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Private equity is entering a new era.
For years, the industry relied on a familiar—and very successful—formula. Source attractive deals, add leverage, professionalize management, improve reporting, reduce costs, optimize pricing, pursue tuck-in acquisitions, capture multiple expansion and exit quickly through competitive auctions.
That formula is now much harder to execute. READ MORE
Corporate venture capital used to run on instinct, relationships, and a healthy dose of internal diplomacy. You built a thesis, flew to the conferences, shook the hands, and spent a good chunk of every quarter explaining to your business unit why a gut-microbiome startup in Estonia aligns with the core mission of making an allergy medicine.
Then AI showed up. And like every disruption before it, it arrived with both promise and confusion. Venture teams now compete not just with rival funds, but with algorithms that can source deals, run diligence, and draft a board update faster than most of us can find the right Zoom link. READ MORE
Looking at the largest NYC startup funding rounds from August 2026, leveraging AlleyWatch’s proprietary funding data, we’ve analyzed the most significant venture capital deals of the month. Beyond the raw funding numbers, this month’s report includes detailed information about each company’s industry focus, founding team, business model, and total funding history to provide deeper context about these high-growth NYC ventures. READ MORE
Donald Trump Jr.'s venture capital firm punched back Tuesday at suspicions cast by a key congressional Democrat about potential "insider political influence," likely foreshadowing the political showdowns in the U.S. House if control of the chamber flips in the November elections.
In a letter shared with CBS News, the legal counsel for the president's eldest son's firm, 1789 Capital, rejected Rep. Jamie Raskin's characterizations of the firm and criticized his "spaghetti-against-the-wall approach." The firm did not provide the materials requested by Raskin. READ MORE
Middle-market M&A and venture capital are operating in a market defined by selective deployment and heightened discipline. While capital reserves remain substantial, buyers and investors are deeply scrutinizing seller fundamentals to prioritize the best companies and the best fit. Also a major factor is artificial intelligence, which has emerged as both a complex source of diligence friction and a powerful valuation catalyst, one that’s reshaping how deals are priced, built and won.
According to Brian Zuercher, a partner with The Northbound Group, today’s M&A market can be defined as a simultaneous mix of caution and rapid deal-making. READ MORE
Growth in the evergreen fund market is being driven by the largest listed alternative managers. But there are asset classes in which size is likely to be a weakness rather than a strength in catering to individual investors.
This, at least, is what venture capital and growth equity manager Fairway Capital Management is banking on. READ MORE
California lawmakers have sent Gov. Gavin Newsom legislation aimed at preventing private equity firms, hedge funds and other corporate investors from influencing attorneys’ decisions about litigation, according to a press release issued Wednesday.
Assembly Bill 2305, authored by Assemblymember Ash Kalra, D-San José, would require decisions involving litigation to remain solely with licensed attorneys and their clients. READ MORE
Climate entrepreneurs are being quite clear about what they need, and are not getting: They need help putting more projects and equipment into the field. After all, that’s the only way they can grow. But venture capital can’t fund that on its own.
A new founder survey out today from CTVC and Elemental Impact makes the point crystal clear. Among 121 climate-tech founders, 70% said equity would most accelerate growth. Yet 73% identified capital structure as a top financing challenge. Sure, twenty-seven percent want catalytic financing for first-of-a-kind projects, while another 17% want pre-construction development capital. Half of the respondents are already using smaller deployments as a bridge to scale. READ MORE
The apparent race between OpenAI and Anthropic for stock market listings that could value each at more than $1 trillion is just the latest episode in the two companies’ dash for cash to fund their AI ambitions. Only in May Anthropic raised $65 billion, which came on top of a $30 billion fund raising in February, while in March OpenAI announced it had secured funding of $122 billion.
But examples from eastern Europe suggest that it is perfectly possible to become a global technology company without access to Silicon Valley capital. One of the best known is Bitdefender, a cybersecurity company that grew out of a software business founded by Florin Talpes and his wife Mariuca shortly after the fall of communism in Romania. Although it is now a global entity with a headquarters in Bucharest and a key security operations center in San Antonio, Texas, it bootstrapped its way through its early years. READ MORE
When growers are testing new ag robots, they will usually tell you one of two things, observed Ben Palone at Western Growers at the inaugural Ruggedize conference at Reservoir Farms in Salinas: “They’ll say it’s alright, which means its working great, or it’s a piece of sh*t.”
