Venture

Venture

Asset prices are in freefall, key legislation hangs by a thread, and members of Crypto Twitter fret it's their turn to learn what it's like to "have fun staying poor." One company, though, is sitting pretty amid all this. That would be Tether, which last week reported $10 billion in profits for 2025, and has amassed so much gold it's now storing bars of the stuff in Swiss bunkers from World War II.

But after decades of outsourcing tungsten production, the federal government has now begun restricting imports. United States Tungsten founders Stacy Hastie and Randy Waterfield saw this coming. They're reviving what was once America's largest tungsten mine, the Tungsten Queen. It's a site holding an estimated 1 million tons of tungsten with an in-ground value approaching $450 million, the company says. And it says it is already in talks with the U.S. Government.

BlockDAG has drawn major attention in the crypto space for creating one of the largest price gaps in recent presales. The project is offering its final 800 million BDAG tokens at 0.0005, while the confirmed exchange benchmark remains near 0.05. This creates a 100x multiplier opportunity for participants who enter during the few hours remaining before the presale closes. The calculation is simple.

Worried that AI will take your job? Marc Andreessen isn't. The venture capitalist and cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz says the loudest fear around artificial intelligence - that it will wipe out jobs - is aimed at the wrong problem.

The deal was announced during Keir Starmer's official visit to China, with Octopus founder and chief executive Greg Jackson joining the UK business delegation in Beijing. The new venture, called Bitong Energy, will combine PCG Power's position as one of China's fastest-growing investors and solutions providers in the commercial and industrial renewable energy sector with Octopus' proprietary software and expertise in green energy trading and optimisation.

Joby Aviation ( ) leads in developing electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for urban air mobility. The company is advancing toward commercial operations in 2026, with plans to carry its first passengers in Dubai and participate in the FAA's eVTOL Integration Pilot Program to test use cases nationwide. Joby has completed three of five FAA certification stages and expects to begin passenger flights in early 2026, partnering with Delta Air Lines ( ) for routes in New York and Los Angeles.

Expanding your startup into Africa is one of the most ambitious and potentially rewarding moves you can make as a founder. With a rapidly digitalising economy and a booming young population, the continent offers a growth trajectory that is hard to find elsewhere. However, as you begin to scale, you will quickly realise that the financial landscape is not a monolith. Navigating 54 different countries means managing dozens of volatile currencies and banking systems.

While Bitcoin treads water to start 2026, sentiment for other niches in crypto has soured even more-especially DePIN, or decentralized physical infrastructure. Tokens for the decentralized cellphone service Helium and the decentralized mapping network Hivemapper, for example, are near all-time lows. Still, some investors remain bullish on the concept, including the upstart venture firm Escape Velocity, which has raised $61.74 million for a second fund to back founders in DePIN and crypto more broadly.

ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, recently established a separate American entity to run the app's U.S. operations. This restructuring aims to separate U.S. TikTok from its Chinese parent, addressing concerns about data privacy and foreign control. The move came after years of pressure from lawmakers, who feared the Chinese government's potential access to Americans' data. In 2024, Congress enacted a law, mandating that TikTok's U.S. operations be separated from ByteDance.

HighPost Capital, a private equity firm co-founded by Jeff Bezos's half-brother Mark Bezos, has invested £7.3 million (US$9.9 million) in UK-based chain WatchHouse as the company prepares for U.S. expansion. According to initial reporting from The Times of London, the $9.9 million is part of a Series B round worth $14.8 million. HighPost Capital, which is based in the U.S., said it led the round in December 2025.

SpaceX is the most anticipated market debut of the decade, and space ETFs like the , and will be the biggest beneficiaries. It is targeting a mid-to-late 2026 IPO that could value the company at $1.5 trillion. It would nearly double its current $800 billion private valuation and raise over $30 billion in fresh capital. The market is under-appreciating how big the space industry can be, especially if SpaceX's IPO sets a new benchmark for space stocks to be valued against.

Founded in 2021 and based in Boston and Tel Aviv, Memcyco has built an agentless platform that proactively prevents brand impersonation and account takeover (ATO) attacks. Amid an increase in ATO attacks and AI-driven deception such as phishing, Memcyco aims to improve protections by infiltrating the attack timeline as it unfolds. It relies on covert, agentless anti-impersonation technology that provides organizations with visibility into both victim and attack behavior, to stop attacks before credential theft or fraud.

