Tootfinder

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.

What Makes a Visualization Complex?
Mengdi Chu, Zefeng Qiu, Meng Ling, Shuning Jiang, Robert S. Laramee, Michael Sedlmair, Jian Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08332 https://

What Makes a Visualization Complex?
We investigate the perceived visual complexity (VC) in data visualizations using objective image-based metrics. We collected VC scores through a large-scale crowdsourcing experiment involving 349 participants and 1,800 visualization images. We then examined how these scores align with 12 image-based metrics spanning information-theoretic, clutter, color, and our two object-based metrics. Our results show that both low-level image properties and the high-level elements affect perceived VC in vis…

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

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

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

Higher-arity PAC learning, VC dimension and packing lemma
Artem Chernikov, Henry Towsner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02420 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02420

Higher-arity PAC learning, VC dimension and packing lemma
The aim of this note is to overview some of our work in Chernikov, Towsner'20 (arXiv:2010.00726) developing higher arity VC theory (VC$_n$ dimension), including a generalization of Haussler packing lemma, and an associated tame (slice-wise) hypergraph regularity lemma; and to demonstrate that it characterizes higher arity PAC learning (PAC$_n$ learning) in $n$-fold product spaces with respect to product measures introduced by Kobayashi, Kuriyama and Takeuchi'15. We also point out how some of th…

Lighter, which operates an Ethereum Layer 2 network and a decentralized exchange to support perpetual futures contracts, raised $68M at a ~$1.5B valuation (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/378358/lighte

@… 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™

1Password founders sold a $75M stake as part of a $100M secondary sale, valuing the company at $6.8B, the same valuation as its $620M Series C in January 2022 (Jeff Stone/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

#Italian corp aggregator of failed #VC discards #BendingSpoons buys assets of #Vimeo the once high flying premium

MeanVC: Lightweight and Streaming Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Mean Flows
Guobin Ma, Jixun Yao, Ziqian Ning, Yuepeng Jiang, Lingxin Xiong, Lei Xie, Pengcheng Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08392

MeanVC: Lightweight and Streaming Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Mean Flows
Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to transfer timbre from a source speaker to any unseen target speaker while preserving linguistic content. Growing application scenarios demand models with streaming inference capabilities. This has created a pressing need for models that are simultaneously fast, lightweight, and high-fidelity. However, existing streaming methods typically rely on either autoregressive (AR) or non-autoregressive (NAR) frameworks, which either require large parameter sizes to…

VC firm Insight Partners says thousands of staff and limited partners had personal data stolen in a ransomware attack
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/vc-giant-insight-partners-notifies-staff-and-limited-partners-after-data-b…

VC firm Insight Partners says thousands of staff and limited partners had personal data stolen in a ransomware attack | TechCrunch
The venture capital giant, behind cyber giants Wiz and Databricks, notified current and former employees, as well as the firm's limited partners, that their data was stolen in a January cyberattack.

BlockSDN-VC: A SDN-Based Virtual Coordinate-Enhanced Transaction Broadcast Framework for High-Performance Blockchains
Wenyang Jia, Jingjing Wang, Kai Lei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00306

BlockSDN-VC: A SDN-Based Virtual Coordinate-Enhanced Transaction Broadcast Framework for High-Performance Blockchains
Modern blockchains need fast, reliable propagation to balance security and throughput. Virtual-coordinate methods speed dissemination but rely on slow iterative updates, leaving nodes out of sync. We present BlockSDN-VC, a transaction-broadcast protocol that centralises coordinate computation and forwarding control in an SDN controller, delivering global consistency, minimal path stretch and rapid response to churn or congestion. In geo-distributed simulations, BlockSDN-VC cuts median latency b…

Cofinal families of finite VC-dimension
Omer Ben-Neria, Itay Kaplan, George Peterzil
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24744 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24744

Cofinal families of finite VC-dimension
Given infinite cardinals $θ\leq κ$, we ask for the minimal VC-dimension of a cofinal family $\mathcal{F}\subseteq[κ]^{<θ}$. We show that for $θ=ω$ and $κ=\aleph_n$ it is consistent with ZFC that there exists such a family of VC-dimension $n+1$, which is known to be the lower bound. For $θ>ω$ we answer this question completely, demonstrating a strong dichotomy between the case of singular and regular $θ$. We furthermore answer some relative and generalized versions of the above questio…

