Billionaires are quietly rewriting the private-equity playbook, and UBS (NYSE:UBS) says the shift could be one of the most consequential capital-allocation pivots of the coming year. In its latest Billionaire Ambitions Report, UBS found that almost a third of the 87 surveyed individuals controlling 10-figure fortunes plan to scale back commitments to private equity funds over the next 12 months, the biggest expected decline across more than a dozen investment categories. With higher borrowing costs squeezing deal profits and shrinking payouts to limited partners, the traditional fund model is facing the kind of pressure that could be reshaping how the ultra-rich think about private markets. READ MORE
Lawsuit highlights private equity's CV conflict
A Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund last month sued to stop a Houston-based private equity firm from selling a portfolio company to a continuation vehicle, with both sides yesterday agreeing to enter arbitration.
Why it matters: This dispute gets at the fundamental conflict between LPs and GPs when it comes to CVs, which may have just peaked, if you boil away all goodwill and assumption of positive intent.
On the docket: Abu Dhabi Investment Council is a limited partner in PE funds raised in 2011 and 2014 by Energy & Minerals Group. They both hold stakes in Ascent Resources, a large natural gas company that also counts First Reserve among its investors. READ MORE
Startup Funding Continued On A Tear In November As Megarounds Hit 3-Year High
November was another outsized month for venture funding as investors poured $39.6 billion into startups globally. The funding total was on par with October and up 28% year over year from $31 billion, according to Crunchbase data.
Capital continued to concentrate into the largest companies. A stunning 43% of venture funding last month went to just 14 companies that raised rounds of $500 million or more each. That marked the largest number of such megarounds raised in a single month in the past three years. READ MORE
US Startup Funding Overview – November 2025
November 2025 demonstrated exceptional strength in US venture capital with $18.2B invested across 409 companies, showing a 49.2% increase from October 2025’s $12.2B and a robust 56.9% year-over-year increase from November 2024’s $11.6B. The month featured eight mega-rounds exceeding $500M, led by Anysphere’s record-breaking $2.3B late-stage round for its AI coding assistant Cursor.
Artificial Intelligence maintained its dominance with an estimated $11.8B across AI-related companies (65% of total funding). READ MORE
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Investors Get Back To Writing Large Checks
We took a break from covering the largest U.S. startup investments over Thanksgiving week, which was just as well, given that it was a predictably slow period for big deal announcements. Now, with just a few weeks left in 2025, things are picking up again.
Predictions market Kalshi led the list after confirming its already widely reported $1 billion fresh financing. Other big rounds came from sectors including defense tech, AI infrastructure, cybersecurity and biotech. READ MORE
Big money, few deals as crypto venture funding dries up
Venture capital funding in the cryptocurrency sector remained muted in November, continuing a broader slowdown that has persisted through late 2025. Deal activity was once again concentrated in a small number of large raises by established companies.
As Cointelegraph previously reported, the third quarter saw a similar pattern: total funding climbed to $4.65 billion, according to Galaxy Digital, but deal counts lagged as capital flowed primarily to bigger, more mature firms. READ MORE
Where are we in the AI bubble?
I’m currently reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book 1929, which traces the characters at the center of the market crash that ran from 1929 to 1933 before the Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 89% from its peak of 381 in September 1929 to 41 in July 1932. In today’s terms, that’s like the Dow dropping back to where it was in 1996.
Sorkin draws subtle parallels to today such as tariffs under Smoot-Hawley, a long bull market, and speculative excess.
But the differences are just as important. READ MORE
How to Build a Brand Without Losing Your Soul
The dominant startup script is simple: raise fast, scale faster, exit fastest. For luxury brands, this often produces hype instead of lasting value.
Lafco, the luxury home fragrance company, took the opposite approach. After 33 years without outside capital, their candles sit alongside premium competitors at Neiman Marcus, core sizes retail around $50 to $115, and the brand has expanded from candles into body care while maintaining its positioning.
Here is what its journey reveals about building brands that actually matter. READ MORE
How Venture Capital And Private Equity Are Fueling An AI-Driven Financial Feedback Loop
The traditional boundaries between venture capital and private equity have begun to dissolve, creating a hybrid investment ecosystem that may be amplifying systemic risks in the technology sector. This convergence, combined with what economists term "circular financing" among major AI companies, has created conditions reminiscent of previous market bubbles - with potentially far-reaching consequences for the broader economy. READ MORE
'We're going to see a lot of carnage': VC investor says AI boom will create giants — and topple overhyped startups
The AI boom is only just beginning — and it may prove the most lucrative cycle in venture-capital history, even as it also leaves behind a wave of startups.
That's according to Mel Williams, cofounder and partner at TrueBridge Capital Partners, a fund-of-funds manager with $8 billion under management that has backed firms such as Founders Fund, Thrive, and Sequoia. READ MORE
Why ‘hold forever’ investors are snapping up venture capital ‘zombies’
Italian company Bending Spoons flew largely under the radar — until last month. In a span of 48 hours, the company announced the acquisition of AOL and a massive $270 million raise, quadrupling its valuation to $11 billion from $2.55 billion set in early 2024.
