Tootfinder

PitchBook: European VC investments rose 5% YoY to a post-pandemic high of €66B in 2025; AI-related deals accounted for 35% , or €23.5B, up from €17.7B in 2024 (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/523ee7a9-489a-4f68-8aae-3f98c336b479

Garry Tan, VC and Y Combinator CEO: Brain computer interfaces are now giving sight back to the blind https://garryslist.org/posts/brain-computer-interfaces-are-now-giving-sight-back-to-the-blind by @…

Brain Computer Interfaces Are Now Giving Sight Back to the Blind
A 2mm chip restored sight more than 80% of blind trial patients, built by a former cofounder of Neuralink.

Source: Spark Capital, the first VC firm to back Anthropic in 2023, is raising about $3B in new funds, 50% more than the size of funds it raised two years ago (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-backer-spark-c…

Anthropic Backer Spark Capital Targets $3 Billion in New Funds
Spark Capital, the first venture firm to back Anthropic, is in the process of raising about $3 billion in new funds, 50% more than the size of funds it raised two years ago, according to a person with direct knowledge of the fundraise. The fundraising target will test investor demand in a ...

Sources and US tax lawyers: the IRS's planned audit of private equity and VC firms is faltering under President Trump, as many senior leaders leave the agency (Jesse Drucker/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/business/irs-private…

Push to Audit Private Equity and Venture Capital Falters Under Trump
Specialists have left the I.R.S. and audits have been abandoned since the president returned to office.

A profile of VC firm Index Ventures, which saw billions in gains from exits in 2025, including Figma, Scale AI, and Dream Games, as it looks ahead to succession (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-08/inde…

Jay Graber is stepping down as Bluesky CEO, saying a "seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution" is needed; VC Toni Schneider is named interim CEO (Kate Knibbs/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-stepping-down/
…

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down
Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will take over as interim CEO as Bluesky’s board of directors hunts for a permanent replacement.

I have a killer idea for an AI startup. The name says it all:
CanadianGirlfriend
You know what it does already, right?
I don’t even NEED a pitch. Someone send me VC checks!

a16z raises over $15B across five new funds, including $6.75B for its fifth growth fund and $3B for unspecified "other venture strategies" (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/09/andreessen-horowitz-15-billion-for-new-funds

Andreessen Horowitz raises $15 billion for new funds
It's a major boost for the U.S. VC market, after its weakest fundraising year since 2017.

Ventura County Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster ( #VCVOAD )
is a collaborative of nearly 50 local non-profit agencies,
faith-based organizations,
volunteer groups,
public institutions,
and private entities
dedicated to improving outcomes for people affected by disasters.
VC-VOAD helps communities respond to and recover from major disasters guided by our f…

About | Ventura County VOAD

A look at Sourcery, a podcast and newsletter from Molly O'Shea, which gets big-name guests including Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey (Henry Chandonnet/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/molly-oshe

Meet Molly O'Shea, the VC-turned-podcaster who gets execs like Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey talking
Molly O'Shea's network helped her land interviews with Palantir and Anduril leaders. "A lot of these people really trust me," the Sourcery host said.

PitchBook-NVCA: global VC investments hit $512B in 2025 with AI accounting for 50% ; VC fundraising fell to a 10-year low of $118.6B, ~$100B less than in 2024 (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2026/01/07/pitch…

PitchBook: AI dominates global venture capital as 2025 deal value nears record - SiliconANGLE
PitchBook: AI dominates global venture capital as 2025 deal value nears record - SiliconANGLE

The problem with relying on commercial services for hosting any of your blog content is that they may only be around 10 or 15 years.
My blog has been around for 29 years and every now and then I need to fix up a bunch of posts from a decade ago because some service shut down.
My personal site (paid for by doing side jobs for people) has outlasted corporations with VC backing and overpaid CEOs who failed.

“Oh, look, they’ve built a new sewer… I wonder if it’ll enshittify?”
– Some folks, over and over again
#startups #VC

Generation 65 plus: "Der #VCÖ schlägt vor, dass Personen, die ihren #Führerschein freiwillig abgeben, drei Jahre lang kostenlos ein #Klimaticket

I think it's funny that VC was released 17 years after the year it was set in, imagine a new GTA intentionally set in 2009 (I know IV is basically that but there's a diff, contemporary v caricature)

