Venture
fromAlleyWatch
4 hours agoThe Weekly Notable Startup Funding Report: 4/20/26
Notable startup funding activity in the US totaled $1.8B for the week ending 4/18/26, featuring 25 significant deals.
For most companies, there's roughly a 12-month period where the business is at its peak value, and then it crashes out. The companies that capture generational returns are often the ones where someone spies that moment instead of assuming the good times will get even better.
Launching a fund used to be a real test of endurance, with timelines often stretching across many months. The process demanded patience that many ambitious founders found difficult to sustain.
"This is a system shock," says Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group. "You have a material energy supply disruption and a structural shift toward fragmentation."
Goldman Sachs' Chief Equity Strategist Peter Oppenheimer has called the recent sell-off in U.S. tech stocks a rare 'buying opportunity,' suggesting that the current market conditions may favor investment in this sector.
At 7:46 a.m. Monday, Doornbos had posted on X that Iranian officials were still considering a U.S. proposal to end the war, 'centering around uranium enrichment.'
Cursor is nearing a funding round of at least $2 billion, with returning investors Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz expected to lead the financing at a $50 billion valuation. The deal terms are not final and may still change.
The Invesco DB Commodity Index Tracking Fund (NYSEARCA:DBC) is up 42% over the past year, and nearly 29% year-to-date. These gains reflect a war that has scrambled global commodity supply chains from crude oil to wheat to fertilizer.
For decades, the United States stock market has been a juggernaut on the international stage. The US dollar has been - and still is - the de facto currency globally. But for how much longer that will be the case is now looking uncertain. As the New York Times reports, investors are starting to look elsewhere as the Trump administration continues to threaten the independence of its central bank, start a trade war with Europe, and implement self-conflicting monetary policies.
Dollar weakness matters enormously for emerging market equities because most of these companies earn revenues in local currencies. When the dollar softens, those earnings translate into more dollars for U.S.-based investors, giving the portfolio a currency tailwind on top of any underlying business performance.