#venture-capital

#venture-capital

Beauty and wellness booking marketplace Fresha has announced an $80 million investment from KKR's Next Generation Technology Growth fund, valuing the London-based company at more than $1 billion. The investment is notable for coming from KKR's growth equity arm, which targets companies with proven business models that are still in aggressive expansion mode - a sign that Fresha is seen as past the risky early stages and ready to scale.

When Gavriel sat down on Jan. 29 and wrote the first line of code for NanoClaw, he wasn't thinking about fundraising. He was trying to solve a problem: the agentic tools available to him were powerful but dangerously insecure. So Gavriel, a former Wix developer with a physics and computer science background plus years of obsessive after-hours AI tinkering, built his own.

Copenhagen is on the list, together with cities such as London, Stockholm, Paris and Berlin. Total number of deals in 2025 in Copenhagen are reported to 20. Totalt number of capital last year: €112 million.

War is a racket, he couldn't have imagined that a sitting US president would time announcements about major military operations in order to manipulate the stock market. But as the US economy has been increasingly financialized, so too has the nature of war profiteering, increasingly driven by insider trading, oil speculators, and the portfolio earnings of venture capital (VC) investors, tech billionaires, and private-equity fund managers.

Lexroom is selling 8,000+ law firms a verified-source legal AI built around six million documents. Milan-based , the legal AI startup focused on civil-law jurisdictions, has raised a $50m Series B led by Left Lane Capital. Base10 Partners, Eurazeo, Acurio Ventures, Entourage and View Different joined the round, which closed eight months after the company's $19m Series A and takes total funding past $73m. The proceeds will fund expansion into Spain and Germany.

When Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon founded Spotify in April 2006, they were two Stockholm entrepreneurs with a prototype so skeletal that Per Roman, the cofounder of investors Bullhound Capital, who would later back the company, says his first look at it was "world-changing," despite there barely being a product to look at.

Benchmark is famously selective in the companies it chooses, and backs hardware companies so rarely that Vishria was kicking himself for giving time to Cerebras. "Why did I take this meeting?" he kept muttering. At one point, he even messaged his assistant, who manages his calendar, and bugged her: "Why did you let me take this meeting?" Vishria recalls.

The school's endowment invested $20 million in OpenAI during a very early fundraising round, well before Microsoft's $1 billion investment in 2019 and before most people had heard of the AI lab. That stake is now expected to be worth roughly $2 billion, representing a staggering 9,900% return on a single investment.

Andreessen Horowitz, which over its 14-year history has never raised capital from the major California pension funds, is changing its tune this year. The firm, also known as a16z, has raised $400 million from CalPERS for a new fund called California Innovation Opportunities, Fortune found in public records. The firm is also currently pursuing investments from CalSTRS, according to lobbying records.

Lonsdale suggested starting small: He and some of his friends would pay for a one-mile, approximately $6 million to $7 million underground tunnel system, built by Elon Musk's the Boring Company, that would connect his friends' land around town. He said that the initial mile-long tunnel could spark interest from leadership for a citywide tunnel system that the Boring Company could ultimately build in partnership with the city, and a pitch deck he sent after the call refers to "a growing group of successful citizens" willing to donate or sell land at below-market prices for stations near the airport, Tesla's Austin gigafactory, the Q2 Stadium, Lonsdale's house, and his venture capital firm, 8VC.

"I've never seen a situation like this change so quickly," says Wettlaufer, partner at the short-selling shop Bleecker Street Research, which opened its short position into SVB in January. Wettlaufer wasn't talking about the events of the last two and a half days-when a bank run ushered the California financial regulator into its offices to close it down not long after SVB said it was raising more than $2 billion in capital through a share sale. No-Wettlaufer was referring to the last two years.