Multicoin co-founder and Managing Partner Kyle Samani says he is stepping back from the VC firm and has transitioned to an advisory role (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/388561/multicoin-founder-kyle-samani-ste…

when VC funded projects quiet-quit

Oh goody, a LinkedIn connection request with a message!
Let’s break this down:
> …vc backed…
Focused on quarterly profits / RoI instead of outcomes.
> …invite-only…
NDAs and other gag agreements.
> …openAI browser…
Chromium that begs authors for ARIA to parse content.
> …seeing promising results…
Which aren’t genuine results.
> …goal is 100% WCAG testing…
Ah, snake oil.
> …with high capture rates.
Sales…

DOJ files reveal how Jeffrey Epstein helped his Russian-born publicist Masha Bucher become a prominent VC who now boasts of early checks to 22 unicorns like xAI (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/20

How Jeffrey Epstein Helped His Publicist Become A Big-Time Venture Capitalist
Masha Bucher is one of the more high profile female VCs in Silicon Valley. New emails released from the Department of Justice reveal a deep, years long relationship with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Nvidia says it is working with Peak XV and other VC firms in India to fund AI startups; over 4,000 Indian AI startups have joined its global startup program (Dylan Butts/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/18/nvidia-india-ai-vc-data-center-partners.html…

Nvidia is partnering with major Indian VC firms in search for the country's next AI start-ups
Nvidia is expanding its partnerships in India, including with venture capital firms, as it bets on the country's AI ecosystem that has drawn massive Big Tech investments. 

Source: Dragoneer raised $4.3B for its seventh VC fund and now has over $30B in AUM; it raised $3.8B for its sixth private fund in 2022 (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/12/15/dragoneer-vc-fund

Scoop: Dragoneer raises $4.3 billion for new VC fund
It's an outlier in what has been an exceptionally slow year for VC fundraising.

PitchBook estimates that 25% of VC-backed unicorns have become "undercorns," startups once valued at $1B or more by VCs but now valued below that threshold (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/13/vc-unicorn-companies

VC-backed unicorns are losing their horns
A quarter of "unicorn" startups have likely seen their market value drop below $1 billion, per PitchBook.

I’d like to revise and say that my hotter take is that every VC-funded *open source* software project should report both runway amounts and how many active FTE they have on payroll

Global fintech VC funding rose 27% YoY in 2025 to $51.8B; Y Combinator was the most active investor in the space, participating in 151 deals, up 24.8% YoY (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/most-active-fintech-inve…

Y Combinator Was By Far The Most-Active Fintech Investor in 2025, Data Shows
All told, global venture funding to financial technology startups totaled $51.8 billion for 2025 compared to $40.8 billion in 2024, per Crunchbase data. The investors who provided all that capital included a mix of private equity and alternative investors, with venture capital firms and accelerators next in line.

Peak XV, which split from Sequoia in 2023, raised $1.3B across new India- and Asia-focused funds, bringing its total assets under management to over $10B (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/20/peak-xv-rais…

Peak XV raises $1.3B, doubles down on AI as global VC rivalry in India heats up | TechCrunch
Peak XV says most of its new capital will target India as the firm prioritizes AI, fintech and cross-border bets while navigating recent partner departures.

my hot take is that I think every VC-funded software project should report how much runway they have left every month

Mumbai-based Knight Fintech, which builds core infrastructure connecting banks, lenders, platforms, and borrowers, raised $23.6M led by Accel (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/…

Knight Fintech secures $23.6 million from Accel, IIFL, & others
Knight Fintech has raised $23.6 million in a funding round led by early-stage venture firm Accel, with participation from IIFL and Rocket Capital. Existing investors Prime Venture Partners, 3One4 Capital, Commerce VC, and Trifecta Capital also participated in the round.

@… yeah, absolutely — I’d take FTE over runway. But with both you can better estimate how much time is left on the VC Hourglass of Funding™

A look at South Park Commons, the VC firm behind a startup community focusing on idea exploration over immediate business plans, as it aims to raise $500M (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Tracxn: VC funding for Indian startups fell 17% YoY to $10.5B in 2025 across 1,518 deals, down ~39% YoY; AI startups raised $643M, up 4% YoY, across 100 deals (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/27/india-startu…

India startup funding hits $11B in 2025 as investors grow more selective | TechCrunch
Startup funding rounds in India fell sharply in 2025 as investors concentrated capital into fewer companies.

