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The volume of global private equity exits fell 6.25% year over year in the first quarter to 720 from 768.
Trade sale transactions fell to 566 from 603, while secondary buyouts — sales to another general partner — declined to 141 from 153. The number of IPO exits rose to 13 from 12, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. READ MORE
Craig Shapiro has a track record of predicting what consumers want. Since launching his venture capital firm, Collaborative Fund, in 2010, Shapiro and his team of investors at the New York City-based firm have backed Kickstarter, Lyft, Olipop, Magic Spoon, Smash Kitchen, and Whoop. Now, he is turning his focus from fast-growing consumer businesses to companies that are more focused on building for the long run. To do that, he’s launching a new private equity fund: Collab Holdings. READ MORE
Private equity firms may have been returning less profit to investors in recent years, but finance chiefs working at businesses owned by such companies are seeing their own compensation packages grow.
That’s the upshot of a new report issued Wednesday by executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles. On average, CFOs working at PE-backed firms in the U.S. took home cash pay of $604,000 in 2025, up 5% year over year. READ MORE
The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) released its annual yearbook looking at the past year and the future of the venture capital industry.
According to its NVCA 2026 Yearbook, this year’s report focuses on strong investment activity as well as mounting structural pressures around liquidity. U.S. venture capital firms closed 15,352 deals worth $320 billion, a 51 percent increase in deal value and the second-highest total on record. READ MORE
In the second half of 2025, I noticed a pattern in our Fund IV fundraising conversations at Eleven VC. One after another, institutional LPs – mainly from Europe – told us some version of the same narrative: they had made a strategic decision to move away from seed funds and concentrate their venture allocation entirely on growth VCs.
It was frustrating at times but I acknowledged their pursuit to maximize returns by capturing ‘the bigger opportunity’ growth capital presented – especially after years of scarcity in Europe. However, something about this narrative was off. I was not convinced. READ MORE
Private equity fund managers are focused on value creation amid economic uncertainty.
The 2026 S&P Global Market Intelligence Private Equity and Venture Capital Outlook report reflects managers' lack of confidence that they can ride economic growth to a strong exit. READ MORE
Traditional approaches to Army prototyping efforts have been known to move at a lackluster speed, letting ideas gather dust, while near-peer adversaries field “good enough” solutions to operational units. FUZE is the U.S. Army’s flagship innovation program, which adopts a venture capitalist (VC) model to expedite military technology development. Launched in September 2025 with a projected $750 million annual investment, it unifies existing initiatives like xTech, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR), Technology Maturation Initiative (TMI) and Manufacturing Technology (ManTech) to fund emerging commercial and “dual-use” firms. The program aims to get technology from concept to operational prototype within 70 days or less. This model represents a significant shift from the traditional, slow-moving acquisition cycle, embracing a high tolerance for failure in pursuit of rapid technological superiority in the hands of operational Army forces. READ MORE
Q1 2026 marked an all-time quarterly high for venture investment, thanks to the biggest funding deal ever for a private company. But those milestones mask a different reality for many startups on the ground: While more money than ever is being invested in the private markets, that’s thanks to larger checks, not more of them.
In fact, Crunchbase data shows the extent to which venture funding this year has been a case of more capital concentrated into a select few companies and a single industry. Last quarter, a handful of large, well-funded AI companies, almost all based in the U.S., captured the vast majority of venture dollars, even as global startup deal count fell. READ MORE
A slow start to 2026 has put first-time biotech financings on course for their worst year since before the pandemic, reducing the already limited funding opportunities available for startups.
The data come from J.P. Morgan’s first-quarter biopharma licensing and venture report (PDF). Analysts tracked 50 seed and series A investments collectively worth $2.3 billion over the first three months of 2026. The data reverse the encouraging trend seen in the first quarter of 2025, when J.P. Morgan reported (PDF) that the number of investments rose to 60 and their combined value reached $3.7 billion. READ MORE
U.S. venture capital investment easily hit an all-time record in Q1 2026, according to data released today by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. In fact, domestic startups raised more last quarter than in any entire year, save for 2021 and 2025.
Yes, but: U.S. venture capital investment decreased quarter-over-quarter, if you remove just five Q1 2026 transactions.
