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Geopolitical tensions are creating massive opportunities in defense and industrial investing, according to Carlyle Group CEO Harvey Schwartz.
"Everywhere you go in the world, the conversation is the same. It's a conversation first and foremost about national security," Schwartz said at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on Wednesday. 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
Before OpenAI became a trillion-dollar IPO candidate, before AI coding assistants generated billions in revenue, and before defense tech became one of Silicon Valley’s hottest categories, a small group of seed investors had already made their bets.
They backed frontier AI, autonomous systems, cybersecurity and AI infrastructure years before the market went all-in on these sectors. In many cases, they invested before startups had meaningful revenue, before products existed and before entire categories had fully formed. 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
SpaceX published its landmark S-1 filing on Wednesday, offering the most comprehensive picture of its financials to date. In its top-line figures, the Starlink creator disclosed that it brought in USD 18 billion in revenue in 2025 on a consolidated basis, with a net loss of USD 4.9 billion. EBITDA came in at USD 6.58 billion for the year.
That exponential growth trajectory has been nearly two decades in the making. SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, and it has raised more than USD 10 billion in venture capital funding over its lifetime as a private company. Now, a slew of investors—including Founder’s Fund, DFJ, D1 Capital, Fidelity, and Thrive Capital—and thousands of early employees are gearing up for a generational liquidity event. READ MORE
Funds that invest in university spinouts are a growing asset class, having seen strong expansion over the past three years. However, there are few benchmarks focused on specifically these funds.
It is our aim at Global Corporate Venturing to collect enough data on these university venture funds to create a benchmarking tool that fund managers can use to compare their performance with other funds.
For the past two years we have run surveys of university funds and independent fund managers to build a picture of spinout investment vehicles globally. 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
Corporate venture capital is no longer a side experiment. CVC units are now present in about 20% of the startup funding rounds annually. Yet the period that determines whether a new unit endures or is quietly shut down is brutally compressed: the first three years. 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
Venture capital moves fast and breaks things. Private equity moves deliberately and fixes them. That difference explains a lot about where PE sits on AI right now: not absent, but methodical in a moment moving faster than methodical allows.
According to my company's research, VC-backed companies have adopted AI at a 77% rate. PE-backed companies are at 59%. That gap is less about technology than organizational readiness. READ MORE
Have you heard the story about Pyrex? Yes, that Pyrex, the near-indestructible glassware you probably have a piece of rolling around at the back of a cupboard. Pyrex existed and thrived for over 100 years, creating jobs in western Pennsylvania and being a beloved brand worldwide. When it came to glass bakeware, nothing is as good as Pyrex. READ MORE
A top tech banker tells Axios that tech buyouts are "frozen," and the data largely backs him up.
By the numbers: There's been a total of just $9.3 billion of global tech buyout value in April and May 2026 combined, according to PitchBook. 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
The 50th birthday of New York private-equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts – founded with $120,000 by the cousins George Roberts and Henry Kravis and now holding $758 billion of assets under management – is a moment to ask whether the modus operandi the firm pioneered has been good or bad for the world. Private-equity buyouts of underperforming public companies have certainly been a catalyst for sharper corporate performance across every western economy. But with what impact on society? READ MORE
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