#venture-capital

#venture-capital

This Builder Stage session brings together Katie Stanton ( Moxxie Ventures), Thomas Krane ( Insight Partners), and Sangeen Zeb ( GV). They've seen thousands of decks, led major rounds, and helped steer startups from scrappy beginnings to breakout scale. You'll hear what actually moves a pitch from "maybe" to "we're in," including the metrics that matter, how to tell your growth story, and what causes investors to walk away.

In 2021, global femtech investment peaked at before plunging to just €1.1bn the next year, amid a tech funding apocalypse and capital making a headlong dash towards AI. Several factors contributed to this decline - broader market conditions, withering investor risk appetite, and natural sector maturation. But the surge in AI funding coinciding with a plunge in femtech investment highlights serious issues with capital allocation.

Clayton Jacobs, the CEO of influencer marketing company CreatorDB, thinks there can be a "healthy middle class" of content creators. Jacobs told Business Insider that he usually recommends CreatorDB's clients go with a "pool of medium-sized creators" that "often will perform better than a single large creator if they're the same price." Using data analytics and AI, CreatorDB wants to prove that to brands.

Arch - $52M Series B Arch, a private market investment tracking platform, has raised $52M in Series B funding led by Oak HC/FT. Founded by Jason Trigg, Joel Stein, and Ryan Eisenman in 2018, Arch has now raised a total of $77.5M in reported equity funding. GreenLite - $49.5M Series B CONSTRUCTION TECH GreenLite, a platform that streamlines the permitting process for construction, has raised $49.5M in Series B funding led by Insight Partners. Founded by Benjamin Allen and James Gallagher in 2022, GreenLite has now raised a total of $86M in reported equity funding.

"No question: we're early," said Krane. "Third pitch, top of the second inning, driving at Formula One speeds." He added: "This is a pitch clock that we've never seen before. This game is moving incredibly quickly, for better and for worse."

"This is like a dream job, where I get to help early stage companies make noise, but then I also get to help the late-stage companies prepare for IPOs," Machiz says.

the very best of DARPA technology gets scaled and into the market and is made available to the warfighter.

AlixLabs has developed technology to shrink semiconductors like transistors and memory. They are building a pilot facility in Lund to handle wafers for global players like Intel and Taiwan's UMC. But their SEK 165M round has proven hard to fill in Europe. "Interest in Asia is much greater," says CEO Jonas Sundqvist, who keeps the round open for overseas investors. A few blocks away, NordAmps is raising SEK 65M for nanowire transistors that boost analog circuits with higher speed and lower energy use.

When Arianna Simpson was 22 years old, she plowed her savings into Bitcoin. She had left her college job and traveled with a friend through Zimbabwe, witnessing firsthand the consequences of hyperinflation. When she returned, she became enamored with the idea of crypto as a potential salve. Aside from investing the contents of her bank account, Simpson started a blockchain lunch meetup at her next post, Facebook. She wrote a blog post on multisignature wallets that landed her a job at the infrastructure startup BitGo,

The AI news cycle of the summer captured themes including the challenge of starting a career, the importance of technology in the China/U.S. trade war, and mounting anxiety about the impact of the technology. But in terms of finance and investing, Deutsche Bank sees markets "on edge" and hoping for a soft landing amid bubble fears. In part, it blames tech CEOs for egging on the market with overpromises, leading to inflated hopes and dreams, many spurred on by tech leaders' overpromises.

I got to meet fruit professors who are the best in the world at what they do,

I always tell founders they should have a microscope in one eye and a telescope in the other. What I mean by that is get the stuff done you need, but also zoom out. So the first thing that I do when I'm sipping my coffee is write down a few tactical things I need to make sure I get done, and then one or two bigger things that are top of mind.

Called the India Deep Tech Investment Alliance, the group brings together Celesta Capital, Accel, Blume Ventures, Gaja Capital, Ideaspring Capital, Premji Invest, Tenacity Ventures, and Venture Catalysts, the firms said in a joint statement on Tuesday. The launch follows the Indian government's approval of a ₹1 trillion (approximately $11 billion) Research, Development, and Innovation (RDI) scheme, announced in the national budget earlier this year to boost deep tech R&D.

We are literally as a species sitting on the precipice of space becoming part of our day-to-day lives,

In 2020, the murder of George Floyd and the growing Black Lives Matter movement put a spotlight on diversity and equity issues-including in the business world. Suddenly investors were clamoring to support Black entrepreneurs, a way of course correcting a history of underinvestment and unfair barriers. In the year after Floyd's murder, a given investor was 36% more likely to invest in a Black-founded startup, and the overall share of venture capital dollars going to Black entrepreneurs grew by 43%.

I was first introduced to Bitcoin in 2014 by a schoolmate during my undergraduate years, and what started as curiosity quickly turned into conviction. As I studied the whitepaper and explored the few available resources at the time, it became clear to me that Bitcoin wasn't just a new form of money-it was a paradigm shift. It addressed structural flaws in traditional finance, like inflation and centralized control, with elegant technological solutions.

In 2016, 433 people invested an average of $2,730 in a private startup named Revolut. Fast-forward to today, those $2,730 stakes are worth more than $1 million, up 89,900%.

Data from PitchBook reveals that 15.9% of venture-backed deals in 2025 are down rounds, marking the highest rate in a decade.

Venture capital seeks massive bets with the hope of high rewards, focusing on companies with the potential for a 10x return, despite a high failure rate.