Tootfinder

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…

CuspAI, which develops AI foundation models for materials discovery, raised a $100M Series A led by NEA and Temasek, a source says at a ~$520M valuation (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/09/10/cuspai-raises-100-million-in…

AI for chemistry startup CuspAI raises $100 million in new venture capital funding
NEA and Temasek are leading the investment into CuspAI, with Nvidia's NVentures, Samsung, and Hyundai participating.

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

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.

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.

How VCs are changing the way people learn about the tech industry, through a sprawling media ecosystem consisting of podcasts, newsletters, and streaming shows (Anne VanderMey/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Venture Capital’s Podcast Obsession Has Transformed Tech Media
Podcasts hosted by venture capitalists set the narrative in tech, changing the way that insiders—and everyone else—learn about the world of startups.

Yeah, I knew some lovely people who worked at Twitter too. And did you know they once had unfettered API access and anyone could create their own client? Some of us loved that so much we built things that helped legitimise them as an open platform. And then one day they just switched that off.
Legitimacy is gold to venture-capital-funded startups. They need people with it to convince everyday folks that this latest iteration of the same old rug pull is different. Until they’ve grown s…

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)
Attached: 1 image I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky. As much as I trust and respect the Bluesky executives and board members I am acquainted with, I believe the service itself is insufficiently enshittification-resistant to trust: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: h…

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.

Ukrainian tech gets $58.5 million boost from global backers: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/10/ukrainian-tech-gets-million-boost.html

Investors are suddenly pulling out of #AI #BCI?…

Investors Are Suddenly Pulling Out of AI
As billions of dollars flood the AI industry in 2025, investors have begun exiting in droves, and the money isn't coming with them.

Humanoid robot startup Figure raised a $1B Series C led by Parkway Venture Capital at a post-money valuation of $39B, up from $2.6B in February 2024 (Jackie Davalos/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-1…

A profile of 6-year-old Ramp, which has grown to a $22.5B valuation as it expanded beyond corporate cards to tools for expense reporting, bill payment, and more (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/article/ramp-american-express-corp…

Ramp is taking aim at American Express by upending corporate credit cards. Can the $22.5 billion startup live up to the hype?
With $1 billion in revenue, Ramp has grown at hyperspeed amid the AI boom and corner-office financial anxiety.

Sam Altman: "What if an inhuman AI took control of the world by manipulating people's behavior but its core directive was to make paper clips and it burned down the planet to do that? This is so scary and it's a real thing you should be worried about!"
Governments: "Oh boy that's scary we'll make special rules to invest in your company so you can save us from this frightening possibility. Will we restrict or discourage AI use/development? Haha no that would be foolish!"
Me: "What if an inhuman handful of corporate charters took control of the world by manipulating human behavior but their core directive was to maximize venture capital and they burned down the planet to do that? ..."
Governments (sponsored by said corporations): "Send in the SWAT teams now, this idea is dangerous!"

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…

Austin-based Hello Patient, whose AI agents let healthcare organizations handle patient communications, raised a $22.5M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners (Marissa Plescia/MedCity News)
https://medcitynews.com/2025/09/hello-patient-conversational-ai/

Hello Patient Secures $22.5M for Conversational AI Solution
Hello Patient's Series A round was led by Scale Venture Partners and included participation from 8VC, Bling Capital, Max Ventures, Remus Capital and FirstLook Partners.

Online platforms offering astrological advice are thriving in India, with the leading app Astrotalk claiming about 84% of its 70M users are under the age of 35 (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-0…

Star Charts and Stock Tips: Venture Capital Bets on Financial Astrology
An age-old belief in astrology has snowballed into a $7 billion industry as a younger generation seeks celestial guidance.

Sources: HongShan, formerly Sequoia China, has invested only a quarter of the ~$9B it raised in 2022 and has been increasingly looking beyond China for deals (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/neil-she…

Neil Shen’s HongShan Is Slow to Deploy Its $9 Billion Capital, Looks for Deals Outside China
When venture capital giant Sequoia decided to carve off Sequoia China two years ago in response to growing tensions between the U.S. and China, the newly independent China firm was expected to continue pouring its huge funds into Chinese startups. Renamed HongShan (Mandarin for Sequoia), the ...

Yes Hitler, would be a reason to be cautious, Microsoft. 🤦‍♂️
Maybe even ask yourself a deep question about whether this technology is suitable at all for the general public.
But no..
That venture capital says go go go!
#hitler #fascism #socialresponsibility #technology #AI #Grok #Microsoft
https://mastodon.social/@verge/114988351652802386

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.

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 …

Savvy Wealth, a digital wealth management service for financial advisors, raised a $72M Series B led by Industry Ventures, taking its total funding to $100M (Davis Janowski/Wealth Management)
https://www.wealthmanagement.com/ria-news/

Savvy Wealth Raises $72M, Adds Mark Casady to Board of Directors
Savvy Wealth, a technology platform provider to RIAs, announced the closing of a $72 million Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Industry Ventures.

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

New company on #BayFarm island in #EastBay says they have created the “#NextGeneration” of #batteries that are safer than explosion prone

Source: OpenAI raised $8.3B at a $300B valuation, months ahead of schedule, as part of plans to raise $40B this year; 5M business users pay for ChatGPT (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/business/dealbook/openai-ai-mega-funding-deal.html…

OpenAI Raises Another Funding Deal, From Dragoneer, Blackstone and More
The venture capital round values the ChatGPT maker at $300 billion, and underscores the fierceness of the A.I. money race.

How VCs are changing the way people learn about the tech industry, through a sprawling media ecosystem consisting of podcasts, newsletters, and streaming shows (Anne VanderMey/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Lumana, which integrates vision-language models and agentic AI into its video surveillance system, raised a $40M Series A led by Wing Venture Capital (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/07/29/lumana-gets-40m-build-intel…

Lumana gets $40M to build more intelligent video surveillance systems - SiliconANGLE
Lumana gets $40M to build more intelligent video surveillance systems - SiliconANGLE

Turkey-based Good Job Games, which develops Match-3 games like the popular Match Villains, raised a $60M Series A, after raising a $23M seed six months ago (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/07/31/good-job-games-secures-60m-seri…

Good Job Games secures $60M Series A to build the future of Match-3 gaming
Turkish mobile games dev company Good Job Games has raised a $60 million Series A round, co-led by Menlo Ventures and Anthos Capital, with additional participation by Bessemer Venture Partners.  The round brings the total investment amount to date to $83 million, after a seed round of $23 million just six months ago. Good Job Games aims to build a generational entertainment brand through timeless, socially-driven games. An example is its popular Match Villains, a game designed to be endless…

Dutch web design automation startup Framer raised $100M led by Meritech and Atomico with Accel participation at a $2B valuation, after raising $27M in 2023 (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Tel Aviv-based Seemplicity, whose AI-based tech automates enterprise vulnerability and exposure management, raised a $50M Series B led by Sienna Venture Capital (Rick Whiting/CRN)
https://www.crn.com/news/software/2025/remediation-o…

Sources: Elad Gil is raising a fund of ~$1.5B that could grow to $2B based on investor interest, making it one of the largest fundraising hauls for a solo GP (Natasha Mascarenhas/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/el…

Elad Gil Plots $1.5 Billion Fund, Stretching Definition of a Solo GP
Venture capital firms are under pressure to make rapid-fire decisions about big checks in the frenzied world of artificial intelligence investing, straining partnerships that need a unified front. It helps sometimes to have just one decision-maker.That makes a case for Elad Gil, a prolific ...