Tootfinder

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.

A little reminder that DuckDuckGo is venture capital (VC) funded.
The way VC works:
1. You get VC
2. You grow as fast as you can (or fail fast)
3. You sell (either to a larger corporation or to the public in an IPO; this is called the “exit”)
(In case any of you are surprised by recent/future developments.)
#DuckDuckGo

The VC-dimension of random subsets of finite groups
Brad Rodgers, Anurag Sahay
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14219 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

The VC-dimension of random subsets of finite groups
For a random subset of a finite group $G$ of cardinality $N$, we consider the VC-dimension of the family of its translates (equivalently the VC-dimension of a random Cayley graph) and prove a law of large numbers as $N\rightarrow\infty$. This answers a question of McDonald--Sahay--Wyman.

PitchBook: 15.9% of VC-backed deals in 2025 so far have been down rounds, a 10-year high, with AI and ML startups accounting for 29.3% of the down rounds (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/startup-down-rounds-are-at…

Startup down rounds are at a 10 year high, according to PitchBook data
PitchBook data revealed that 15.9% of venture-backed deals in 2025 to date have been down rounds, marking a decade high.

@… 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

Bulk viscous cosmological models with cosmological constant: Observational constraints
R. Noem\'i Villalobos, Yerko V\'asquez, Norman Cruz, Carlos H. L\'opez-Caraballo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11614

Bulk viscous cosmological models with cosmological constant: Observational constraints
We investigate whether viscous cold dark matter (vCDM) in a $Λ$-dominated FLRW universe can alleviate the Hubble tension while satisfying thermodynamic constraints, examining both flat and curved geometries. We model vCDM with bulk viscosity $ζ= ζ_0\,(Ω_{vc}/Ω_{vc0})^m$, where $m$ determines the viscosity evolution and $Ω_{vc}$ is the density parameter of vCDM. We explore two particular scenarios: constant viscosity ($m=0$), and variable viscosity ($m$ free). Using Bayesian inference, we …

Saudi startup Lucidya, which develops customer experience software, raised a $30M Series B led by Impact46, marking the largest AI funding round in the kingdom (Yassmin Jabri/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

»DID Method for Natural Persons«
Does anyone know about this and are there any post-quantum cryptography approaches available? How widespread is it, and is it already being used extensively? If so, where and by whom in what areas?
I thank you in advance for your answers and the retoot :BoostOK:
🧑‍💻 https://

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Portishead:
🎵 It Could Be Sweet
#Portishead
https://virv-celest.bandcamp.com/track/portishead-it-could-be-sweet-vc-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/1cpnpMvnvmdy3hzYgd5oo9

On Tight Robust Coresets for $k$-Medians Clustering
Lingxiao Huang, Zhenyu Jiang, Yi Li, Xuan Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11260 https://

On Tight Robust Coresets for $k$-Medians Clustering
This paper considers coresets for the robust $k$-medians problem with $m$ outliers, and new constructions in various metric spaces are obtained. Specifically, for metric spaces with a bounded VC or doubling dimension $d$, the coreset size is $O(m) + \tilde{O}(kd\varepsilon^{-2})$, which is optimal up to logarithmic factors. For Euclidean spaces, the coreset size is $O(m\varepsilon^{-1}) + \tilde{O}(\min\{k^{4/3}\varepsilon^{-2},k\varepsilon^{-3}\})$, improving upon a recent result by Jiang and …

Sources: Stripe appoints Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang to serve as CEO of its planned Layer-1 blockchain Tempo; a source says Huang will remain at Paradigm (Fortune)
https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/08/12/matt-huang-paradigm-stripe-tempo-blockchain-ceo/…

Exclusive: Top crypto VC Matt Huang to lead Stripe blockchain Tempo as CEO, stay at Paradigm
Huang serves on Stripe’s board, and his VC firm Paradigm is helping incubate the fintech’s blockchain.

Investors are finding new opportunities in climate tech despite VC firms decreasing funding in the sector. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

VC firms aren’t putting as much money into climate tech—but some investors see new opportunity
VC investments in climate tech are down for the third year in a row, but investors say the space is narrowing, not disappearing.