Good Morning #Canada
On the eve of #RemembranceDay, it's fitting that we wish a ##HappyBirthday to Charles Cecil Ingersoll Merritt, who was born on this day in 1908. Merritt was the first Canadian recipient of the Victoria Cross in #WWII, the highest award for bravery among troops of the British Empire. He was also the son of Captain Cecil Mack Merritt, who was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres on April 23rd, 1915. Merritt commanded The South Saskatchewan Regiment, Canadian Army, (Canadian Infantry Corps), and led his regiment at the failed Dieppe Raid on August 19th, 1942. He led multiple charges against fortified positions, was wounded twice, and stayed on the beach to defend his troops as they were withdrawn. He was captured by the Germans and remained a prisoner until the end of the war.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CanadianHeroes
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/charles-cecil-merritt-vc

I was thinking of #Bluesky as not-Twitter, i.e., commercial but free of the RW nazi-adjacent stuff, & run by well-intentioned people. I was forgetting that it is a US-based VC-funded corp. I imagine there are all sorts of crazy pressures on it to buckle under MAGA rule, and that e.g., Charlie Kirk stuff was a lightning rod.
The only way BS could be immune to the sorts of pressures that…

I'm so glad I never took up any of those Silicon Valley companies or VC-backed startups on their offers.
Probably I'd be rich, I guess.
But I prefer to have my conscience not flushed down the toilet.

Crosslisted article(s) found for math.CO. https://arxiv.org/list/math.CO/new
[1/1]:
- Higher-arity PAC learning, VC dimension and packing lemma
Artem Chernikov, Henry Towsner

Simple, an AI-powered health coaching app to help users lose weight, raised a $35M Series B led by Kevin Hart's HartBeat Ventures (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/01/kevin-harts-vc-firm-leads-35m-series-…

Kevin Hart’s VC firm leads $35M Series B for weight-loss app Simple | TechCrunch
Simple is an AI-powered health coaching app that helps people lose weight.

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.DM. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DM/new
[1/1]:
- Higher-arity PAC learning, VC dimension and packing lemma
Artem Chernikov, Henry Towsner

@… For Magit https://magit.vc/donate/, I switched to bank transfers: from my perspective, it cuts out the middlemen and I already have an account with my bank ;-)
Maybe

@… For Magit https://magit.vc/donate/, I switched to bank transfers: from my perspective, it cuts out the middlemen and I already have an account with my bank ;-)
Maybe

I used to run a few generative Twitter bots, all of which are now defunct due to Elon-related API restrictions, focus and audience shifts, etc. I'd like to resurrect a couple, and maybe even ensloppify one with AI (to attract VC $€£) but it appears botsin.space is dead. Any decent botting instances left? Is mastodon.bot alright? Should I just start my own instance, and make my hobby trying to get federated, instead?

PitchBook: VCs have invested $192.7B in AI startups so far this year, putting 2025 on track to be the first year when 50% of VC funding goes to the AI industry (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Arcade Media, the management company behind British YouTuber collective The Sidemen, sells a minority stake to Thomas Benski's film studio and VC group Lumina (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/9e7e3955-dd9e-4e0f-b22c-fca01a480485

O_O-VC: Synthetic Data-Driven One-to-One Alignment for Any-to-Any Voice Conversion
Huu Tuong Tu, Huan Vu, cuong tien nguyen, Dien Hy Ngo, Nguyen Thi Thu Trang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09061

O_O-VC: Synthetic Data-Driven One-to-One Alignment for Any-to-Any Voice Conversion
Traditional voice conversion (VC) methods typically attempt to separate speaker identity and linguistic information into distinct representations, which are then combined to reconstruct the audio. However, effectively disentangling these factors remains challenging, often leading to information loss during training. In this paper, we propose a new approach that leverages synthetic speech data generated by a high-quality, pretrained multispeaker text-to-speech (TTS) model. Specifically, syntheti…

Crosslisted article(s) found for math.LO. https://arxiv.org/list/math.LO/new
[1/1]:
- Higher-arity PAC learning, VC dimension and packing lemma
Artem Chernikov, Henry Towsner

Soso, #Nexthink an eine US-amerikanische Firma zu verkaufen ist also ein grosser Erfolg.
Fühlt sich irgendwie falsch an.
Der Einschub «Diese Transaktion wird viel Geld in die Region zurückbringen, das reinvestiert werden kann» finde ich nur halbwegs tröstlich. Aber hey, ich bin ja auch kein VC...

Nexthink: Schweizer Softwarefirma für 3 Milliarden übernommen
Wenige Start-ups erreichen je den in der Businesswelt begehrten Einhornstatus. Nexthink war eines davon. Dass es verkauft wurde, sei ein Meilenstein für die Schweizer Techbranche, sagt ein Experte.