Sources: Anthropic is set to raise about $20B led by Singapore's GIC and Coatue, double the amount it had targeted, at a $350B valuation (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/5e6ee0d4-a313-452c-baac-27b45f5f2de5

Anthropic doubles VC fundraising to $20bn on surging investor demand
Company in talks to raise new funds from Coatue, GIC, Iconiq and Sequoia at $350bn valuation

Sources: a VC firm backed by Fidelity billionaire Johnson's family shelves plans to sell its stake in ~40 Chinese tech companies as geopolitical factors ease (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Latin American VC funding rose 14.3% YoY in 2025 to $4.1B, with early-stage investment up 31.9% YoY to nearly $2B and late-stage/growth deals reaching $1.63B (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/vcs-bullish-latam-startup-…

LatAm Startup Funding Rebounds In 2025 As Mexico Sees Surge In Investment And VCs Remain Bullish On Region
Latin America startup investment climbed by 14.3% in 2025, driven by a boost in both early- and late-stage funding, Crunchbase data shows. 

Chinese state media: China launches three VC funds of $7.1B each to back early-stage "hard technology" startups valued below ¥500M, or about $71M (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa…

London-based PolyAI, which makes call center AI voice assistants, raised an $86M Series D led by Georgian, Hedosophia, and Khosla, after raising $50M in 2024 (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/12/15/polyai-raises-86m/

PolyAI raises $86M
London-based AI startup PolyAI has raised $86m in a Series D funding round.The funding round in the AI assistant developer for call centres was co-led by existing investors Canadian B2B software investor Georgian, London-based investor Hedosophia and US VC firm Khosla Ventures.Additional investors were NVentures (Nvidia’s VC arm), Sands Capital, Squarepoint Ventures, Citi Ventures, Point72 Ventures and the British Business Bank, which invested £15m ($20.1m). The British Business Bank is also…

VC fund a16z crypto says it is expanding to Asia and opening an office in Seoul, calling South Korea the world's second-largest crypto market (Sam Reynolds/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/12/10/a16z-cryp…

Andreessen Horowitz Crypto Unit to Expand Into Asia With South Korea Office
The crypto VC says it's opening its first Asia-based office in Seoul.

Khosla Ventures' Vinod Khosla and Ethan Choi disavow Keith Rabois' comments on an ICE shooting; Rabois said the man killed by agents was committing a "felony" (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/26/vino

Vinod Khosla publicly disavows Keith Rabois' comments on ICE shooting | TechCrunch
Unwavering Trump loyalist and VC Keith Rabois caused his colleague and his firm's founder to distance themselves from his comments on ICE.

Sequoia, a16z, and other VC firms invested $1.2B into police and public safety tech startups over the past year, following the success of Palantir and others (Abram Brown/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/a

Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Add to $1.2 Billion Funding Boom for Police Tech Startups
Over the past year, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and many of Silicon Valley’s other top venture capital firms have funneled at least $1.2 billion in funding to startups selling technology to city police departments and local public safety agencies. Those companies illustrate the technology industry’s growing enthusiasm for making software and hardware for the government and law

European VC funding rose 9% YoY to hit $58B in 2025, below North America's 46% YoY rise; AI led with $17.5B, followed by biotech's $13.4B and hardware's $10.8B (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/european-funding-nudged…

European Venture Funding Nudged Higher In 2025, While AI Led For The First Time
Venture funding to Europe-based startups last year gained only slightly, around 9% year over year, reaching $58 billion, with AI emerging as the region’s leading sector for startup investment for the first time, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows. 

Booz Allen Hamilton commits $400M to a16z's newest set of funds, for which a16z raised $15B in January; this is Booz Allen's first LP stake in any VC fund (Lucinda Shen/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/all-deals/2026/01/23/booz-allen-hamilton-400m…

Booz Allen Hamilton commits $400M to a16z funds
It's the firm's first LP stakes in any venture funds.

Crypto VC firm Dragonfly closes a $650M fund, its fourth, as the crypto VCs go through a "mass extinction event"; Dragonfly backed Polymarket's Series B (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/02/17/dragonfly-fou…

Exclusive: Crypto venture firm Dragonfly closes $650 million fourth fund—even as blockchain VCs face ‘mass extinction’
An inside look at the fast-rising firm, from its early Polymarket bet to its mysterious founding partner.

General Catalyst plans to invest $5B in India over five years, an increase from the $500M to $1B previously announced, after merging with a local VC in 2024 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/19/general-catalyst-commits-5b-to-ind…

General Catalyst commits $5B to India over five years | TechCrunch
The pledge marks a sharp jump from General Catalyst's earlier $500 million–$1 billion India earmark.

