Venture

Venture

"There are some things that rhyme [with previous technological cycles]," he said. "But in many ways, also, AI is weird...The reason I say that is because, if you look at past technological cycles, there's almost always been one kind of innovation, right? Sometimes people call it the J-curve."

Top talent, ambitious founders, and serious capital are flooding into a mission that matters, delivering products and solutions that will send us to the moon, deploy unimaginably capable unmanned aerial devices, and redefine what's possible in modern warfare. It's an exciting moment-one full of possibility and potential. But here's the problem: while everyone is focused on the moonshots, we're overlooking the foundation.

The latest venture capital, seed, pre-seed, and angel deals for NYC startups for 10/9/2025 featuring funding details for Class 3 Technologies and much more. This page will be updated throughout the day to reflect any new fundings. Class 3 Technologies - $2M CLIMATE TECH Class 3 Technologies, a platform that helps large property owners and institutions protect their organizations from climate-driven disasters with its simulation engine, has raised $2M in funding according to a recent SEC filing.

A new wave of DEX wars has shifted from token incentives to a focus on speed, leverage and sustainable infrastructure. Hyperliquid continues to lead the market with over $300 billion in monthly volume, strong liquidity and rising institutional adoption. Aster's growth is powered by airdrops, Binance-backed credibility and leverage that attract professional traders. Lighter is gaining momentum through its Ethereum layer-2 speed, zero-fee trading model and exclusive points-based yield farming system.

"For brands in the mid- to high-end segment, especially those looking to expand overseas, they need to set their sights on the US market early on and go all in," he said to CNBC. "The US remains the most important market with the greatest spending power and cultural influence," he added. Pop Mart, a Chinese toy manufacturer behind the viral doll Labubu, expanded to the US in 2023, opening its first brick-and-mortar store in New Jersey's American Dream mall.

But there's something very worrying about many of these deals: they're often "circular," as a slew of recent coverage has noted, meaning that AI companies are pouring money into one another, creating an illusion of a robust ecosystem that skeptics worry could quickly come crashing down. And many of the deals tie back to Nvidia, the chipmaker whose hardware is underpinning our age of AI, for which it has become the world's most valuable company.

Led by cofounder and CEO Daniel Lev, Coinflow is a payment service provider, or PSP, going head-to-head against competitors such as Stripe and Worldpay amid the race to remake global transactions with blockchain technology. But Lev is confident that his scrappier startup can challenge the giants. "Stablecoins is a paradigm shift," he told Fortune. "There will be a net new winner who was built natively on this technology."

"I'm envious of the current generation of 20-year-old dropouts,"

Working with your romantic partner isn't just a niche phenomenon; it's a growing trend. A recent study from the National Library of Medicine reveals nearly one in four U.S. small businesses are run by romantic couples. Yet, for all the talk of "power couples" in the startup world, precious little unfiltered insight exists on what it actually takes to share a bed, a budget, and a booming enterprise. For many, the lines between personal and professional don't just blur; they cease to exist.

Managing rental property finances remains one of the most time-consuming challenges in real estate investing, with landlords juggling spreadsheets, consumer payment apps like Venmo and Zelle, generic accounting software, and multiple banking accounts. The 14 million individual real estate investors across the United States-who own half of the country's rental supply-face fragmented workflows that drain hours each week from their businesses.

The $100T world of B2B commerce operates in a "Wild West" where businesses provide goods and services first and chase payment later - often for months. Despite decades of software innovation, the accounts receivable process still depends on millions of finance professionals manually sending emails, tracking down contacts, answering invoice questions, and reconciling incomplete payment data. With 57% of invoices paid late and 77% of AR teams falling behind, this communication and negotiation bottleneck has become one of the most persistent inefficiencies in the modern economy.

Startups are betting big on vibe coding, and their bank statements show it. Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz partnered with Mercury, a fintech that provides banking and payment tools for startups, to analyze transaction data from more than 200,000 customers between June and August. The report, released Thursday, tracked where startups are spending their AI dollars and identified the top 50 AI-native application companies based on spending data.

As an innovative, effective model, VCaaS is designed with an established VC firm which works for a corporation or institutional client to invest on its behalf. By using this model, the corporation or client benefits from startup innovation, access to deals, and active portfolio engagement, while avoiding the cost and trouble of setting up its own VC organization. There are a number of unique ways VCaaS works to benefit corporations and startups. Corporations typically want to become more innovative and this model makes this happen.

But that's part of the story of how Polakof's new AI-for-car-dealerships startup Flai got off the ground last year. Founded by Polakof and his brother Alen (also from HappyRobot) at Y Combinator, along with former Netflix data scientist Juan Alzugary, Flai is one of a number of startups trying to use artificial intelligence to improve the experience of buying, selling, or servicing a car at a dealership.

The solution combines attack surface management with code scanning, identifying forgotten assets and exposed services and uncovering vulnerabilities before they enter production. The company also offers penetration testing and helps organizations prepare for audits. Oneleet says its solution works with existing stacks, allowing businesses to connect cloud providers, repositories, identity platforms, and productivity utilities with its scanners and monitoring tools, for automated security.

Every new token launch starts the same way: liquidity is added, insiders move fast, and retail traders scramble. Without automation, you're already late. Sniping is no longer a niche tactic - it is survival. Banana turned sniping into a repeatable process: Detect new pools and bonding curve migrations in real time. Filter unsafe pools with liquidity guards and anti-rug scans. Execute with MEV protection, slippage rules, and priority routing. Exit with auto-sells, limit orders, or staged DCA.

Another heavy hitter from Wall Street is diving into the crypto treasury craze. On Wednesday, a group of investors announced that it plans to establish a $671 million company dedicated to stockpiling the cryptocurrency Avalanche. Bart Smith, the former head of the crypto arm of the quantitative trading firm Susquehanna, will be CEO. Dubbed Avalanche Treasury Co., the company plans to go public on the Nasdaq in the first quarter of 2026 via a special purpose acquisition vehicle, Mountain Lake Acquisition Corp.

We designed it this way, almost entirely institutionally backed, because, as I have learned, these vehicles are not ideal for most retail investors. They are for investors who can underwrite the volatility, place it as part of a broader structured portfolio and have the capital to support the company over the long run.

The stat that women receive less than 2% of VC funding is often cited-but that figure tells only part of the story.

"Toyota is looking for the next new new thing in mobility, climate, AI, and industrial automation. Its answer is $1.5 billion in new capital that will focus on, and invest in, the lifecycle of startups - from the first seeds of an invention through its growth stage and eventually to mature companies. Toyota made two related announcements Tuesday that provide a snapshot of the company's growing interest in the startup ecosystem."

Brent Ridge , MD, cofounded Beekman 1802 in 2008 and has worked alongside Josh Kilmer-Purcell to lead the company ever since. Prior to his entrepreneurial career, Ridge was Vice President of Healthy Living at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. He also built a distinguished medical career as a specialist in geriatric medicine, completing a fellowship at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and joining the faculty there as an assistant professor.