Ripple Effects
Hosted by Soph Dicker from So Invested following Australian founders and VC operators on a transformative two-week journey in Tanzania...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/ripple-effects/

Source: Stripe is in talks to buy back shares from its VC backers at a $106.7B valuation; Sequoia bought $861M worth of shares in 2024 at a $70B valuation (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/23/stripe-buy-back-stock-vc

Scoop: Stripe in talks to buy back stock from investors
Stripe has never seemed interested in an IPO.

(R)evolution of Programming: Vibe Coding as a Post-Coding Paradigm
Kevin Krings, Nino S. Bohn, Thomas Ludwig
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12364 https://arxiv…

(R)evolution of Programming: Vibe Coding as a Post-Coding Paradigm
Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly large language models, have introduced new possibilities for software development practices. In our paper we investigate the emerging Vibe Coding (VC) paradigm that emphasizes intuitive, affect-driven, and improvisational interactions between developers and AI systems. Building upon the discourse of End-User Development (EUD), we explore how VC diverges from conventional programming approaches such as those supporte…

“The day may come sooner than many expect when shareholders, directors and executives will demand evidence that the massive investment in LLM technology will generate an adequate return for them. The answer will be “no” for many, if not most”
(This isn’t from some mad poster, this guy has been a big shot VC since the 1980s.)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/24/ai-investors-llms

PitchBook: US AI and robotics VC deals are up over 4x since 2023 to $160B so far in 2025, while comparable China deals are just $10B , up from $9.24B in 2023 (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/cnbc-china

CNBC's The China Connection newsletter: Foreign investors warm to China’s cheaper AI valuations despite fears of a U.S. bubble
For all the worries about a bubble in U.S. AI spending, capital flows into China's tech sector is far less, pushing startups to do more with less.

On the quadratic complexity of subsets of $\mathbb{F}_p^n$ of bounded $\mathrm{VC_{2}}$-dimension
C. Terry, J. Wolf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12767 https://

On the quadratic complexity of subsets of $\mathbb{F}_p^n$ of bounded $\mathrm{VC_{2}}$-dimension
In prior work, we showed that subsets of $\mathbb{F}_{p}^{n}$ of $\mathrm{VC_{2}}$-dimension at most $k$ are well approximated by a union of atoms of a quadratic factor of complexity $(\ell,q)$, where the complexity $\ell$ of the linear part and the complexity $q$ of the quadratic part are both bounded in terms of $k$, $p$, and the desired level of approximation $μ$. A key tool in the proof of this result was an arithmetic regularity lemma for the Gowers $U^3$-norm by Green and Tao, which resu…

Paris-based Filigran, which develops open-source threat intelligence tools, raised a $58M Series C led by French VC Eurazeo and reports 6K users (Daphné Leprince-Ringuet/Sifted)
https://sifted.eu/articles/cybersecurity-startup-filigran-raises-58m/

VCBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Venture Capital
Rick Chen, Joseph Ternasky, Afriyie Samuel Kwesi, Ben Griffin, Aaron Ontoyin Yin, Zakari Salifu, Kelvin Amoaba, Xianling Mu, Fuat Alican, Yigit Ihlamur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14448

VCBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Venture Capital
Benchmarks such as SWE-bench and ARC-AGI demonstrate how shared datasets accelerate progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). We introduce VCBench, the first benchmark for predicting founder success in venture capital (VC), a domain where signals are sparse, outcomes are uncertain, and even top investors perform modestly. At inception, the market index achieves a precision of 1.9%. Y Combinator outperforms the index by a factor of 1.7x, while tier-1 firms are 2.9x better. VCBench p…

Strong enhancement of d-wave superconductivity in an extended checkerboard Hubbard ladder
Xichen Huang, Saisai He, Jize Zhao, Zhong-Bing Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24415 h…

Strong enhancement of d-wave superconductivity in an extended checkerboard Hubbard ladder
By employing the density-matrix renormalization group method, we study an extended checkerboard Hubbard model on the two-leg ladder, which includes an intraplaquette nearest-neighbour attraction V. The simulated results show that V plays a significant role in enhancing the d-wave superconductivity when the electron density is close to half-filling. In the homogeneous case t'=t (t and t' are the intraplaquette and interplaquette hopping integrals), large critical |Vc| is required to in…

HISPASpoof: A New Dataset For Spanish Speech Forensics
Maria Risques, Kratika Bhagtani, Amit Kumar Singh Yadav, Edward J. Delp
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09155 https://

