Venture

Venture

while 90% of policies are sold through financial advisors, these professionals navigate a fragmented ecosystem of over 10 disconnected legacy tools, each handling separate aspects of quoting, underwriting, and case management. This operational complexity translates into a six-month average policy cycle time for permanent life insurance, creating friction at every stage of the client journey and limiting advisors' capacity to serve their clients effectively. Modern Life addresses this systemic inefficiency by consolidating the entire life insurance workflow into a single AI-powered platform that enables advisors to instantly quote across 30+ carriers, receive underwriting decisions in minutes rather than weeks through its Express Decision capability.

"It's no longer enough to show how far we've come. It's critical, too, that we use those insights to point the way forward," said the report's author, Tom Wehmeier, who is also a partner at Atomico and the firm's head of intelligence. This includes four policy recommendations with fairly self-explanatory names: Fix the friction, Fund the future, Empower talent, and Champion risk.

When Val Vavilov co-founded his Bitcoin mining company, Bitfury, in 2011, the original cryptocurrency was worth less than $30, a sliver of its roughly $91,000 price today. Since then, Bitfury's mining ventures spun off into two Nasdaq listed companies whose combined worth tops $9 billion, while also launching two companies that offer AI infrastructure. Bitfury's next step? It wants to use its money to invest in the next crop of ethical tech innovators.

Produced by The Legaltech Fund, the first venture capital firm devoted exclusively to legal tech, it is a conference I previously dubbed the Davos of legal tech for the fact that it brings together leaders from across disciplines to engage in open and unfettered dialogue about the state and future of legal innovation. As someone who has attended all four summits, I've had a front-row seat to its evolution.

The latest venture capital, seed, pre-seed, and angel deals for NYC startups for 11/17/2025 featuring funding details for Keychain, Ramp, and much more. This page will be updated throughout the day to reflect any new fundings. Ramp, the financial operations platform, has raised $300M in Venture funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Founded by Eric Glyman, Gene Lee, and Karim Atiyeh in 2019, Ramp has now raised a total of $2.1B in reported equity funding.

Peter Thiel's hedge fund Thiel Macro LLC sold off its holdings in Nvidia Corp. during the third quarter, marking another retreat from the leading provider of artificial-intelligence chips. The fund offloaded its entire position of 537,742 shares in the world's premier AI chipmaker, which would have been worth about $100 million based on the closing price from Sept. 30. The Thiel Macro fund now counts Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and a reduced stake in Tesla Inc. as its main bets, according to a 13F filing.

(( AlphabetNASDAQ:GOOG)( NASDAQ:GOOGL) dominates the search engine market with a greater than 90% share, powering billions of daily queries through Google Search. Yet its growth extends beyond that core business. Google Cloud has captured a rising slice of the cloud computing sector, trailing only NASDAQ:AMZN) and AmazonNASDAQ:MSFT), while investments in artificial intelligence position it as a leader in machine learning and generative AI technologies like Gemini.

In the late 2010s, at the height of the direct-to-consumer boom, Framebridge founder Susan Tynan was green with envy. Many other venture-backed startups from the era-like Casper, Away, and Glossier -were growing much faster than her custom framing business. While these other buzzy brands focused on acquiring customers and growing revenue, Tynan was using her $81 million in venture funding to tackle more arduous operational issues, like building factories and hiring hundreds of craftspeople to make frames by hand.

"Skims speaks to the power of a consumer product that resonates with a lot of people," said Shamin Walsh, BAM Ventures managing director, via email. "This is entirely different from the old direct-to-consumer days where they're buying revenue. Skims has clearly cracked a formula. If they are profitable and producing that much revenue, then it actually seems like a reasonable multiple based on the strength of the brand and the way they're expanding."

Volkswagen AG and Rivian Automotive Inc. have ambitions of selling the electric vehicle technology they're developing together to other carmakers in the future. The two companies' joint venture, known as RV Tech, said it has made solid progress on delivering the EV electrical and software platform that Volkswagen needs to compete with Tesla and Chinese rivals. The JV is focused on delivering models for Rivian and VW but is keeping communication open with third parties about the scalability of its platforms.

