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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
Venture capital is buying its way into the artificial intelligence transformation that enterprise software hasn’t delivered. Instead of selling AI tools to companies, venture firms are buying legacy companies outright and rebuilding them around AI from the inside.
The bet puts VCs on offense and leaves traditional private equity, which spent the last cycle buying enterprise software at peak prices, on defense. READ MORE
“Lame cold pitch from the US”.
That was the subject line of a recent email with a clear ask that actually caught my attention.
And as an investor who receives dozens of startup pitches and even more follow-ups each week that’s saying something. It wasn’t in a professional tone and it wasn’t polished, rather subtly self-deprecating but undeniably honest. READ MORE
For decades, venture capital has operated on a relatively simple premise: Back exceptional founders early, provide capital, open doors and help companies scale. In prior technology waves—cloud computing, mobile, or software as a service—that formula often worked. Investors did not need to be operators themselves to add value. Pattern recognition, networks and conviction were enough to matter.
Artificial intelligence is changing that model. 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
Julia’s first TikTok to hit a million views came at a price—her job.
The video, from April 23, 2024, shows Julia working as a barista at Foxtrot—the “elevated” convenience store chain with dozens of locations in Chicago, Texas, and Washington, DC, and known for coffee, upscale groceries, wine, and its own delivery app. The caption says, “found out 2 hours before that our company was closing nationwide!!!” Julia shows herself clumsily making her last latte and pans the camera around the store, where customers are still sitting with their laptops. “There are all these people here. What do we tell them?” 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
When Puck announced on May 17 that sustainable fashion startup Everlane had been acquired by Chinese ultra-fast-fashion retailer Shein, it sent shockwaves throughout the apparel industry. Michael Preysman, who founded Everlane in 2011, was just as shocked.
“I found out the same time as everyone else,” he said in a LinkedIn post. “I’m not involved with the company anymore, and like many, am still digesting the news.” READ MORE
There’s a number that keeps coming up in conversations about AI investment right now, and it’s so large it barely sounds real.
In the first quarter of 2026 alone, investors poured $300 billion into roughly 6,000 startups globally (Crunchbase, April 2026). That’s not a typo. A single quarter. One 90-day window. And it eclipses the total venture capital deployed in any full year before 2018. READ MORE
Defense, energy, robotics and government have historically been classic no-go areas for VC investment. These “hard” industries have slow procurement cycles, tight regulatory oversight and high-friction customer migration in common. Legacy software vendors serving them have benefited from a barrier of complexity to innovate slowly without facing the risk of customer churn.
This made the victims of this year’s AI anxiety-driven sell-off all the more dramatic. Software juggernauts serving heavy industries — IBM, SAP, ServiceNow, Schneider Electric — have gone from safe bets to being the subject of investor scrutiny. READ MORE
When the Midas List began in 2001, Silicon Valley was still coming to terms with the “tech wreck.” The excitement in early internet companies led to public flameouts and a long and painful reset that saw the Nasdaq drop 39.3%, its worst one year drop to date. But as any Midas investor knows, market downturns are when generational companies are built: Google, Amazon and Netflix, founded and built in this era, have become some of the world’s most valuable companies, and made their founders and investors vast fortunes. READ MORE
Physical tech is back, at least judging by this week’s largest U.S. funding deals. The biggest of all was a $1.5 billion corporate round for a medical device company that develops implants and treatment systems for musculoskeletal disorders. It was followed by an enormous Series A round, backed by a bevy of big-name investors, for Hark, a 1-year-old artificial intelligence startup that says it’s developing personalized AI devices. Along with the usual heavy dose of AI, this week’s list also includes large deals for aerospace and defense, fintech, and retail technology. READ MORE
For decades, venture capital depended on closed networks. Founders needed introductions. Investors relied on private circles. Geography mattered. The strongest deal flow often stayed concentrated around Silicon Valley, New York and a handful of elite startup communities.
Marshall Sandman believes that model is starting to break down. The founder of Animal Capital has spent the last 139 days posting daily videos on Instagram @marshallsandman explaining venture capital in unusually direct terms: fundraising mechanics, dilution, startup mistakes and how investors evaluate businesses. READ MORE
When founders and investors ask an AI engine about venture capital, the answer leans on Wikipedia, TechCrunch, and Crunchbase — and on exactly one venture firm's own website.
The Venture Capital AI Visibility Index 2026, released by 5W, the AI Communications Firm, is the first public two-wave benchmark of how often U.S. venture firms and named partners are surfaced, cited, and recommended inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. It analyzed 28,400 prompts, 60 firms, and 100 named partners across two testing waves between January and May 2026. 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
Fidelity International Strategic Investments, set up seven years ago by Alokik Advani, has become the latest corporate venture unit to be sold off to become part of a private equity investment company, in this case 7Ridge.
For a CVC unit, this is about as dignified a parting of ways with a parent corporation as can be hoped for — the alternative is seeing the team disbanded and the portfolio sold off in piecemeal secondary transactions for pennies on the dollar. There’s still a discount in this kind of whole portfolio transaction — any secondary deal has that — but it is heartening to see whole CVC teams being taken on by PE in this way. It feels like a vote of confidence in their skills and sector knowledge. Many private equity companies are looking to expand into earlier-stage investments, and this is a good way for them to pick up the talent they need to make that transition. READ MORE
AI may be attracting billions in venture capital, but money is not flowing to every founder with a chatbot demo and a slick deck. In fact, as AI makes building a great product faster and more accessible, founder behavior, judgment, and credibility become even more important. In a crowded market where every pitch claims “category-defining AI,” red flags can surface fast. READ MORE