over $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, serving 35,000 clients and managing pa...
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Wave Function Ventures Raises $15M for Deep Tech Fund
Wave Function Ventures raised $15.1 million for its inaugural deep tech fund, focusing on early-stage investments in sectors like nuclear energy, robotics, and aerospace. Founder Jamie Gull leverages his engineering background from SpaceX and Scaled Composites, along with angel investing experien...
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Better Tomorrow Ventures Raises $140M, Betting Big on Fintech
Better Tomorrow Ventures has raised $140 million for its third fund to invest in early-stage financial technology companies, believing the massive financial services sector is still undergoing significant digital transformation. The firm is focusing on disrupting the accounting industry due to a ...
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Paid AI raises $21M seed to bill clients only for results
Manny Medina's new startup Paid has raised $33.3 million in total funding, achieving a valuation over $100 million, with its seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Paid introduces a results-based billing platform for AI agents, allowing developers to charge clients based on the tangible v...
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Shamillah Bankiya on the State of Europe's Venture Market
Shamillah Bankiya, a partner at Dawn Capital, highlights Europe's dynamic venture market growth, including increased American investor interest and globally successful startups in AI and fintech. She points out structural challenges such as fragmented European stock exchanges and stringent regula...
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Craft Ventures Leads $42M Series A in GovTech Startup Starbridge
Starbridge secured $42 million in a Series A funding round led by Craft Ventures, bringing its total funding to $52 million to address public sector data challenges. The company's platform aggregates fragmented public data into a single, accessible location, using AI to help sales teams identify ...
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Sheryl Sandberg's Flint uses AI to build and update websites automatically
Michelle Lim identified a critical content gap at Warp, where potential customers used AI tools for product information the company's website lacked, highlighting the urgency for dynamic content as AI agents evolve. Lim co-founded Flint, an AI platform that enables businesses to create self-updat...
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FleetWorks Secures $17M to Speed Up Trucker-Cargo Matching
FleetWorks, a logistics startup founded by former Uber Freight and Airbnb employees, has raised $17 million to expand its AI platform that connects small trucking carriers with cargo, aiming to modernize the inefficient trucking industry. The platform has rapidly onboarded over 10,000 carriers an...
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Underdog AI Startups on a16z's Top 50 List
The AI Application Spending Report by a16z highlights that while major players like OpenAI and Anthropic lead in spending, numerous emerging companies are gaining traction by automating specific business functions such as customer service and legal tasks. Vibe coding platforms like Replit, which ...
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Expand North Star 2025: Digital Finance & Deep-Tech Innovations
Expand North Star 2025, held at Dubai Harbor, gathered thousands of visitors and industry leaders to explore digital finance and deep-tech innovations, featuring 2,000 startups and over 1,200 investors managing assets exceeding $1.1 trillion. Key discussions at the event focused on the integratio...
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Humanoids: The Future That's Not Quite Here
Experts caution that humanoid robotics faces significant technological and safety hurdles, including a lack of dexterity and risks in human environments, which may lead to an investment bubble. The development of humanoid robots is highly uncertain and complex, with slow real-world progress and c...
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PEAK:AIO Raises $6.8M Seed Funding to Fuel Global Expansion
PEAK:AIO raised $6.8 million in seed funding, led by Pembroke VCT, to expand its AI-first data storage solutions and global operations. The company's platform addresses AI data bottlenecks by providing high-performance, low-latency storage for applications from edge inference to model training. I...
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Naveen Rao's AI Startup Eyes $5B Valuation With a16z Backing
Unconventional, Inc., founded by former Databricks AI head Naveen Rao, is negotiating a $1 billion funding round that would value the company at $5 billion to develop a new type of AI computer system. Andreessen Horowitz is leading the investment with participation from Lightspeed, Lux Capital, a...
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Toyota Invests $1.5B More in Startup Funding Across All Stages
Toyota is investing $1.5 billion in startup funding to drive innovation in mobility, AI, climate technology, and industrial automation, integrating these into future projects like Woven City. The company has established Toyota Invention Partners with $670 million to support early-stage Japanese s...
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Vibe-Coding Startup Anything Hits $100M Valuation After $2M ARR Launch
Vibe coding, which uses AI tools to build applications via simple prompts, is rapidly growing, with companies like Lovable and Replit achieving massive revenue increases in under a year. Despite their success, these platforms often struggle to help users launch fully functional, production-ready ...
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Why Your Startup Should Launch in Saudi Arabia Now
Saudi Arabia offers a compelling opportunity for tech startups due to its Vision 2030-driven transformation, supported by significant public funding and progressive policies. The country has rapidly emerged as a top startup ecosystem, with Riyadh ranking among the top 25 globally, fueled by incre...
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YC Alum Cercli Raises $12M for AI-Powered HR Platform in MENA
Cercli, a Dubai-based startup founded by former Careem executives, has raised $12 million in Series A funding to address disconnected enterprise software in MENA with its unified, AI-native platform. The company is undergoing a complete AI-first rebuild, leading to a tenfold revenue surge and pro...
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Nvidia's AI Startup Investments: Powering the Future
Nvidia is leveraging its dominant position in high-performance GPUs and financial power to strategically invest in and shape the AI ecosystem through extensive venture capital activities. The company has significantly increased its startup investments, participating in numerous large funding roun...