HISPASpoof: A New Dataset For Spanish Speech Forensics
Zero-shot Voice Cloning (VC) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) methods have advanced rapidly, enabling the generation of highly realistic synthetic speech and raising serious concerns about their misuse. While numerous detectors have been developed for English and Chinese, Spanish-spoken by over 600 million people worldwide-remains underrepresented in speech forensics. To address this gap, we introduce HISPASpoof, the first large-scale Spanish dataset designed for synthetic speech detection and attribut…

"Twenty’s contracts are a rare case of an AI offensive cyber company with VC backing landing Cyber Command work; typically cyber contracts have gone to either small bespoke companies or to the old guard of defense contracting like Booz Allen Hamilton or L3Harris."
The Pentagon Is Spending Millions On AI Hackers

The Pentagon Is Spending Millions On AI Hackers
The U.S. government has been contracting stealth startup Twenty, which is working on AI agents and automated hacking of foreign targets at massive scale.

PitchBook: VC investment in Asia slowed to $48.9B in the first nine months of 2025, just over half of 2024's total, amid uncertainty due to US tariff policies (Pak Yiu/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/finance/asian-ven…

Asian venture capital activity slows amid US tariff uncertainty
Investors increasingly cautious as deals shift toward supply chains and manufacturing

SynthVC: Leveraging Synthetic Data for End-to-End Low Latency Streaming Voice Conversion
Zhao Guo, Ziqian Ning, Guobin Ma, Lei Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09245 https://

SynthVC: Leveraging Synthetic Data for End-to-End Low Latency Streaming Voice Conversion
Voice Conversion (VC) aims to modify a speaker's timbre while preserving linguistic content. While recent VC models achieve strong performance, most struggle in real-time streaming scenarios due to high latency, dependence on ASR modules, or complex speaker disentanglement, which often results in timbre leakage or degraded naturalness. We present SynthVC, a streaming end-to-end VC framework that directly learns speaker timbre transformation from synthetic parallel data generated by a pre-traine…

Filing: Insight Partners says a ransomware attack on its systems between October 2024 and January 2025 affected 12,600 people, including limited partners (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/vc-giant…

VC firm Insight Partners says thousands of staff and limited partners had personal data stolen in a ransomware attack | TechCrunch
The venture capital giant, behind cyber giants Wiz and Databricks, notified current and former employees, as well as the firm's limited partners, that their data was stolen in a January cyberattack.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #NightTracks
Johann Sebastian Bach, Gabriela Montero & Gabriela Montero:
🎵 Adagio after Bach VC in E major BWV1042
#JohannSebastianBach #GabrielaMontero
https://open.spotify.com/track/1v3gGmcneK1QzYyBFiBXG0

London-based Evantic Capital, founded by ex-Sequoia VC Matt Miller, raised a $400M fund, with ~12.5% coming from 135 "legends", including CEOs, a novel strategy (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Tracxn: funding for Indian digital lending startups fell to $462M between January and August 2025 from $1.1B a year earlier, after RBI tightened lending norms (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/t

Clock’s ticking for digital lenders as VC funding plunges 50% in 2025
Funding into digital lending startups slumped to $462 million between January and August 2025 from $1.1 billion a year earlier, according to data from market intelligence platform Tracxn. Only around 50 of the 154 fintech deals reported this year involved digital lenders, the data showed.

Sources: Roelof Botha was asked to step aside after some Sequoia partners raised concerns about his leadership; Botha had declined to comment on Shaun Maguire (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/sequ

MaskVCT: Masked Voice Codec Transformer for Zero-Shot Voice Conversion With Increased Controllability via Multiple Guidances
Junhyeok Lee, Helin Wang, Yaohan Guan, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Jes\'us Villalba, Najim Dehak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17143

MaskVCT: Masked Voice Codec Transformer for Zero-Shot Voice Conversion With Increased Controllability via Multiple Guidances
We introduce MaskVCT, a zero-shot voice conversion (VC) model that offers multi-factor controllability through multiple classifier-free guidances (CFGs). While previous VC models rely on a fixed conditioning scheme, MaskVCT integrates diverse conditions in a single model. To further enhance robustness and control, the model can leverage continuous or quantized linguistic features to enhance intellgibility and speaker similarity, and can use or omit pitch contour to control prosody. These choice…

Qualcomm Ventures and six Indian VC firms join India Deep Tech Alliance with an additional $850M in commitments; Nvidia joins as a strategic technical adviser (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/nvid

NVIDIA, Qualcomm join U.S., Indian VCs to help build India's next deep tech startups | TechCrunch
Qualcomm Ventures has joined six Indian venture firms, collectively adding more than $850 million to boost India’s deep-tech ecosystem.

