Venture

Venture

EV startup Lucid is cutting 12% of US employees, according to an email interim CEO Marc Winterhoff sent to unaffected employees on Friday, which Business Insider has seen. Winterhoff said the cuts would exclude hourly production employees in manufacturing, logistics, and quality. "This difficult but necessary decision was made to improve organisational effectiveness and optimize our resources as we continue on our path toward profitability," he wrote.

According to an SEC filing dated February 17, 2026, Solel Partners LP purchased an additional 526,300 shares of Braze in the fourth quarter. The estimated transaction value was $15.59 million, calculated using the average closing price during the quarter. The fund ended the period with 1,272,200 shares, bringing the total position value to $43.62 million at quarter-end. The net position change, including price movement, was $22.41 million.

Expanding our ABF platform beyond residential and commercial real estate is a natural and important next step for Saluda Grade, Ryan Craft, the company's founder and CEO, said in a statement. Patrick has a strong track record of building institutional investment platforms across multiple sectors. His experience and leadership will help us broaden our reach while maintaining the same disciplined underwriting and structuring approach that has been central to our team and success so far.

AI native,

I resigned from Microsoft in September 2025. Less than a month later, I lost almost everything I owned. During my move from New York City to my hometown of Toronto, the trailer transporting my belongings was stolen in the middle of the night. The trailer was eventually recovered, but none of my belongings were. While resigning from Microsoft set me down this unfortunate path, I believe leaving Big Tech was the right move for me.

Code Metal, a Boston-based startup that uses AI to write code and translate it into other programming languages, just closed a $125 million Series B funding round from new and existing investors. The news comes just a few months after the startup raised $36 million in series A financing led by Accel. Code Metal is part of a new wave of startups aiming to modernize the tech industry by using AI to generate code and translate it across programming languages.

Voltage, a provider of Bitcoin infrastructure, today launched Voltage Credit, a revolving line of credit designed to enable businesses to send payments over Bitcoin rails with instant settlement and settle entirely in U.S. dollars, according to a note shared with Bitcoin Magazine. Voltage Credit allows enterprises to draw from a credit line to send payments that clear in seconds, bypassing the delays associated with traditional settlement systems.

Laplanche, who was also the co-founder of LendingClub before leading Upgrade to a $7.3 billion valuation, was unsparing in a recent interview with Fortune. The fintech sector itself, he claimed, "would not even exist if, frankly, banks had done a better job really delighting their customers with product innovation that moves the needle," Laplanche said, arguing that the industry's reliance on "nickel and dime" fees and "unpredictable" costs created the very void that he's spent his whole career filling.

The YouTuber turned social media mogul and entrepreneur turned heads in 2022 when he paid $5.3 million for a single Pokémon card-an ultra-rare Pikachu Illustrator-making it the most expensive ever sold at a private sale. But Paul didn't stash it away in a vault. He wore the card in a diamond-encrusted chain to major events, including into the WWE wrestling ring, turning a niche collectible into a piece of performance art-and personal branding. On Sunday night, the gamble paid off.

Every purchase you make as an entrepreneur is an investment decision, whether it's for a one-time $500 software subscription or a $500,000 equipment lease. What differentiates the successful founders from the struggling ones is how they approach each decision. Casual spenders leak margins over time, while founders who spend consciously build sustainable, profitable businesses. The key is learning to frame everyday spending through an investor's lens.

This is becoming a familiar pattern. Brands explode onto social media with fairy-tale success. Then the clock strikes midnight, and they are gone. I run Tony Roma's, a 54-year-old brand ranked No. 2 in Newsweek's Excellence Index, after Starbucks. Our unit count is not what it was in the 1980s, but we continue to serve customers profitably across five continents. Here's the tension: Social media has genuinely democratized entrepreneurship.

On August 20, 2011, legendary venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published a blog post-and an accompanying essay in The Wall Street Journal-that would become the sacred texts of the Silicon Valley bull run. Titled "Why Software Is Eating The World," he argued that the global economy was undergoing a "dramatic and broad technological and economic shift" and that software companies were poised to take over large swathes of the industry.

Business growth is valuable, but too often entrepreneurs treat it as a final destination. In reality, expansion is just one part of a long-term success plan, unfolding through many smaller milestones along the journey of building a business. Here are three ways you can expertly use expansion to build on success, along with examples of companies that have handled expansion as a positive part of the success process.

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, the need for innovation and entrepreneurial spirit has never been more critical. As we prepare the next generation of business leaders, fostering entrepreneurial passion among students is essential. Entrepreneurial passion not only drives individuals to pursue new ventures but also enhances their resilience and creativity, vital traits for success in any field. This article explores effective strategies for educators and institutions to cultivate entrepreneurial passion in business students, drawing insights from recent research on the subject.

For Missouri-based community bank OMB Bank, finding the right fintech partner used to be a slow, manual process. Executive Vice President and Chief of Staff Jessica Sims recalls working from static PDFs of the bank's preferences, followed by endless back-and-forth emails whenever a fintech expressed interest. The process worked, but painfully slowly, and promising opportunities often slipped through the cracks.

Integrating security and asset data from over 200 connectors, the platform unifies business context and AI-based intelligence into a single pane, offering visibility and enabling risk prioritization and reduction. Nucleus relies on automation to enhance customers' vulnerability management programs. It correlates flaws with real-world threat data from multiple sources, normalizes it, maps assets to specific teams, and uses workflows for faster remediation. According to Nucleus, its vendor-agnostic approach covers exposure across tools, users, environments, and business units, unifies context, and enables coordinated action.

Investors have committed new capital to fintech company MyCredit, backing its strategy of scaling technology-driven credit platforms rather than a conventional lending operation. The investment reflects a broader shift in fintech funding toward platforms where software, data infrastructure and AI form the primary drivers of innovation, growth, enabling companies to expand across markets without proportional increases in staffing or operational complexity.