Venture

Venture

Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, both 23, are turning heads with Phia, their AI fashion app that's drawing interest from investors andtrendsetters. Phia, an AI-powered shopping assistant, went live in April and said it has since amassed over 600,000 users. The free app and browser extension compare prices on fashion items across around 40,000 linked sites to help users find deals. It's the pair's first business, and it's making waves with investors.

AI taking entry-level jobs is a 'when,' not an 'if.' But in venture capital, 70% of the decision is reading the founder and team-and that's something AI can't do. That simple breakdown , 70% people, 30% product-flips the usual narrative about finance. For decades, finance was defined by numbers. Analysts lived and died by the spreadsheets. Today, AI can run discounted cash flows, parse a term sheet, and size a market faster than any junior associate.

Not all bridges are made of steel and concrete. In finance, many exist out of sight - invisible rails of code, APIs, and data flows connecting borrowers to lenders. While many in the crowded embedded finance space straddle the line between partner and competitor, Lendflow has staked out a different identity as a neutral bridge in the credit infrastructure stack.

Sinead Colton Grant, the chief investment officer at BNY's wealth division, said the traditional strategy of splitting your portfolio 60% on stocks and 40% on bonds no longer yields the same returns. "What a 60/40 portfolio would have given you in the late 90s in terms of exposure to the broader global economy - that's giving you something a lot more narrow today," she said. "If you look at the changes in market structure over the last 20-plus years, they have brought us to a place where to have full exposure to the economy, you need to have exposure to private assets," she added.

From October 27 to 29, connect with 10,000+ members of the global startup community for three action-packed days of breakthrough ideas, live startup pitches, hands-on learning, and career-making connections. Time is running out. Pass rates will increase soon. Save up to $444 today. Bring a guest and get 60% off their pass, or rally your team and save up to 30% on group passes.

When I was studying computer science at one of India's top universities, I became fascinated by startups. I was captivated by the impact startups had: the idea that you could start a company from scratch that provided outstanding services, technologies, and jobs. Naturally, I then became fascinated by Silicon Valley. That's where the top startups in the world were being formed. My goal was to build a company, and it seemed like Silicon Valley was where I needed to be.

Wonder, which launched in April, said the funding was led by Atomico, alongside existing backers LocalGlobe and Blackbird. Other investors included Adobe Ventures, Upside Ventures - a VC firm launched by the UK YouTube group Sidemen - and Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of the creative AI company Freepik. Also participating were Nigel Morris, a former Dentsu executive, and Erik Huggers, chairman of EveryoneTV and former Vevo CEO. All in, Wonder has raised $15 million.

On Oct. 17, MADE, a verification system designed to safeguard Black creativity, won the inaugural "Keep It 100" Pitch Competition hosted by Elite Media. The announcement was made at The One Club's "Where Are All the Black People" Conference in New York City. Elite Media Founder and CEO Chris Crawford joined a panel of judges for the competition and took center stage to present $50,000 to Tommy Johnson, founder and CEO of MADE, along with $12,500 each to the four other finalists.

Paul Diamond is a strategic investor with over 25 years of experience in building businesses across various sectors. A truly international figure, his ventures have spanned financial services, media, property development, and renewable energy. Paul entered Zimbabwe to rehabilitate gold mining operations with no prior experience, nonetheless achieving short-term success. Alas, political upheaval and legal chaos led to the end of this venture. while his public profile remains low, his impact on the industries he engages with is significant.

The company just announced a $100 million investment round led by The Fund for Export Development in Africa (FEDA), the development arm of Afreximbank. The raise marks Africa's largest-ever EV mobility investment and cements Spiro as the continent's most aggressive electric motorbike company. Spiro says it plans to deploy more than 100,000 electric bikes across Africa by the end of 2025, a 400% year-over-year jump that underscores its ambition to dominate a category long considered too fragmented to scale.

We see little reason for concern around Meta's stock given the company's exceptionally strong operating performance, robust financial health, and continued leadership in digital advertising. Meta's transformation into an AI-driven advertising powerhouse-anchored by Instagram's growing dominance and massive infrastructure investments-underpins our confidence. Overall, while the stock trades at a premium valuation, we view it as fairly priced given its strength and momentum.

Unity Software is starting to see a return to strong growth after a few slow years. While the stock has rebounded sharply off its 52-week low, the shares are still 82% off their previous peak. Unity is one of the leading software providers for video game developers. It's widely used in the mobile gaming market and provides tools for game studios to monetize their content through advertising.

Tesla Full Self-Driving just got an insurance offer from Lemonade Co-founder and President Shai Wininger that might be too good to pass up, as he wants to insure vehicles on FSD for "almost free." Traditionally, Tesla vehicles are slightly more expensive to insure with traditional companies because of higher repair costs that stem from their technology and state-of-the-art structural battery design.

"We cannot f---ing wait to innovate until Americans are dying on the battlefield," Driscoll said in his remarks at the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army in Washington. "We must act now to enable our soldiers. Our window to change is right now, and we have a plan to do it. We will set the pace with innovation, and we will win with silicon and software, and not with our soldiers' blood and bodies," he added.