The lack of appetite for UK smaller companies and an "on-again, off-again" approach to tax reform has been a toxic combination for AIM. Hargeave Hale, like most AIM VCTs, hasn't escaped the damage, losing investors 39.5% over five years. The big question for VCT investors though is not what's gone before, but what the future holds. The decline in AIM valuations has left the VCT with an exceptionally well diversified, and by VCT standards remarkably low risk, portfolio.

Twenty years ago, as the top digital and innovation executive for Citi's credit card business, I led the team that spent months building what looked like a brilliant partnership. We'd found a startup with a disruptive payments platform-one that became the forerunner of what has become a new payment type used by millions of consumers today. The deal: strategic investment in exchange for access to the startup's codebase as a sandbox for innovation pilots. No more waiting in the legacy systems queue. Just rapid prototyping with leading-edge developers.

BGF has reported a strong year of investment and exit activity in 2025, underpinned by landmark portfolio realisations, robust trading performance and continued backing for founders across the UK and Ireland. The growth capital investor returned more than £600 million during the year, delivering a money multiple of over 2x, and paid a £75 million dividend to shareholders. The performance was driven by a series of high-profile exits, led by the sale of OrganOx, which generated BGF's largest-ever return.

In an era obsessed with shortcuts, overnight success, and polished social media profiles, adversity is often treated as something to avoid. Something unfortunate. Something that signals failure. That assumption is completely wrong. Adversity is not a flaw in the entrepreneurial journey; it is, in fact, the training ground, the pressure that sharpens one's judgment, accelerates their adaptability and forges the kind of resilience no accelerator, MBA or funding round can manufacture.

Bitcoin cloud mining represents a critical stage in the year 2026. The escalating cost of hardware, surging power expenses and mounting regulatory transparency are transforming the manner in which investors engage in Bitcoin mining. Complex physical infrastructure is no longer managed by them, but it is replaced by cloud mining platforms, which are simple, transparent, and predictable returns. With the increasing competition, platforms whose infrastructure is robust, contracts are clear, and payouts are reliable are the only ones that stand to win.

There was a time when banks and fintechs competed mostly on bells and whistles: smoother apps, faster checkout, appealing rewards. But in the world of public markets and quarterly earnings, functionality gives way to fundamentals.

Weinberg said that he's realized he does his best work when he goes to sleep, dreading just how busy he'll be the next day. "The weeks that I do the best work or feel like I did the best work is every single night before I go to bed, I'm like, 'Ah, shit,'" Weinberg told investor Harry Stebbings during a recent episode of Stebbings' "20VC" podcast. Harvey is one of the hottest names in the closely-watched legal AI startup space.

The S&P 500's performance in 2025 marked yet another blockbuster year after performing well in both 2023 and 2024. Many analysts thought that double-digit gains for a third straight year would be too unlikely, but the market ended up proving them wrong. 2026 is off to a great start for the S&P as well, though a correction is certainly overdue at this stage. But can the market prove bears wrong yet again?

"The traditional world is embracing crypto," Zhou, who leads the world's second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, tells Fortune. "If they don't embrace it, they will be obsolete, especially with crypto wallet adoption growing 20 to 30% each year."

JUST IN: Jeff Bezos advises aspiring Gen Z entrepreneurs to start at real world jobs like McDonalds or Palantir before starting a business,

For more than 60 years, contraception has been almost exclusively a women's responsibility. Today, women have more than 14 modern contraceptive options, while men have just two: condoms and vasectomies. That imbalance has pushed women to shoulder physical side effects, financial burden, medical risks, and the career impact of family planning-costs that have been accepted as the "status quo" for far too long.

Avala Global, launched by former Viking Global star trader Divya Nettimi, had strong performance numbers in 2025. However, the firm has continued to lose staff. Three investment analysts left in the second half of 2025, and Nettimi's fund is set to lose two more senior executives in 2026, including the firm's COO. Avala Global, the $2 billion manager launched by Nettimi in late 2022, gained 22.1% in 2025, according to the firm's year-end letter to clients, which was viewed by Business Insider.