LatentVoiceGrad: Nonparallel Voice Conversion with Latent Diffusion/Flow-Matching Models
Hirokazu Kameoka, Takuhiro Kaneko, Kou Tanaka, Yuto Kondo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08379

LatentVoiceGrad: Nonparallel Voice Conversion with Latent Diffusion/Flow-Matching Models
Previously, we introduced VoiceGrad, a nonparallel voice conversion (VC) technique enabling mel-spectrogram conversion from source to target speakers using a score-based diffusion model. The concept involves training a score network to predict the gradient of the log density of mel-spectrograms from various speakers. VC is executed by iteratively adjusting an input mel-spectrogram until resembling the target speaker's. However, challenges persist: audio quality needs improvement, and conversion…

PitchBook: AI startups received 53% of all global VC dollars invested in H1 2025, rising to 64% in the US, and accounted for 29% of all global startups funded (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/03/ai-startups-vc-investments

AI is eating venture capital, or at least its dollars
AI startups received 53% of all global VC dollars invested in the first half of 2025.

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…

"check matrix" "hop on vc" no bitch let's hop on https://ynoproject.net and meet up on mars

Technologies that promise to track, manage, and supervise workers,
increasingly using artificial intelligence,
are entrenched in the developing world, according to a new report by Coworker.org,
a labor rights nonprofit based in New York. 
Audits of more than 150 startups and regional companies based in Kenya, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and India showed
workplace surveillance is expanding in scale and sophistication, the researchers said.
While lar…

VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech
A funding surge has given rise to technologies to track, analyze and manage workers — often in countries with little regulation.

Does anybody else see "VC" in an article and have their brain replace it with "Viet Cong"?
It's so much funnier imagining someone making a funding pitch to a bunch of communist guerrillas in the jungle rather than some stodgy bay area tech bros.

Active biphasic heat transfer enhancement in vertical natural convection
Haoran Qi, Chaoben Zhao, Yaning Fan, Yihong Du, Varghese Mathai, Chao Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01262

Active biphasic heat transfer enhancement in vertical natural convection
Vertical natural convection (VC), often cannot meet the high heat transfer demands due to the inherent misalignment of the direction of buoyancy (vertical) with the direction of the heat transfer (horizontal). Here we applied a novel strategy on a water based VC system to enhance the heat transfer. By adding 2% of the total volume with a low-boiling-temperature liquid (HFE-7000) and introducing a gas-liquid layer on top of the VC cell, we create a self-sustained state of pseudo-turbulence with …

PitchBook: 27 VC-backed companies went public in the US in the first half of 2025, the smallest number in at least 10 years, raising a total of $44.4B (Natalia Kniazhevich/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

REF-VC: Robust, Expressive and Fast Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Diffusion Transformers
Yuepeng Jiang, Ziqian Ning, Shuai Wang, Chengjia Wang, Mengxiao Bi, Pengcheng Zhu, Lei Xie, Zhonghua Fu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04996

REF-VC: Robust, Expressive and Fast Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Diffusion Transformers
In real-world voice conversion applications, environmental noise in source speech and user demands for expressive output pose critical challenges. Traditional ASR-based methods ensure noise robustness but suppress prosody, while SSL-based models improve expressiveness but suffer from timbre leakage and noise sensitivity. This paper proposes REF-VC, a noise-robust expressive voice conversion system. Key innovations include: (1) A random erasing strategy to mitigate the information redundancy inh…

Lockheed Constellation sobre Santiago de Cuba https://archivo.kamasystems.nl/es/2023/07/31/lockheed-constellation-sobre-santiago-de-cuba/

PitchBook: US startup funding surged 75.6% YoY in H1 2025 to $162.8B, strongest since H1 2021, driven by the AI boom and on track for the second-best year ever (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-ai-startup…

You gotta be locked in when you're playing GTA 3/VC, those games will drop an npc with a gun on you out of nowhere lmao

Avatars and Environments for Meetings in Social VR: What Styles and Choices Matter to People in Group Creativity Tasks?
Anya Osborne, Sabrina Fielder, Lee Taber, Tara Lamb, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Katherine Isbister
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21780

Avatars and Environments for Meetings in Social VR: What Styles and Choices Matter to People in Group Creativity Tasks?
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many professional entities shifted toward remote collaboration and video conferencing (VC) tools. Social virtual reality (VR) platforms present an alternative to VC for meetings and collaborative activities. Well-crafted social VR environments could enhance feelings of co-presence and togetherness at meetings, helping reduce the need for carbon-intensive travel to face-to-face meetings. This research contributes to creating meeting tools in VR by exploring the effe…