Hudson, New York, has never been afraid to evolve. Once a thriving port town, it transformed into an artist's enclave, and today it stands as one of the most vibrant cultural destinations in the Hudson Valley. Its mix of art galleries, design studios, record shops, and old brick architecture gives it a soul that's unmistakably authentic. This is a city that honors its past while always reaching forward-making it the perfect home for a new kind of cannabis culture.

What began as one family's desperate attempt to save their dog has become the largest and fastest-growing veterinary group in the Middle East. CEO Mansoor Alshiha transformed personal tragedy into a mission to revolutionize animal care - and built Vet Alliance in the process. It all started with Dutchie, the Alshiha family dog who nearly died after being hit by a car. At the time, Dubai had no dedicated 24-hour emergency care for pets. The family was forced to improvise - and that moment changed the trajectory of veterinary medicine in the UAE.

Venture capitalists are among investors putting $75 million into a US startup's push to install home solar and batteries for an electricity subscription - just as the residential market shrinks. RELATED: The world's largest battery made of bricks turns on in California Daylight Energy raised the funds in a round that included $15 million in equity led by Framework Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Hippeau, M13, Room40 Ventures and EV3, according to a statement.

The frontman of the Black Eyed Peas spent the early 2000s driving his pop-rap group into the cultural zeitgeist and plowing some of those earnings into budding tech startups in the Bay Area. He joined one of Twitter's early funding rounds, and he put money into Tesla before Elon Musk became CEO, the musician told SFGATE in a wide-ranging interview at San Francisco's Dreamforce conference on Wednesday.

Days later, OpenAI struck a similar multibillion-dollar arrangement with AMD. Celebrated by investors, these deals also raised eyebrows. To some observers, they looked eerily like the circular financing arrangements of the late 1990s, when vendors and clients reinforced each other's valuations without generating real value. Bloomberg aptly described the pattern as an "increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions" fueling a trillion-dollar AI boom.

I've never met a billionaire before. And this isn't how I imagined it would go. Don't get me wrong: his brightly lit Manhattan office is pleasant, but not unusual. The pipes are scalding hot. As his assistant leads me through to the meeting room, I'm fairly sure I can spot discarded paper plates from pizza slices poking out of the kitchen bin. In other words, it is similar to most of the city's workplaces.

The trusts' portfolio is well diversified, with dedicated teams covering both AIM listed and private companies. The trusts also have nearly a third of their money invested in Gresham House managed mainstream equity funds - an unusually large allocation to a comparatively low risk asset class for a VCT. That diversity should help to mitigate the volatility you see in more concentrated VCTs, though might also reduce the potential for really outsized returns.

The purchase of U.S.-based Aligned Data Centers from Australian Macquarie Asset Management on Wednesday is the first deal for the AI Infrastructure Partnership formed last year which includes Abu Dhabi-based fund MGX and Elon Musk's startup xAI among its backers. "With this investment in Aligned Data Centers, we further our goal of delivering the infrastructure necessary to power the future of AI," said BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who also serves as the chairman of the AI Infrastructure Partnership.

This 10-year plan commits $1.5 trillion to finance and bolster industries vital to U.S. national economic security, building on an existing $1 trillion pipeline for facilitation and financing, while adding up to $500 billion through heightened focus and resources. A standout element is up to $10 billion in direct equity and venture capital investments targeted at U.S.-based companies in key areas like supply chains, defense, energy resilience, and frontier technologies - including quantum computing, AI, and cybersecurity.

CoinDCX confirmed to TechCrunch that the latest funding is an investment of new capital by Coinbase. The U.S. exchange has been an investor in CoinDCX since 2020 and last backed the Indian exchange in its Series D round in 2022 through its venture capital arm, Coinbase Ventures. Notably, the funding comes just months after CoinDCX suffered a security breach in July that led to the theft of around $44 million worth of assets.

"That creator mindset gave us a strong foundation in storytelling," said Ireland. "We felt like there was this bigger story to be told around beauty and self care and infusing this joy into what would normally be a really mundane part of your routine."

Tim Ferriss has been called the Oprah of Audio. His podcast, the Tim Ferriss Show, surpassed a billion downloads and reshaped the digital media landscape. Yet at the height of his success, Ferriss found himself at a crossroads. With podcasting becoming a crowded competitive space, he wondered whether the medium that had defined his career was still the best vehicle for his curiosity, creativity, and impact. How should a creator who has always thrived by reinventing himself decide what's next?

Serve Robotics (SERV) is a high-risk, high-reward stock that has delivered explosive gains over the past few months. SERV stock is up 181.66% in the past six months. It is trading at $892.2 million, while reporting, at most, $1 million or so in revenue per quarter. The stock may look dizzyingly overvalued, but the market may be overlooking a multi-billion-dollar opportunity here. Serve Robotics makes delivery robots that can deliver food and groceries to people's doors using sidewalks.