Bending Spoons has grown rapidly by acquiring stagnating tech brands like Evernote, Meetup, and Vimeo, then turning them profitable through aggressive cost-cutting and price increases. While the company’s approach is similar to private equity, there is one key difference: Bending Spoons has no plans to sell these businesses. READ MORE
How founders can evaluate venture capital for long-term success
Raising venture capital is often seen as the holy grail for startups, but taking money from just any investor can be risky. On today’s episode of The Small Business Show, we’re breaking down how founders should approach VC funding strategically, not just as a one-way street where they’re being evaluated, but as a partnership where both sides need to be a good fit. READ MORE
‘Product won’t win. Distribution will.’ Tips for startup founders raising cash right now
If you’re building an early-stage startup and trying to raise venture capital dollars to fuel your big ideas — focus on solving a specific problem, make sure you have strong conviction, and think hard about distribution in the age of AI.
Those were some tips shared during a recent Seattle AI Week panel discussion I moderated with Kellan Carter, founding general partner at Bellevue, Wash.-based firm Fuse, and Rohan D’Souza, CEO and co-founder at Seattle-based healthcare benefits startup Avante. READ MORE
How PE And VC Collapsed Into One Battlefield
With IPO markets effectively frozen and AI-driven mega-rounds absorbing virtually all high-quality deal flow, private equity and venture capital have collapsed into the same battlefield, fighting over the same late-stage technology deals once clearly owned by VC. Even family offices are muscling in, writing checks once reserved for growth funds. The result is a barbell-shaped market where top-tier players crowd into a handful of oversubscribed AI and Big Tech opportunities, while second- and third-tier funds face an existential question: in a world where capital is abundant but true opportunities are scarce, what, if anything, do they actually have left to do? READ MORE
Private Equity Turns To Leadership Diligence To Gain A Sharper Edge
Private equity is entering a new phase where success hinges less on capital structure and more on who sits at the table. As firms deploy record dry powder and compete for differentiated value creation, leadership diligence is becoming the ultimate edge. Evan Berta, an associate at Hunt Scanlon Ventures, explores how investors are rethinking the pre-close process, what practical frameworks are emerging to assess leadership risk, and why KKR’s recent investment in ghSMART demonstrates the market’s conviction that talent intelligence is now core to private equity strategy. READ MORE
Just 4 deals made up nearly half of AI VC funding in Q3
Just four of the 1,086 VC deals recorded for AI startups in Q3—funding rounds for xAI, Anthropic, Nscale and Mistral—accounted for nearly half of the quarter’s total deal value, according to new research from PitchBook.
As fears over a potential AI bubble fester, VCs are backing fewer companies—but investing heavily into that select group. READ MORE
Here’s What 3 VC Heavyweights Suggest Founders Do to Get Funded Now
Capturing the attention of investors, particularly in the venture capital community, may be harder than ever. Closing a funding round is even more challenging. So how can founders raise VC funding in the current environment? Reid Hoffman, Stacy Brown-Philpot, and Aileen Lee have a few suggestions.
Hoffman is the founder of LinkedIn and chairman of venture capital firm Village Global. Philpot is the former CEO of TaskRabbit and founder of Cherryrock Capital. And Lee is founder of seed investment firm Cowboy Ventures — and the person who coined the term “unicorn” for startups. The trio gathered recently at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit to discuss the current funding environment and how companies can stand out when they’re trying to fundraise. READ MORE
Venture Capital LPs Navigate Liquidity Crisis with Secondary Markets and Longer Fund Cycles
In the current reality, limited partners (LPs) in venture capital funds are facing a liquidity crisis: funds are lasting longer than expected, young managers are raising money with greater difficulty, and billions of dollars are stuck in startups that may not live up to the peak valuations of 2021.
A recent StrictlyVC panel in San Francisco brought together five leading LPs representing endowments, fund-of-funds, and secondary-market firms with total assets under management of more than $100 billion, and they painted an unusual picture of the current state of the venture ecosystem while pointing to opportunities amid the chaos. READ MORE
How to Know If Venture Capital Is Right For Your Business
Venture capital is a powerful tool to scale startups, but is it the right tool for your startup? According to major VC investor Kevin Carter, not necessarily. Throughout his career, Carter has invested in more than 1,000 early stage companies, dozens of which have gone on to billion-dollar valuations. He entered early into disruptive companies like Airbnb, Stripe, and Snap — and now his firm Night Capital backs high-potential founders in massive markets. Here, he shares how to decide whether venture capital can take your business to the next level, and if so, which investors are worth partnering with. READ MORE
In An Agentic Era, VC Is Buying A-Player C-Suite Execs At Any Cost — Not ‘Staffing Up’
Venture capital has become a mechanism for extracting executives from trillion-dollar companies and paying them whatever it takes to build in an AI-native world.
We’re not funding companies anymore — we’re buying access to the few hundred people who’ve built AI systems inside Google, OpenAI and Meta. READ MORE