This is exactly what I was afraid of when #laravel took VC money.
https://hachyderm.io/@j3j5/114784445289560905

Here’s what the “just let tech bros run everything” crowd fundamentally misunderstands about how innovation actually works: It requires exactly the kind of chaotic, unpredictable, open ecosystem that authoritarianism systematically destroys.
Real innovation happens when companies have to compete on merit, not on who can kiss the leader’s ass most effectively. In a functioning democracy with actual rule of law, the best products have the opportunity to win. In an authoritari…

Fascism For First Time Founders
Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump t…

This was really interesting. It's about Topaz AI, which was a denoising/upscaling solution I looked at about nine months ago, and rejected because I wasn't really prepared to make the investment at that stage ($300/yr) https://mstdn.social/@Onmyom/114779996030982643…

#SZ am 19. Juli in einem Bericht über VC, Business Angels und Gründerinnen. "deutschsprachigen Raum zum Alltag. Damit stehen sie nicht allein da. Ein Viertel der abhängig beschäftigten Frauen erleben in ihrem Berufsleben einen Fall sexueller Belästigung im näheren Arbeitsumfeld oder sind selbst betroffen, hat eine aktuelle Umfrage des Instituts für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) ergeben. Anders als Gründerinnen haben sie"
Das glaube ich nicht. "Berufsleben" umfasst die Zeit von der…

#SZ am 19. Juli in einem Bericht über VC, Business Angels und Gründerinnen. "deutschsprachigen Raum zum Alltag. Damit stehen sie nicht allein da. Ein Viertel der abhängig beschäftigten Frauen erleben in ihrem Berufsleben einen Fall sexueller Belästigung im näheren Arbeitsumfeld oder sind selbst betroffen, hat eine aktuelle Umfrage des Instituts für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) ergeben. Anders als Gründerinnen haben sie"
Das glaube ich nicht. "Berufsleben" umfasst die Zeit von der…

@… It’s a company that takes USA VC money and spends it on children in the UK. I can’t get mad about that!

Morgan Stanley: hyperscalers will fund about 50% of the $2.9T in future AI infrastructure through 2028, with debt, PE, VC, and other sources making up the rest (Tabby Kinder/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/efe1e350-62c6-4aa0-a833-f6da01265473

De-AntiFake: Rethinking the Protective Perturbations Against Voice Cloning Attacks
Wei Fan, Kejiang Chen, Chang Liu, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02606

De-AntiFake: Rethinking the Protective Perturbations Against Voice Cloning Attacks
The rapid advancement of speech generation models has heightened privacy and security concerns related to voice cloning (VC). Recent studies have investigated disrupting unauthorized voice cloning by introducing adversarial perturbations. However, determined attackers can mitigate these protective perturbations and successfully execute VC. In this study, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of these protective perturbations against VC under realistic threat models that include perturbatio…

On the pointwise and sup-norm errors for local regression estimators
J\'er\'emy Bettinger, Fran\c{c}ois Portier, Adrien Saumard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07132

On the pointwise and sup-norm errors for local regression estimators
In this paper, we analyze the behavior of various non-parametric local regression estimators, i.e. estimators that are based on local averaging, for estimating a Lipschitz regression function at a fixed point, or in sup-norm. We first prove some deviation bounds for local estimators that can be indexed by a VC class of sets in the covariates space. We then introduce the general concept of shape-regular local maps, corresponding to the situation where the local averaging is done on sets which,…

Extended VC-dimension, and Radon and Tverberg type theorems for unions of convex sets
Noga Alon, Shakhar Smorodinsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17777 https…

Extended VC-dimension, and Radon and Tverberg type theorems for unions of convex sets
We define and study an extension of the notion of the VC-dimension of a hypergraph and apply it to establish a Tverberg type theorem for unions of convex sets. We also prove a new Radon type theorem for unions of convex sets, vastly improving the estimates in an earlier result of Bárány and Kalai.

Perplexity's unsolicited $34.5B bid for Chrome with claimed VC backing is clearly a marketing stunt and strategic signaling amid Google's antitrust uncertainty (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)
https://spyglass.org/i-offer-to-buy-jupiter/

Perplexity's Perplexing and Positively PR Offer to Buy Chrome
Why not offer a quadrillion dollars?