Sources: Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis is in early talks to raise hundreds of millions for a VC fund; Patel raised a $50M SPV toward Fluidstack's $700M fundraising (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/dylan-patels-semia…

Dylan Patel’s SemiAnalysis Mulls Raising Venture Fund
SemiAnalysis, the top chip and infrastructure research firm founded by Dylan Patel, is considering raising money to invest in startups, according to someone with direct knowledge of the discussions. The talks are in the early stages, and the firm does not yet have a target, but it could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The move to raise a venture capital fund would formalize

Sources: top VC firms operating in India are expected to commit investments ranging from $300M to $500M each to India's AI ecosystem at the AI Impact Summit (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indi…

Major VCs line up top dollars for coordinated AI capital push in India
Top venture capital firms in India are set to invest $300–500 million each into the country’s AI ecosystem, covering infrastructure, enterprise applications and sector-specific solutions. Global and domestic VCs, including Khosla Ventures, Accel India and Lightspeed, are participating. Combined, these commitments could exceed $1 billion, surpassing last year’s startup funding.

Austin-based Neurophos, which develops a photon-based "Optical Processing Unit" to replace GPUs in AI training, raised $110M led by Bill Gates' Gates Frontier (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

A look at Anti Fund, a small VC firm cofounded by YouTuber Jake Paul that has gained access to hot rounds in startups like OpenAI, Anduril, Polymarket, and Ramp (Jake Angelo/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/02/14/who-is-jake-paul-venture-capital-a…

Jake Paul and his $65 million fortune are gaining influence in Silicon Valley
“We’re going to do amazing things in 2026,” said Steve Han, a partner at Paul's Anti Fund, told Fortune. “And then hopefully we'll show it over YouTube.”

India approves a $1.1B state-backed VC fund to finance high-risk areas like AI and advanced manufacturing, doubling down on an effort that debuted in 2016 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/14/india-doubles-down…

India doubles down on state-backed venture capital, approving $1.1B fund | TechCrunch
India’s $1.1B fund-of-funds will invest through private VCs to support deep-tech and manufacturing startups.

Sequoia's Shaun Maguire speculated in an X post that a Palestinian student was behind the Brown University shooting; the post was later deleted (Chris Stokel-Walker/Fast Company)
https://www.fastcompany.com/91463942/sequoia-shaun-maguire-brow…

Sequoia's Shaun Maguire accused an innocent Palestinian of being the Brown shooter. Then he doubled down.
Online sleuthing is not, it turns out, among the noted VC's talents.

In a podcast, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger describes his phone calls with Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, and says he had been contacted by "every big VC" (Marcus Schuler/Implicator.ai)
https://www.implicator.ai/peter-steinberger-chose-o…

Peter Steinberger Chose OpenAI. The Code Was Never the Point.
OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI over Meta. The 196,000-star project's code wasn't the prize. Its adoption graph was.

Total global VC funding to fintech startups totaled $51.8B in 2025, up 27% YoY and above pre-pandemic totals, but much lower than 2021's peak of $141.6B (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/fintech/funding-jumped-big-checks-ai-ye-2025/<…

Fintech Funding Jumped 27% In 2025 With Fewer Deals But Bigger Checks
Global venture funding to fintech startups climbed in 2025 to its highest level in several quarters, boosted by later-stage deals, Crunchbase data shows.

Some of the biggest VC firms are backing both OpenAI and Anthropic, breaking a taboo by investing in competing startups, as the AI race reshapes venture capital (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-11/…

Nick Clegg joins London-based VC firm Hiro Capital as a general partner, and Yann LeCun joins the firm as an adviser; sources: Hiro looks to raise a €500M fund (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/98cf87d9-3d1c-4f60-9c50-eed36a25e219

Sources: Balderton cashed out ~$2B of its Revolut stake in the past year, turning an early £1M bet into a historic European VC win; its fifth fund returned 25x (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/97e6f29e-bc79-43e0-bcbd-2dfe98755ea3

How a16z became the dominant influence on Trump-era AI policy, including via Marc Andreessen building key relationships; an ex-official says it has "veto power" (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026…

Tucuvi, which develops AI agents that check in with patients and escalate cases to human teams when needed, raised a $20M Series A, led by Cathay and Leadwind (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2026/01/08/clinical-voice-ai-startup-tucuvi-raises-20m/

Clinical voice AI startup Tucuvi raises $20M
A Spanish AI voice startup, which says its tech makes minor clinical decisions while on the call with patients, has raised $20m in a Series A funding round.Tucuvi was founded by Maria Gonzalez, its CEO, whose mother passed away after a reported hospital administration error.The Series A funding round was led by VC firm Cathay Innovation and Madrid-based Kfund, through its early-growth fund Leadwind, with participation from existing investors Frontline Ventures, Seaya Ventures, and Shilling.Tucu…