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Nexos.ai Secures $30M to Accelerate Enterprise AI Adoption
Nexos.ai raised $30 million in Series A funding, valuing the company at $350 million, to support its mission of enabling secure enterprise AI adoption by acting as a trusted intermediary platform. The platform addresses data security concerns by providing a neutral bridge between employees and AI...
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South Korea's Silicon Valley Falls Short of Global Dreams
Pangyo Techno Valley is South Korea's leading technology hub, established in 2011, but it faces significant gaps in global influence, talent attraction, and international capital compared to Silicon Valley. The hub hosts major companies like Naver and Kakao but is dominated by small to mid-size e...
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How a Prankster Tricked VCs Out of $1 Million
Oobah Butler's documentary *How I Made £1 Million in 90 Days* explores the hype-driven culture of modern entrepreneurship by attempting to legally accumulate wealth while critiquing society's obsession with profit. He experimented with strategies like creating buzz around a cryptocurrency venture...
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GITEX Expands to Latin America, Fuels $950B Digital Boom
Latin America's digital economy is projected to reach nearly $950 billion by 2026, with GITEX launching its inaugural Latin American edition in São Paulo in 2027 to accelerate this growth. GITEX LATAM will showcase Brazil as a tech hub, leveraging its digital infrastructure and economic leadershi...
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Polars Creator Raises $21M From Accel to Boost Open Source Tool
Polars secured a $21 million Series A investment led by Accel, building on its origins as a pandemic-era open-source project designed to outperform Pandas with a Rust-based engine. The company is expanding its product suite with Polars Cloud and Polars Distributed, aiming to compete with Apache S...
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United Gulf Adds $1M to Hedera Africa Hackathon Prize Pool
The Hedera Africa Hackathon 2025 prize pool has doubled to $2 million, thanks to a $1 million contribution from UGFS North Africa, aimed at fostering digital innovation and economic inclusion across Africa. The event targets over 10,000 participants from at least 15 countries, who will develop de...
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San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie to Speak at Disrupt 2025
Mayor Daniel Lurie will deliver a keynote at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, symbolizing a significant homecoming for San Francisco's tech ecosystem and a push to reintegrate technology into the city's identity. His participation signals a reconciliation between City Hall and the tech community, address...
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Veeam Buys Securiti AI in $1.7 Billion Data Security Deal
Veeam has acquired Securiti AI for $1.725 billion to enhance data management and protection, integrating its technology into Veeam's data resilience solutions by early December. The acquisition aligns with Veeam's strategy to expand its capabilities in data security and AI readiness, following a ...
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OpenEvidence, AI for Doctors, Raises $200M at $6B Valuation
OpenEvidence has raised $200 million at a $6 billion valuation, reflecting strong investor confidence in specialized AI tools for healthcare, following a previous $210 million round just three months earlier. The platform serves as a medical version of ChatGPT, offering verified healthcare profes...
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Realm.Security Secures $15 Million in Series A Funding
Realm.Security secured $15 million in Series A funding, led by Jump Capital, bringing its total funding to $20 million to accelerate product development and market expansion. The company launched an AI-powered Security Data Pipeline Platform (SDPP) that consolidates and analyzes security data in ...
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Stoke Space's $510M Round Signals Defense-Focused Launch Future
The launch industry's demand center has shifted from commercial markets to defense and national security priorities, driven by substantial investments like the $510 million funding for Stoke Space. Geopolitical tensions and initiatives such as the Pentagon's "Golden Dome" missile defense program ...
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Steph Curry's VC Invests in AI to Fix Food Supply Chains
The global food supply chain is inefficient, relying on outdated methods like emails and faxes for orders, which creates bottlenecks and hurts thin profit margins. Burnt, a startup, has secured $3.8 million in seed funding to use AI agents that automate back-office tasks, such as order entry, wit...
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Insight Partners Hit by Ransomware Attack, Exposing Staff and Investor Data
Insight Partners suffered a significant data breach due to a sophisticated cyberattack, compromising personal information of over 12,600 individuals. The stolen data included banking details, tax information, and personal records of employees and limited partners, highlighting vulnerabilities in ...
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Terraton Aims to Be the McDonald's of Biochar
Terraton has raised $11.5 million in seed funding to scale biochar production using a franchise-like model, partnering with companies to replicate and improve facilities. Biochar is made from agricultural waste, sequestering carbon and improving soil health, but scaling supply is a challenge desp...
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Hunted Labs Raises $3M to Enhance Open Source Security
Hunted Labs has secured $3M to identify suspicious contributors in the open source community, led by former NSA deputy director George Barnes.
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Serval Secures $47M to Power AI Agents for IT Service
Serval raised $47 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures to advance its agentic AI systems for IT service automation, with backing from firms like First Round and General Catalyst and clients including Perplexity and Together AI. The company uses two distinct AI agents: one autonomo...
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Ex-Gates Climate Lobbyists Launch New Firm
The Clean Economy Project, founded by former Breakthrough Energy staff, believes clean energy will soon be cost-competitive with fossil fuels. It was established after Breakthrough Energy dissolved its policy team, citing difficulties in achieving policy progress during the Trump administration. ...
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