Man I'm still pissed about last week. I keep thinking about it. I'm most definitely not having an open VC this Saturday, and I don't know when I will do that again.

Gen. Timothy Haugh, former Director of the NSA and Commander of US Cyber Command has joined cyber-focused VC firm Ballistic Ventures as Strategic Advisor
https://ballisticventures.com/former-n

Former NSA Director and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command Gen. Timothy D. Haugh joins Ballistic Ventures as Strategic Advisor
Former NSA Director Gen. Haugh joins Ballistic Ventures as Strategic Advisor to shape the future of cyber innovation.

Perplexity offers to acquire Chrome for $34.5B, significantly more than Perplexity's estimated $18B valuation, and says large VC funds agreed to back the deal (Katherine Blunt/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/perplex…

Polymarket raised "double-digit millions" from 1789 Capital, which Donald Trump Jr. joined as a partner in 2024; Trump Jr. will join Polymarket's advisory board (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/26/trump-jr-vc-fund-polymarket

Scoop: Donald Trump Jr.'s VC firm bets on Polymarket
1789 Capital invested double-digit millions of dollars into Polymarket

Exploring Disentangled Neural Speech Codecs from Self-Supervised Representations
Ryo Aihara, Yoshiki Masuyama, Gordon Wichern, Fran\c{c}ois G. Germain, Jonathan Le Roux
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08399

Exploring Disentangled Neural Speech Codecs from Self-Supervised Representations
Neural audio codecs (NACs), which use neural networks to generate compact audio representations, have garnered interest for their applicability to many downstream tasks -- especially quantized codecs due to their compatibility with large language models. However, unlike text, speech conveys not only linguistic content but also rich paralinguistic features. Encoding these elements in an entangled fashion may be suboptimal, as it limits flexibility. For instance, voice conversion (VC) aims to con…

Maxmum Size of a Uniform Family with Bounded VC-dimension
Tianchi Yang, Xingxing Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14334 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14334

Maxmum Size of a Uniform Family with Bounded VC-dimension
In 1984, Frankl and Pach proved that, for positive integers $n$ and $d$, the maximum size of a $(d+1)$-uniform set family $\mathcal{F}$ on an $n$-element set with VC-dimension at most $d$ is at most ${n\choose d}$; and they suspected that ${n\choose d}$ could be replaced by ${n-1\choose d}$, which would generalize the famous Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem and was mentioned by Erdős as Frankl--Pach conjecture. However, Ahlswede and Khachatrian in 1997 constructed $(d+1)$-uniform families on an $n$-elem…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[2/5]:
- An $\tilde{O}$ptimal Differentially Private Learner for Concept Classes with VC Dimension 1
Chao Yan

On the a16z podcast, Bryan Kim said a16z backed Cluely because speed in marketing and building beats crafting a perfect "artisan" product due to AI competition (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/202…

Why a16z VC believes that Cluely, the ‘cheat on everything’ startup, is the new blueprint for AI startups | TechCrunch
Andreessen Horowitz explains why its new investment philosophy prioritizes 'build as you go' approach embodied by Cluely

Might be a while until I have people in a VC on stream after this one. Not even gonna publish the VOD.

Replaced article(s) found for econ.GN. https://arxiv.org/list/econ.GN/new
[1/1]:
- Accelerating Equity: Overcoming the Gender Gap in VC Funding
Chuan Chen, Michele Fioretti, Junnan He, Yanrong Jia

Agora, which offers a white-labeling service to let other companies launch their own, self-branded versions of its stablecoin, AUSD, raised a $50M Series A (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/07/10/exclu…

Exclusive: Stablecoin startup Agora raises $50 million Series A led by crypto VC giant Paradigm
Agora is run by Nick Van Eck, son of the asset management veteran Jan van Eck.