The product is called "Chad: the Brainrot IDE." It is yet another vibe coding integrated development environment - an IDE is the software developers use to code - but with a twist. While waiting for the AI coding tool to finish its task, the developer can mess around with their favorite brainrot activities, within a window of the IDE. Or, as the company's website advertises: "Gamble while you code. Watch TikToks.

"I've poured my heart and soul into building this company,"

Kardashian's ventures, including her cosmetics brand SKKN, have attracted young shoppers and benefited from her vast social media following. Similarly, other celebrity-backed brands have also drawn venture capital investment, as firms bet on the marketing power and built-in audiences of high-profile founders to drive consumer demand. Elf Beauty agreed to buy Hailey Bieber's makeup and skincare brand, Rhode, for about $1bn earlier this year, while Rihanna-backed Fenty Beauty and Khloe Kardashian's Good American have also drawn venture capital funding.

One of my favorite worst pieces of business advice was given to me by Paul Graham,

She still had room in her budget for weekends filled with activities.JR was more worried about now. Rather than putting money into a 401(k) he wouldn't touch for decades, he enjoyed his $75,000 salary. Five years later, JR began to build his nest egg. He opted for the minimum contribution rate to qualify for the company match, contributing 6% with a 3% match.

Masayoshi Son isn't known for half measures. The SoftBank founder's career has been studded with brow-raising bets, each one seemingly more outrageous than the last. His latest move is to cash out his entire $5.8 billion NVIDIA stake to go all-in on AI, and while it surprised the business world on Tuesday, it maybe should not. At this point, it's almost more surprising when the 68-year-old Son doesn't push his chips to the center of the table.

Many investors in 2025 require dependable passive income, especially those nearing retirement, and one effective way to achieve this is to invest in exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Unlike open-end mutual funds, ETFs trade on major exchanges like stocks. They own financial assets, including stocks, bonds, currencies, debt, futures contracts, and commodities such as gold bars.

Gamma, a startup that creates AI-generated presentations, websites, and social media posts, announced on Monday a $68 million Series B round at a $2.1 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. Co-founder and CEO Grant Lee posted on X that the company has profitably hit $100 million in ARR, with 70 million users. The startup hit $50 million profitably in its first two years, Lee previously posted. Gamma last raised a $12 million Series A round led by Accel in 2024.

African entrepreneurs can build world-class businesses, but investors hesitate because they cannot see how or when they will get their money back. Initial public offerings (IPOs) remain extremely rare, and most exits take the form of trade sales often unpredictable and slow to clear. Our stock exchanges offer little comfort either with liquidity outside the largest firms still limited. Start-ups here can remain start-ups for decades with no clear path to maturity.

With the company posting four straight years of losses (a cumulative $245 million), it's clear why it needed to raise cash, she writes in her Substack.

The event was held in a private room behind a second-floor restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown San Francisco, just blocks away from the offices of many new AI startups. Lessin said in his introduction that technology doesn't just adopt itself - one often has to "push it into the world." And when you have a new and disruptive product that not everyone will welcome, charisma is the secret ingredient that opens doors.

The most potent form of social today is basically in group chats, which is obviously not new technology, but what it's highlighting is the fact that that's a trusted group of people who you actually know, who are verifiably human

Liquid - $7.6M Seed Liquid, a perp DEX aggregator that routes and executes futures trades across multiple exchanges, has raised $7.6M in Seed funding led by Paradigm. Founded by Franklyn Wang in 2025, Liquid has now raised a total of $7.6M in reported equity funding. AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders.

That was the case with crypto payments firm Mesh, which announced an $82 million Series B this year that included a $20 million payout to its founder. Ditto with the blockchain social network firm Farcaster, which raised an eye-popping $150 million Series A, but saw its CEO carve off at least $15 million of that. You can read about other examples here.

"We've glorified resilience as this virtue," he told me. "Bounce back, return to normal, weather the storm. But the literal definition of resilience is the ability of a system to return to its original baseline after being disturbed."