Growers, said Verdant Robotics* CCO Curtis Garner, expect your machine “to just work. Bombproof, reliable, and if something breaks, swap it.” And they will always “buy reliability before they buy innovation,” added John Deere business integration manager Sean Sundberg. READ MORE
Town, a startup that builds AI personal assistants for businesses, is in negotiations to raise funding at a valuation of about $1 billion.
Index Ventures is leading the round, according to the industry newsletter Newcomer. The fresh financing would make Town, dubbed “Silicon Valley’s new favorite AI tool” by Inc., the second personal-assistant company in a week to achieve unicorn status in what Newcomer calls a “personal agent frenzy.” READ MORE
US private equity funds that invest in fast-growing companies without taking a controlling stake raised a record amount of capital in the first half of this year, in a sign of their strong recovery from a 2023 fundraising slump. Growth funds attracted $33.2bn in the first six months of this year, the highest first-half total on record and a 36 per cent jump from a year earlier, according to data from Preqin. Fundraising across other private equity strategies grew 20 per cent over the same period. READ MORE
Ten fund managers raised $855 billion between 2021 and 2025, nearly a quarter of the $3.6 trillion raised by the 300 largest global private equity managers combined, according to Private Equity International's PEI 300 ranking. The minimum entry amount to the list reached $2.8 billion, a record. At the same time, total global capital raising fell to its lowest level since 2020, at $735 billion in 2025. The tech sector has become the largest sub-sector of private equity in both value and number of deals, according to a report by Bain & Company and perhaps that's why it captures this dichotomy more clearly than anyone else: capital is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands but the ability to understand the very product being bought doesn't always follow the same path. READ MORE
Decades before David Tisch began investing in startups, he was wheeling and dealing sports cards as an 11-year-old kid in the suburbs of New York.
“I’ve been a collector forever,” the founder of venture capital firm BoxGroup said from his Meatpacking District office, surrounded by an assortment of whimsical collectibles. The crown jewel of Tisch’s collection, however, isn’t so easily displayed on a shelf: Tisch and BoxGroup were among the very first investors in AI coding startup Cursor, which this month was acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $60 billion, the largest VC-backed acquisition of all-time. READ MORE
The U.S. venture capital industry is one of the most impressive economic growth engines this country has. Seven of the top ten companies by market capitalization today were VC-backed when they were young, innovative, and very risky. My research with Will Gornall shows that companies that received VC funding and subsequently went public now account for nearly half of the U.S. market capitalization and 94% of R&D spending among all public companies founded in the last 50 years. Today, global VC assets under management stand at nearly $3.5 trillion, spread across more than 11,000 institutional VC firms. Those firms have backed a quarter of a million companies, including almost 4,000 unicorns. READ MORE
Nicolas Sauvage believes judgment and taste will be what sets people apart in the AI era — and that's why he's bullish on product managers.
The president of venture capital firm TDK Ventures told Business Insider that product managers are one of three job categories that will rise in demand as AI reshapes work. READ MORE
Global assets under management of growth equity strategies exceeded $1.2 trillion in 2024, making it one of the fastest-maturing segments of private equity. Its share of total private equity fundraising has averaged around 20% since 2008. As technology, healthcare, and consumer goods companies grow beyond venture capital funding capabilities but do not yet have the cash flow maturity that traditional buyout funds seek, an intermediate layer of capital is now treated as a distinct, stand-alone category rather than a transitional stage. READ MORE
Just two years ago, 1789 Capital Management “was a struggling venture capital firm that earned consistently disappointing results by serially investing in total market flops,” but after recruiting President Donald Trump’s eldest son in the wake of the 2024 US election, it “suddenly had the Midas touch,” a key congressional Democrat highlighted this week, launching an investigation.
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)—a lawyer who managed the historic second impeachment of the president—revealed Thursday that the previous day he had sent a letter demanding answers from Donald Trump Jr., who is a partner at 1789 Capital, as well as company president Omeed Malik and chief investment officer Christopher Buskirk. READ MORE
There is a slightly awkward question lurking behind a lot of the conversations about corporate venture at the moment: What exactly are we expecting CVC to do?
For years, the answer was relatively straightforward: find interesting startups, invest in them, generate a financial return and, ideally, find some strategic value along the way. That doesn’t seem ambitious enough anymore. READ MORE
Governor Gavin Newsom announced that California, the nation’s #1 state for venture capital, has reached another major milestone, attracting $366 billion in venture capital funding in 2026. This year, more than 4,000 California-based startups have secured more funding than startups in all 49 other states combined. Fueled by California’s unmatched leadership in technology, artificial intelligence, and innovation, the Golden State continues to outperform the rest of the nation, attracting investment, creating new companies, and building the industries that will define the future. READ MORE
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