Israeli VC firm Cyberstarts has raised a $300M fund to allow long-time employees at some of its portfolio companies to cash out their vested shares (Kate Clark/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

JIS: A Speech Corpus of Japanese Idol Speakers with Various Speaking Styles
Yuto Kondo, Hirokazu Kameoka, Kou Tanaka, Takuhiro Kaneko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18296

JIS: A Speech Corpus of Japanese Idol Speakers with Various Speaking Styles
We construct Japanese Idol Speech Corpus (JIS) to advance research in speech generation AI, including text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) and voice conversion (VC). JIS will facilitate more rigorous evaluations of speaker similarity in TTS and VC systems since all speakers in JIS belong to a highly specific category: "young female live idols" in Japan, and each speaker is identified by a stage name, enabling researchers to recruit listeners familiar with these idols for listening experiments. With i…

Sources: Reflection AI, which is building AI coding tools, nears a deal to raise ~$1B at a valuation of $4.5B to $5.5B; Nvidia's VC arm would invest $250M (Financial Times)

How VC firm 1789 Capital grew to $1B in assets with Donald Trump Jr. as a partner; its recent deals include investments in xAI, Neuralink, and Perplexity (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/trump-linked-venture-fun…

Stabilizers and NIP arithmetic regularity
G. Conant, C. Terry
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04271 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04271

Stabilizers and NIP arithmetic regularity
We give a new proof of the NIP arithmetic regularity lemma for finite groups (due to the authors and Pillay), which describes the approximate structure of "NIP sets" in finite groups, i.e., subsets whose collection of left translates has bounded VC-dimension. Our new proof avoids sophisticated ingredients from the model theory of NIP formulas (e.g., Borel definability and generic compact domination). The key tool is an elaboration on an elementary lemma due to Alon, Fox, and Zhao concerning the…

In Q2 2025, global VC funding reached $91B, up from $82B in Q2 2024, driven largely by AI investments, but down from $114B in Q1 2025, the highest since Q3 2022 (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/global-funding-climbs-q2-…

Q2 Global Venture Funding Climbs In A Blockbuster Quarter For AI And As Capital Concentrates In Larger...
Global venture funding ticked up year over year in Q2 2025, reaching $91 billion, with a greater concentration of capital into the largest funding rounds compared to a year ago, Crunchbase data shows.

Dealroom: European VC deals are set to rise 3-4% YoY in 2025 to $57B, about the same as in 2023, driven by rising startup valuations in AI, fintech, and defense (Ivan Levingston/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/5cd37cea-87e7-4648-b85b-f77091dd4558

As Trump targets Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, a look at his VC firm Walden International, which has invested $5B in 600 companies, with 100 in China including SMIC (Ian King/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-…

PitchBook: European defense tech startups have raised €2.4B since 2022, including €1.4B in the first 7 months of 2025, up from €30M in 2020 and €150M in 2021 (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/a194942b-93ff-49a0-8aa9-02460055748e

Europe’s defence tech start-ups attract investment surge
Russia’s war in Ukraine and fears over US security relationship drive wave of VC funding

Conan: A Chunkwise Online Network for Zero-Shot Adaptive Voice Conversion
Yu Zhang, Baotong Tian, Zhiyao Duan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14534 https://

Conan: A Chunkwise Online Network for Zero-Shot Adaptive Voice Conversion
Zero-shot online voice conversion (VC) holds significant promise for real-time communications and entertainment. However, current VC models struggle to preserve semantic fidelity under real-time constraints, deliver natural-sounding conversions, and adapt effectively to unseen speaker characteristics. To address these challenges, we introduce Conan, a chunkwise online zero-shot voice conversion model that preserves the content of the source while matching the voice timbre and styles of referenc…

PitchBook: VC exits through public listings, acquisitions, and buyouts reached $67.7B in Q2 2025, up from $38.5B a year ago and the strongest showing since 2021 (Richard Waters/Financial Times)

Source: Balderton Capital, one of Revolut's earliest VC backers, has sold ~$1B in shares through multiple transactions that valued the fintech company at $45B (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/fe6f985b-15b7-48cb-a05d-d5b613d75474

Vocoder-Projected Feature Discriminator
Takuhiro Kaneko, Hirokazu Kameoka, Kou Tanaka, Yuto Kondo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17874 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Vocoder-Projected Feature Discriminator
In text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC), acoustic features, such as mel spectrograms, are typically used as synthesis or conversion targets owing to their compactness and ease of learning. However, because the ultimate goal is to generate high-quality waveforms, employing a vocoder to convert these features into waveforms and applying adversarial training in the time domain is reasonable. Nevertheless, upsampling the waveform introduces significant time and memory overheads. To addres…

PitchBook: in H1, AI startups raised $104.3B in the US, or about 66% of all US VC funding, up from 49% last year; there were 281 VC-backed exits totaling $36B (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/22/ai-startups-raised-1…

AI startups raised $104 billion in first half of year, but exits tell a different story
AI accounted for nearly two-thirds of all fundraising deal value in the first half of 2025, with the bulk of those dollars concentrated in a few companies.

