The Evolving Landscape of Venture Capital Mindsets

VC investing isn’t what it was. By that I mean, the majority of investment isn’t done by a loose partnership of generalists investing in emerging markets with speculative technology. Instead, tech markets have grown and matured, and the amount of capital available has kept pace, growing many orders of magnitudes in the last few decades. As a result, venture capital has professionalized with much of the activity coming from coordinated teams in large firms doing tremendous amounts of analysis, often in specific sectors. In fact, I’d wager most of that analysis isn’t about technology at all. READ MORE

From 8VC to Benchmark, here’s what’s hiding in October SEC filings

October was a big month for venture funds, per SEC filings. The filings show that established names are currently commanding top dollar from LPs, especially with a specialized focus. Here are some of the most notable ones we found that haven’t been meaningfully announced or have seen important updates.

For one, Trust Ventures filed Monday to raise a $400 million Fund V. The Austin-based firm was founded in 2017 by Salen Churi to back founders building in highly regulated industries. Koch Disruptive Technologies notably backed the firm’s debut fund back in 2018. It previously sought to raise a $225 million Fund IV in 2023, though it’s unclear if or when that fund closed. Deep tech fund Interlagos Capital is also raising a $400 million Fund II.  READ MORE

New private funds raise $96bn in September as PE capital more than doubles

More than 2,300 new private funds reported raising $96.1 billion in September, bringing year-to-date fundraising across new and existing private funds to $1.3 trillion, according to data collected and analyzed by Convergence.

The increase came despite a 44.7% decline in new private credit fund issuance to 26 funds in September. Year to date, private credit funds in their initial fundraising stage raised $28.9 billion, down 20% from the same period in 2025. READ MORE

AI megadeals dominate venture capital as investors pour billions into fewer startups

Global venture capital investment reached US$170.9 billion in Q3'26 despite geopolitical uncertainty, as investors continued to back AI at unprecedented levels and poured billions into the infrastructure needed to support the technology's rapid growth.

According to the Q3’26 edition of KPMG’s Venture Pulse, a quarterly report examining VC trends globally and in key jurisdictions around the world, venture funding is on track for one of its strongest years on record, reaching US$728.3 billion through the first nine months of 2026. READ MORE

Brothers Built a $1.1 Billion Company Without Venture Capital. Their Customers Funded It Upfront

AI startups pulled in $102 billion of venture capital last quarter, 64 percent of everything invested worldwide, and a record 27 companies raised rounds of $1 billion or more, according to Crunchbase data published October 5.

Phil and Dom Kwok, two London-born brothers, have not taken a dollar of it. They say EasyA, the AI and blockchain developer education company they started in 2019 from their childhood bedrooms, is now worth $1.1 billion, and they are taking it public through a direct listing while still owning all of it. READ MORE

Venture capital firm tied to Donald Trump Jr weighs legal action against ABC News over botched report

ABC News could face significant consequences as the venture capital firm at the center of a botched report about the Trump family ponders legal action.

"We still have our attorneys completely plugged into this, and we're not taking options off the table because they can't get away with writing completely false things and hit jobs," 1789 Capital spokesperson Alexa Henning told Fox News Digital. READ MORE

Even Benchmark thinks AI is eroding the venture pact against backing rivals

For decades, the unwritten rule of venture capital was that a firm doesn’t back two companies that compete head-on. But speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this week, the partners of Benchmark readily acknowledged that the AI boom is straining that rule.

It’s been on the verge of snapping for some time. The towering AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic share dozens of the same investors at this point. Then, at the end of September, Factory, a startup that builds an AI agent to write software, said it was firing board observer and adviser Chris Degnan for “unethical conduct involving Cognition,” its direct rival and the maker of the Devin coding agent. Factory’s CEO alleged Degnan had discussed a job at Cognition while privy to Factory’s board-level discussions. Degnan said he had already resigned and denied sharing anything confidential. Soon after, he announced he was joining Cognition as chief revenue officer. Powerhouse investor Vinod Khosla sided with Degnan on X, blasting Factory’s CEO and calling the company “a struggling second tier competitor.” Khosla Ventures backs both companies. READ MORE

‘It’s certainly not easy’: How are Boston biotechs coping with a shallower pool of seed funding?

As the world's biggest biotech hub, funding for early-stage startups has long been the lifeblood of Boston's life sciences industry. But the latest figures make for concerning reading—with average seed funding secured by a preclinical start-up plunging 40% over the past year.

