Inside the VC Roll-up Craze That Has Taken Silicon Valley by Storm

Venture capitalists borrowed liberally from the private equity playbook this year, and nowhere was that more evident than in roll-up strategies built on the idea that AI tools can make old-school small businesses far more efficient.

We wrote back in June that the “AI roll-up had officially gone mainstream.” Since then, major firms including General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Thrive Capital, and 8VC have doubled down on the strategy, which generally involves acquiring multiple companies in a service sector like accounting, IT services, insurance, or law, and then remaking them with AI tools. READ MORE

6 Charts That Show The Big AI Funding Trends Of 2025

AI was the leading sector for startup funding globally from 2023 through 2025. In each year, funding amounts to this sector have gone up dramatically and proportions have increased.

At the close of 2025, OpenAI is the most valuable private company of all time, valued at $500 billion. Not far down the list is rival Anthropic, the fourth-most valuable at $183 billion. Together, those two companies alone make up close to 10% of the value on The Crunchbase Unicorn Board. READ MORE

SpaceX to Pursue 2026 IPO Raising Far Above $30 Billion

SpaceX is moving ahead with plans for an initial public offering that would seek to raise significantly more than $30 billion, people familiar with the matter said, in a transaction that would make it the biggest listing of all time.

The Elon Musk-led company is targeting a valuation of about $1.5 trillion for the entire company, which would leave SpaceX near the market value that Saudi Aramco established during its record 2019 listing. The oil major raised $29 billion at the time. READ MORE

Nuclear Fission Shows Continuing Popularity (With VCs, At Least)

At first glance, nuclear fission power doesn’t seem like the most obvious area for U.S. venture capital to cluster.

After all, the last big boom for building American nuclear power plants was in the 1970s. Not long after that, environmental and safety concerns, project cost and broader availability of other affordable power options, among other factors, effectively brought new installations to a halt. READ MORE

4 signs your startup is fundable, according to top investors

Every beautiful garden begins with a humble seed planted in the ground. That's where the startup world got the term "seed funding": some of the earliest money a new company receives to grow. "For startups, seed investing is what is needed for you to see those beautiful tulips one day," says Michael Duda, cofounder and managing partner of Bullish Inc., a venture capital firm that has invested in companies like Warby Parker, Peloton, Harry's, Bubble Beauty, and Bandit Running. READ MORE

Private Equity Fundraising Remains Glum, Four Years On

As 2025 nears its end, private equity firms are facing the fourth year of a slide in fundraising. During the first nine months these funds have raised $906.9 billion, down from more than $1.7 trillion in 2022, the year fundraising first began to decline, according to new data from PitchBook.

Hilary Wiek, senior strategist at PitchBook, noted that both the number of funds closing and the amount of capital raised remain weak. READ MORE

Private equity’s hot ‘continuation’ trade leaves some feeling singed

A recurring theme in 2025 in the world of private equity is “keeping the wolf from the door”. For companies on the brink of running out of money, that manifests through the increasing popularity of so-called liability management exercises, where zombie companies are temporarily kept upright by tapping bountiful debt markets and strong-arming investors. For companies in private equity portfolios that are not quite hobbled but not exactly thriving either, there are continuation vehicles. These are new funds created by the same private equity sponsor that can purchase a business when the original fund is at its contractual end. A way, in effect, of keeping a promising company in the fold. READ MORE

Billionaires Are Ditching Private Equity Funds -- And Betting Billions on Direct Deals Instead

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