Sources: Meta offers to buy ~49% of Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross's VC fund NFDG; about half of NFDG's first fund of ~$1.1B, raised in 2023, has been invested (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https:/…

FasterVoiceGrad: Faster One-step Diffusion-Based Voice Conversion with Adversarial Diffusion Conversion Distillation
Takuhiro Kaneko, Hirokazu Kameoka, Kou Tanaka, Yuto Kondo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17868

FasterVoiceGrad: Faster One-step Diffusion-Based Voice Conversion with Adversarial Diffusion Conversion Distillation
A diffusion-based voice conversion (VC) model (e.g., VoiceGrad) can achieve high speech quality and speaker similarity; however, its conversion process is slow owing to iterative sampling. FastVoiceGrad overcomes this limitation by distilling VoiceGrad into a one-step diffusion model. However, it still requires a computationally intensive content encoder to disentangle the speaker's identity and content, which slows conversion. Therefore, we propose FasterVoiceGrad, a novel one-step diffusion-b…

VC firms Thrive Capital and General Catalyst are adopting the "roll-up" strategy from the PE playbook, as Khosla Ventures, 8VC, and others explore similar moves (George Hammond/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/74db4959-5980-4ca3-8a46-f058ef4774…

Tech venture firms deploy private equity ‘roll-up’ strategy
Thrive Capital’s backing of Savvy Wealth is part of growing effort to fund groups that go on to buy similar companies

Sources: at least six of China's biggest VC firms are targeting a combined $2B in new USD-denominated funds to allow overseas investment in Chinese startups (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-18/chi…

Stable, which is building a new Layer 1 blockchain for stablecoins, raised a $28M seed co-led by Bitfinex and Hack VC (Yogita Khatri/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/364952/tether-focused-layer-1-stable-raises-28-mi…

CB Insights: Figma's IPO was the largest venture-backed IPO by market capitalization for a US tech company since Rivian's debut in November 2021 (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fig…

Report: Swiss deep tech startups have created over $100B in total enterprise value, with 60% of VC funding in Switzerland from 2019 to 2025 going to deep tech (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/06/26/switzerlands-100b-deeptech-engine-comes-…

Switzerland’s $100B deeptech engine comes Into focus
Today, the launch of The Swiss Deep Tech Report 2025 spotlights how Switzerland has quietly become one of the world’s most advanced and efficient deeptech ecosystems. Curated in close collaboration with Dealroom.co, Startupticker and venture capital firms Founderful and Kickfund, the report is the first of its kind to map the full scope of Switzerland’s deeptech performance - from research institutions and patents to venture activity and late-stage outcomes. With over 1500 Swiss deeptech …

PitchBook: US VC investment in AI startups rose 33% QoQ to $65B in Q1, up 550% from the quarter prior to ChatGPT's 2022 release (Cade Metz/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/technology/ai-spending-openai-amazon-meta.html…

A.I. Frenzy Escalates as OpenAI, Amazon and Meta Supersize Spending
Companies like OpenAI, Amazon and Meta have supersized their spending on artificial intelligence, with no signs of slowing down.

Sources: Index Ventures' nearly $100M investment in Figma was worth $2.17B at the initial IPO price, while Greylock's $50M investment was worth $2.03B (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202…

Legion, a security operations center that uses AI to detect threats within users' computer browsers, emerges from stealth with a $38M seed and Series A (Alexandra Sternlicht/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/07/30/legion-cybersecurity-st…

Cybersecurity upstart Legion emerges from stealth with $38 million from Accel, Coatue, and others
This also marks the U.S. launch of VC firm Picture Capital, who co-led the round.

Q&A with General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja on the VC firm's "AI roll-up" strategy to buy service businesses and inject them with AI, investment bubbles, and more (George Hammond/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/2757870b-dbbf-4603-9fc3-7ccd03ffc…

Centific, an AI "data foundry" that works with businesses to develop, train, and deploy their AI models, raised a $60M Series A led by Granite Asia (Nicholas Gordon/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/asia/2025/06/25/centi…

Singapore VC Granite Asia leads $60 million funding round for AI ‘data foundry’ Centific to fund global expansion
“This funding round isn’t about necessity—it’s about ambition,” CEO Venkat Rangapuram said in a statement.