Venture

Venture

Blockspace Media has acquired Bitcoin Layers, an independent data platform tracking metrics across Bitcoin's layer-2 and scaling ecosystem, as the company expands beyond journalism into data and intelligence products. The acquisition brings Bitcoin Layers' research and on-chain analytics directly into Blockspace's content and product suite, including a forthcoming data dashboard designed to track adoption, total value locked (TVL), and activity across Bitcoin L2s and other scaling platforms, the company wrote to Bitcoin Magazine.

It was the most chaotic two weeks of my life," Sumer told Business Insider, adding that at one point, she told her then-fiancé that wedding planning would be left to him, and she'd just show up to get married.

Aikido's core proposition is rooted in the conviction that traditional application security tools have not kept pace with the rapid evolution of software development. Modern engineering teams ship code more frequently, and the widespread adoption of AI tools for coding has heightened both velocity and risk. Legacy scanners and point solutions can generate noise and distract developers, rather than offering actionable insights at the right moment.

The company offers a platform that helps mobile app developers market their apps and was formed in 2021 through a merger of Liftoff and Vungle. Blackstone acquired the majority of its shares at the time and the finance giant also appointed new leadership, meaning it is no longer a founder-run company. After the offering, Blackstone will remain the majority shareholder, according to the S-1 filing.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has written his biggest political check in years, donating $3 million to a California business group leading the fight against a proposed billionaire wealth tax. The move positions the Palantir co-founder as one of the earliest and most prominent financiers of an emerging campaign to stop the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act before it reaches voters. Thiel made the $3 million contribution on December 29 to the California Business Roundtable,

'It's very fragmented-there are so many blockchains, there are so many stablecoins, there are so many payment methods,' Bengani said. 'It's ripe for one company to make it easier, and that's what we want to do.' When companies and individuals connect to the Meld network, they can buy or settle stablecoins, Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other type of digital asset around the world.

Nick Fleisher learned that the hard way at McKinsey, where he helped elite law firms roll out tech tools, often with little enthusiasm from the lawyers expected to use them. "It was like pulling teeth," Fleisher said. That work led Fleisher to leave McKinsey and start a company in August. His startup, Sandstone, is aimed squarely at in-house legal teams instead of law firms, and Sequoia Capital is backing the idea.

You could think of us a lot like a climate tech fund, but instead of thinking about, where can we emit less carbon dioxide or avoid emissions in the first place, we're doing the same thing for nature loss,

The government urgently needs to reconsider these changes. Our analysis shows that start-up and scale-up businesses could face a funding shortfall of well over £500 million, as a direct result of changes to VCT tax relief announced in the Budget. If the aim, as was claimed in the Budget, is to make Britain the best place to start and scale a business, this misguided policy risks achieving the opposite.

The venture capital industry fought for years to persuade state lawmakers to impose strict restrictions on noncompete agreements. The VC crowd eventually succeeded in 2018, with the Massachusetts Legislature adopting a one-year limit on all noncompetes - contracts that prevent employees from working for a rival for a certain period of time, often in a specific region. And they were outlawedoutright for lower-paid hourly workers.

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. At the intersection of traditional banking and modern fintech lies a simple but growing question: what actually drives sustainable value for banks today? Is it the buzz‑worthy growth of payment volumes and new revenue streams - or the old‑school strength of deposit balances and net interest income?

In the last several weeks of 2025 alone, nuclear startups raised $1.1 billion, largely on investor optimism that smaller nuclear reactors will succeed where the broader industry has recently stumbled. Traditional nuclear reactors are massive pieces of infrastructure. The newest reactors built in the U.S. - Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia - contain tens of thousands of tons of concrete, are powered by fuel assemblies 14 feet tall, and generate over 1 gigawatt of electricity each.

The 29-year-old told Business Insider that he waited over an hour on the phone to book an appointment with an orthopedist, and then two weeks for insurance to approve his MRI scheduling. Frustrated with the pace of the healthcare system, Seelamsetty cofounded the AI agents startup Tivara with Aumesh Misra. The company promises to answer patient phone calls, handle scheduling and refills - and cut down the hours of grunt work that comes with a medical visit.

XRPL tokenization expanded by more than 2,200% , driven by regulatory clarity following the August 2025 SEC resolution and institutional infrastructure through partnerships like Archax and Ripple's Hidden Road acquisition. Banks and asset managers tested tokenized bonds, funds, and stablecoin settlement on XRPL. The network now hosts roughly $500 million in tokenized assets as of early 2026, while Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin reached $1.3 billion across multiple chains.

My clearest memory from middle school is pacing in my bedroom, phone in hand, repeating the word 'wake' again and again. I was testing a voice app I had written. If I said the phrase just right, the app would respond. If not, I would tweak the code and try again. I had just learned to code from YouTube. My apps were getting downloads, and I was addicted. I would run home from school, drop my backpack, and open the reviews before starting my homework. It was the first time I saw that code written alone in my bedroom could reach people I would never meet.

The federal government signaled a new direction in federal funding this week when it announced plans to put as much as $150 million into a private semiconductor startup. Instead of a grant or a loan, the government would take an equity stake. It's a meaningful departure from how federal funding has traditionally operated. For years, federal R&D support came structured as non-dilutive grants and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) awards that didn't require equity concessions.

He joins Blend after roles at Alkami Technology and ACI Worldwide, where he built sales teams and grew customer bases across community banks, credit unions and regional institutions. Blend has built a powerful platform, strong relationships with key customers, and has good momentum in the market, Thomson said in a statement. Financial institutions are looking for partners who can help them compete digitally while maintaining the relationships that define their brands.

Mark Cuban believes businesses need to embrace AI to succeed, but he says those that use it incorrectly are doomed to failure. "There's going to be two types of companies: those who are great at AI, and everybody else," the celebrity billionaire of "Shark Tank" fame said. "And the 'everybody else' is going to fail because AI is such a transformative tool."

There is an echoing melancholy to this era, as we watch the end of Silicon Valley's hypergrowth era, the horrifying result of 15+ years of steering the tech industry away from solving actual problems in pursuit of eternal growth. Everything is more expensive, and every tech product has gotten worse, all so that every company can "do AI,"

There are plenty of dividend stocks out there for equity investors looking to maximize their overall total portfolio returns. Dividends can play a significant role in generating long-term returns, with around one-third of the cumulative returns of the stock market coming from dividends over the long-term. Now, this current market is dominated by high-growth stocks, many of which don't provide meaningful yields (if there are dividends paid out, many top tech companies have a yield well less than 1%).

When you look at dividend yields in the 2-4% range, you might think they are easy to dismiss as not being worth your time. For some investors, a thousand dollars invested at that rate feels like you're only earning pocket change, but this is a point most investors miss as modest yields are not something to worry about, a lack of consistency is.

This is yet another big bet on AI, as the whole industry is pitching an Underpants Gnomes-style business plan where they build a bunch of data centers far outpacing the present-day demand for AI, have no fucking idea what to do next, then claim we will enter an age of unprecedented prosperity. AI is definitely here to stay to some degree, and OpenAI advertising themselves this week as too big to fail is one example of how we're stuck with it,

Last December, I was standing in front of a wall of bottles, paralyzed. Not because I don't like wine. I do. I was paralyzed because the entire experience was designed to make me feel small. The sommelier energy, the gatekeeping language, the implied message that if I couldn't name the terroir, I didn't deserve a good bottle. So I did what I always did: grabbed the same safe choice, went home, and told myself I'd "branch out next time."

We're not going to be using iPhones in 10 years,