Why it matters: Traditional VC metrics no longer make much sense, at least if used to gauge the health of America's startup ecosystem. READ MORE
If you work for a hedge fund, your salary will typically be low and your bonus will typically be high. In the good times, it therefore makes sense to work for a hedge fund. In the bad times, it's better to max your salary elsewhere.
Given that these have been bad times for some hedge funds, it's interesting to note - then - that people have been leaving the most salary-maxxing employer in the market: the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA). READ MORE
Funding to foundational AI startups, also known as generative AI companies or frontier labs, has doubled in the first quarter of 2026 so far compared to all of 2025, Crunchbase data shows.
That funding is increasingly concentrated in a handful of foundational giants, including OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. In 2025 and early 2026, the market saw a shift to a small number of companies capturing a disproportionate share of global capital. READ MORE
Apple, founded in 1977 to sell hobbyist computers, is currently celebrating its 50th year and is one of the most valuable companies today. However, this wasn’t the case back then, with venture capital firm Sequoia Capital sharing its founder’s memo regarding a potential $600,000 financing for the then-fledgling firm. According to the firm’s X post, its founder, Don Valentine, wrote the note, saying that Apple’s request will give it 10% of equity in the startup with a market greater than $500 million. READ MORE
Venture capitalists are putting young entrepreneurs in incubators again. It sounds like a fun alternative to growing up. READ MORE
Insight Partners is one of the biggest startup investors in the world, managing over $90 billion thanks to its bets on companies like Twitter, Wiz, Databricks and Anthropic — comparable in size to its noisier rivals Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. Now, a new lawsuit and SEC filings show that it is in part owned by the government of Abu Dhabi via a private, Abu Dhabi-based investment firm called Lunate. READ MORE
Investors who specialise in scooping up distressed assets at bargain prices have identified a downturn in private credit as their best opportunity since the 2008 financial crisis.
These funds, which typically invest in companies with bad balance sheets but viable underlying businesses, have been largely sidelined for a decade as markets surged but are now betting on making money from strains in private credit. READ MORE
A federal government plan to include alternative assets in 401(k)s has lifted the stock of private equity giants.
On Monday, the US Labor Department officially issued a proposal opening the door for alternative assets like private equity, credit, and cryptocurrency to be included in retirement accounts for more than 90 million Americans. READ MORE
If you focus on some of the top-line, headline-grabbing numbers, this would seem to be a boom time for venture capital.
The industry collectively invested more money in startups last year than in any other year except 2021. And venture investors have been putting gobsmacking sums into particular companies, including what ended up being a record $110 billion earlier this year for San Francisco’s OpenAI.
But if you dig a little below the surface, the venture industry’s foundational business model appears to be under stress, if not breaking down. READ MORE
Investing in startups has gone from being a “luxury” for companies to a critical strategic necessity as AI brings in an era of rapid transformation. Corporate venture investment is at a record level, both in the number of companies making investments and the dollar sums being committed. It has proven itself a steady pillar in the startup ecosystem at a time when venture capital has been in decline.
This makes corporate investment a more valued partner to venture capital. Nicolas Sauvage, president of TDK Ventures, spoke of a “yin and yang” system in which traditional venture capital provides speed and discipline while corporate investors offer the practical assistance — factories, supply chains, customer relationships — for scaling deep tech and AI startups. READ MORE
When competition looms, incumbents often tighten their grip on a market by snapping up rivals and rapidly shelving breakthrough technologies that could otherwise accelerate the next wave of innovation. We now find ourselves at a similar technological inflection point where rapid innovation in AI poses a deep challenge to dominant firms.
To sidestep this challenge, large tech firms have adapted the acquihire—traditionally the acquisition of a company primarily for its talent rather than its products—into a structure that evades the regulatory scrutiny that would ordinarily accompany a merger of two companies. The result is the reverse-acquihire: unlike traditional acquihires these deals avoid antitrust scrutiny by replicating the benefits of an acquisition through alternative structures that stop short of an actual purchase. These deals allow dominant firms to both license a booming startup’s intellectual property and poach its top talent, often hollowing out the remaining company in the process. READ MORE