In fact, the average seed round for a Massachusetts-based biotech in the first six months of 2026 was just $4.65 million, down from $7.65 million for the same period in 2025, according to the most recent industry snapshot from trade group MassBio. READ MORE

Just 5% of VCs Make Most of the Profits

Beyond a handful of big names, most venture capitalists are relatively unknown. Who are they, and what distinguishes the superstars from the rest?

“To understand why some VCs are super successful and others are not, it is very important to get a full picture on every single player in the VC ecosystem,” says Ilya Strebulaev, a professor of finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business, who has spent much of his career trying to understand the inner workings of the venture capital industry. READ MORE

While VCs crowd into San Francisco, Endeavor Catalyst raises $320M for founders ‘elsewhere’

Endeavor Catalyst has closed its fifth fund with $320 million in capital commitments, bringing the firm’s total assets under management to more than $850 million. The raise is good news for founders outside the Bay Area who risk getting overlooked as more funds focus squarely on AI companies in Silicon Valley.

Endeavor Catalyst is the venture arm of Endeavor, a New York-based global nonprofit that has spent 30 years supporting founders outside major tech hubs. (It calls all those other places “elsewhere” throughout its marketing materials.) READ MORE

The Capital Fit Problem In The Creator Economy

Roughly a decade of institutional money has now moved through the creator economy. Enough of it has failed that we can stop treating each collapse as idiosyncratic and start reading the pattern.

The pattern is not fraud, and it is rarely incompetence. It is fit. Capital is not neutral. Every dollar arrives attached to a clock, a required outcome, and a governance posture, and most of the damage in this sector has come from financing one layer of the business with the instrument designed for another. READ MORE

The world's most valuable VC-backed companies

The biggest venture-backed businesses in the world continue to delay listing on public exchanges, driving a rise in secondary exchanges where investors can access the likes of OpenAI, SpaceX and Stripe.

The PitchBook 100 tracks how these pre-IPO startups are driving a bridge between public and private markets by ranking the most valuable VC-backed companies globally. READ MORE

PE/VC campaign contributions lean toward Republicans

Private equity and venture capital aren't leaning into a Blue Wave, according to an Axios analysis of campaign donations made by political action committees affiliated with the American Investment Council and National Venture Capital Association.

Why it matters: Political alignment could impact issues like expanded retail investor access to alt investments, crypto market structure, qualified investment definitions, and AI regulation. READ MORE

Conviction amid complexity

You might condense down the challenge of venture capital to this: you must invest with conviction in the face of complexity and confusion. Amid shifting industrial policy, corporate strategy, market hype, you must commit — both in terms of money and time — to half-formed ideas and technologies. This is the challenge for any investor and even more so for those placing bets on startups on behalf of a corporation.  

The successful corporate investors we interview for GCV all have found ways to manage complexity while holding onto a guiding strand. Take John Banta at Blue Venture Fund, for example, with 36 limited partners to manage — all Blue Cross Blue Shield companies and affiliates. Many corporate investors struggle with navigating the expectations of just one corporation, let alone three dozen, all wanting strategic benefits and insights from the portfolio. READ MORE

A Bullish Biotech Funding Market and a Higher Bar for Companies Seeking Capital

Anyone who has spent significant time in biotech understands that periods of abundant capital are never permanent. The industry moves through cycles of enthusiasm and retrenchment, but the current environment signals a meaningful rebound in investor appetite. After the funding constraints of 2022 to 2024, biotech venture investment rebounded strongly in late 2025, supported by renewed M&A activity, improving public markets, and sustained demand for innovative therapeutic assets, and 2026 is looking like a banner year. READ MORE

The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Almost All About AI

This week’s list of the largest U.S. startup funding rounds was pretty much all about AI. That includes the biggest financing — a $1 billion round for Instinct, a developer of AI assistants for everyday tasks — as well as most of the rest of the Top 10. Other large fundraisers include EliseAI, which is deploying AI for the home rental sector, and Armadin, an AI cybersecurity startup. READ MORE

The 100 Highest-Funded MBA Startups Of 2026

Looking across Poets&Quants’ lists of the highest-funded MBA startups over the last several years, the problems seem to be getting harder.

More founders are pushing into AI, deep tech, biotech and advanced manufacturing. Rather than looking for market gaps and trying to fill them (though plenty still are), more MBA entrepreneurs are trying to solve big world problems with capabilities that don’t yet exist. Across our 2026 list, founders are going after problems that require laboratories, factories, years of research and enormous amounts of capital. READ MORE