Look, I'm not accusing #Replit of anything, but are we sure it is wise to perform a massive migration from #Vercel to Replit without doing the proper background checks first?¹
As far as I know, even though their founders are under no suspicion, this company is still american, VC-backed, and has all sorts of partnerships with ultra-tainted companies (such as Microsoft).
Please be mindful, just saying.
1. For reference: #freepalestine #boycottisrael

Replaced article(s) found for cs.DM. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DM/new
[1/1]:
- Sunflowers in set systems with small VC-dimension
J\'ozsef Balogh, Anton Bernshteyn, Michelle Delcourt, Asaf Ferber, Huy Tuan Pham

An analysis of Crunchbase and PitchBook data: in 2025 so far, 80 tech startups reached $1B valuations, many of them focused on AI with exceptions like Kalshi (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/01/at-least-36-new-tech-…

At least 80 new tech unicorns were minted in 2025 so far | TechCrunch
Using data from Crunchbase and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the VC-backed startups that became unicorns so far this year.

DealStreetAsia: VC funding in Indonesian startups fell to just $80M in H1 2025 from $200M a year earlier, as startups face fallout from corruption scandals (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/asean-money/indonesian-s…

Indonesian startups face funding fallout from corruption scandals
Experts urge better governance and more hands-on investor oversight to revive ecosystem

Cerrion, which develops AI video agents that detect and resolve production line issues in real time, raised an $18M Series A led by Creandum (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/11/25/cerrion-raises-18m-to-reduce-factory-downtime-wi…

Cerrion raises $18M to reduce factory downtime with AI video agents
Cerrion, the Swiss-founded AI video agent platform that detects and resolves production line issues in real time, has raised $18 million in Series A funding to further expand and scale operations in the US and Europe. The round was led by Creandum, with participation from existing investors Y Combinator, Goat Capital, 10x Founders and Session VC, alongside prominent angels including Harry Stebbings (20VC), Oskar Hjertonsson, Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face) and Garret Langley (Flock Safety).Fa…

Sources: Kalshi is receiving funding offers from VC investors at $10B-$12B or higher valuations, just weeks after it announced a $300M round at a $5B valuation (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Ultralytics, which develops the YOLO series of open-source computer vision models and sells commercial licenses, raised a $30M Series A led by Elephant VC (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/09/17/computer-vision-startup-ul…

Computer vision startup Ultralytics raises $30M in funding - SiliconANGLE
Computer vision startup Ultralytics raises $30M in funding - SiliconANGLE

Arbiter, which is using AI to automate healthcare administrative tasks, emerges from stealth with a $52M seed from multiple family offices at a $400M valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/health-sta

This former Eli Lilly exec just raised a $52 million seed round from family offices to build a new healthcare AI startup.
Thirty Madison's former president is launching her own healthcare AI startup without a drop of VC funding.

A profile of Edwin Chen, the CEO of Surge AI, a Scale AI rival that had $1.2B revenue in 2024, is profitable, and is reportedly raising $1B at a $30B valuation (Phoebe Liu/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2025/09/17/the-ai-billionaire-…

AI Founder Edwin Chen Shunned VC. Now He’s Worth $18 Billion
An alum of Google and Twitter, Edwin Chen built his data labeling company, Surge, in the shadows of the AI revolution. Now the 37-year-old wants to make his voice heard.

Everett Randle, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins, joins VC firm Benchmark as general partner, following a slew of personnel departures at Benchmark (Natasha Mascarenhas/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/benchmark-names-ev…

Benchmark Names Everett Randle as New General Partner 
Everett Randle, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins investing out of its growth-stage funds, has joined Benchmark as the firm’s newest general partner, the early-stage firm announced Monday. At Kleiner, Randle worked on investments including enterprise search startup Glean and legal AI startup Harvey, earning him a top spot on The Information’s Next General Partners list in 2024. The hiring

Israel-based Second Nature, whose conversational AI helps train sales teams, raised a $22M Series B led by Sienna VC, taking its total raised to $80M (Meir Orbach/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bj0cciralg

Zoom-backed Second Nature raises $22 million Series B to expand AI sales training platform
The Israeli startup uses conversational AI to transform how companies coach sales teams. 

Tokyo-based Sakana AI becomes Japan's most valuable unicorn at a ~$2.6B valuation, following a ~$130M raise from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial and US VC firms (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/a…

Sakana AI takes crown as Japan's most valuable unicorn
AI developer valued at $2.63bn in latest funding round

Dealroom: 230 European defense tech startups have launched since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with VC funding reaching $1.5B this year, mostly for drone tech (Sylvia Pfeifer/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/6c247bbe-0181-472f-8369-581e2fd4f19b