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In recent days, founders and founders-turned-investors took to X to share horror stories about being mistreated by VCs. Their complaints ranged from VCs falling asleep during pitch meetings to investors suggesting a founder fire a co-founder.
Brendan Foody, co-founder of the AI talent platform Mercor, which was last valued at $10 billion, went so far as to call out Sequoia, arguably one of the most elite VC firms in the world. READ MORE
A decade ago, defense tech was considered a niche, even controversial corner of venture capital, with few startup investors daring to place bets on companies working with the military.
How times have changed. Already this year, more than $14.6 billion in venture investment has gone into companies in Crunchbase’s military, national security and law enforcement categories, blowing past the sector’s previous annual record of $9.6 billion raised in all of 2025. READ MORE
There is a moment before every flight that matters more than takeoff itself.
It is not dramatic or cinematic. From the outside, it often looks like nothing at all. A pilot reviews the conditions, studies the route, checks the aircraft, evaluates the weather, considers alternatives, and then makes a decision: go or no-go.
That decision is deceptively simple to underestimate because nothing visibly happens. If the answer is “go”, the flight proceeds. If the answer is “no-go”, the aircraft stays on the ground, the plan changes, and life moves on. READ MORE
Early-stage venture firm 1517 Fund has sued the California regulator that’s overseeing the delayed rollout of a controversial new portfolio diversity disclosure requirement, claiming the law is unconstitutional.
It’s the sharpest pushback yet from VCs, who have called the rules an overreach that burdens investors and the startups they fund. The complaint appears to be the first lawsuit over the California Fair Investment Practices by Venture Capital Companies Act. READ MORE
Venture capital’s latest pivot is away from purely software bets and back toward the physical layers of computing, manufacturing and energy. In Maker Faire Rome’s 2026 hardware outlook, the argument is that artificial intelligence has made hardware a strategic asset again, not just a support system. That view is increasingly reflected in company data and investor behavior. READ MORE
Funds that invest in university spinouts are a growing asset class, having seen strong expansion over the past three years. However, there are few benchmarks focused on specifically these funds.
It is our aim at Global Corporate Venturing to collect enough data on these university venture funds to create a benchmarking tool that fund managers can use to compare their performance with other funds.
For the past two years we have run surveys of university funds and independent fund managers to build a picture of spinout investment vehicles globally. READ MORE
1789 Capital, the venture capital firm with Donald Trump Jr. as a partner, has seen its assets under management skyrocket from $200 million to $3.5 billion in just one year by leveraging an America-first investment strategy.
The Palm Beach, Florida-based firm's explosive growth follows a massive dealmaking spree focused on leading privately held companies in artificial intelligence (AI) and defense technology.
The VC is capitalizing on shifting geopolitical dynamics and policies favoring domestic tech manufacturing. READ MORE
Capital concentration in the private markets is accelerating. Companies with breakout growth or experienced founders in compelling sectors are raising funding at a faster clip, while the rest of the market is increasingly left behind.
In 2025, 70% of U.S. funding — more than $200 billion — was invested in 389 companies that raised rounds of $100 million and over, Crunchbase data shows. Of that, $90 billion went to just six companies that each raised more than $5 billion last year. READ MORE
Wonders of the world include the Colosseum, the Great Wall of China, and a venture capitalist’s checkbook.
What makes the latter such a rare sight is that Fidelity Private Shares® notes that VCs are writing fewer (yet larger) checks, often concentrated in AI and late-stage companies. Everyone else? They’ll need to navigate a tighter, more scrutinized fundraising environment where clean equity, financial discipline, and a clear story matter more than ever. READ MORE
Venture capital is in the middle of a quiet power shift.
Over the past few years, some of the largest and most consequential deals in tech, healthcare and life sciences have not been led by traditional venture firms at all. Instead, family offices and sovereign wealth funds are backing bigger bets, longer timelines and platforms that stretch across borders, often outside the constraints of the traditional 10-year fund model. READ MORE
Generative AI was the dominant theme of venture capital in 2023 and will likely continue to be this year. However, investment in the sector is likely to become more specialized.
A record $29.1 billion was invested across 691 generative AI deals last year, according to PitchBook data. This represents a 268.4% increase in deal value over 2022’s total. READ MORE
As Big Tech investments proliferate across emerging startups—advancing everything from AI to crypto to biotech—markets brim with promise of human progress through innovation. But when titans extend tentacles into rising potential competitors, what whispers echo from conference rooms with two-way mirrors? Emerging trends around influence through minority board positions should spur regulators to reassess antitrust frameworks developed long before today's complex web of strategic investments between dominant platforms and startups. READ MORE
Over the past four weeks, I’ve talked to hundreds of SaaS founders and there’s one recurring topic: The current funding environment. How do you address this tough situation? Do you cut costs or do you make a risky decision to keep spending and attempt to grow into the original valuation? READ MORE
My colleagues and I at Prime Movers Lab reviewed over 3,000 investment opportunities last year and are on pace to exceed that in 2022. In the process, we deployed more than $400 million across six sectors: transportation, energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture and human augmentation. To accurately allocate capital across so many burgeoning sectors, every year, we run 25-plus squads, which are our internal teams that go deep on particular technologies and themes, such as lithium, orbital debris and cultivated seafood. The work of these squads, combined with the careful watching of public and private markets, have led me to a few predictions for where I see venture capital going the rest of this year. READ MORE
Money is everywhere in the world of venture capital. In 2021, U.S.-based startups saw a record $93 billion worth of funding in the seed stage. Since money is such a commodity, a lot of VC funds have pondered working with PR agencies to bolster their presence so as to not miss out on checks, either signed for the next big startup or received from a big name limited partner (LP). As alluring as press clips and media mentions in top-tier outlets may seem, venture funds are often not well positioned to make any of that media happen. Based on our experience at BAM, here are five reasons why venture funds should skip the PR agency: READ MORE
A decade ago, $20 billion would have been enough to fund roughly a third of all global venture funding for an entire year. Today, it’s the sum that just a single investor racked up for a single fund.
This morning, software-focused growth investor Insight Partners announced it raised over $20 billion for its 12th flagship fund. That’s more than twice the size of the 11th flagship fund, which closed about two years ago with $9.5 billion and ranks among the largest funds ever. READ MORE
There may be a shortage of semiconductors, but there’s no lack of venture funding to companies in the chip space.
While most of the talk around semiconductors revolves around disruptions in the supply chain, the industry actually saw an unprecedented amount of venture capital in 2021—as well as one of its biggest M&A years ever. READ MORE
The imbalances in today’s job market have become a familiar story.
Employers can’t fill an enormous number of jobs because they can’t find and attract employees with the requisite skills. READ MORE
With sky high redemptions, prices stuck well below NAV, and PIPEs not getting done, the SPAC market is not in a happy place. But, at least DWAC is crushing...? READ MORE
Today M3-Brigade Acquisition II Corp. (MBAC) became the latest SPAC to call off a merger when it cancelled its planned combination with Syniverse, marking the 9th deal to be called off since December. The company noted that due to the amount of redemption requests it received that they wouldn't be able to meet the minimum cash requirements for the deal.
Given that Syniverse is backed by Carlyle and counts other major players as investors, it was slightly surprising that more wasn't done to get this deal over the finish line, particularly as they were seemingly close with a shareholder vote scheduled for today. READ MORE