All posts tagged: General Catalyst

General Catalyst just led a M bet on India’s travel payments market

General Catalyst just led a $63M bet on India’s travel payments market

Published by skeptic

Scapia, an Indian startup that combines travel booking with co-branded credit cards and mobile payments, has raised $63 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst, with existing investors Peak XV Partners and Z47 also participating. The deal comes despite a broader slowdown in fintech dealmaking. The all-equity round values assigns the startup a post-money valuation of more than $500 million, according to a source familiar with the matter, more than doubling its valuation from around $200 million in April 2025. The four-year-old outfit has raised $126 million to date from investors. That General Catalyst, one of the most prominent U.S. venture firms, is leading the round suggests that India’s travel-focused fintech market is drawing serious attention well beyond its home region. The funding comes as investors globally grow more selective in fintech bets after years of aggressive funding. In India, fintech funding remained largely flat in Q1 2026, while the number of deals fell by more than half from a year earlier as investors concentrated capital into fewer, larger deals, per a recent …

General Catalyst posted VC rage bait and it worked, especially on a16z

General Catalyst posted VC rage bait and it worked, especially on a16z

Published by skeptic

One of the most entertaining moments in VC this week was a piece of rage-bait marketing from General Catalyst. In a now-viral post on X that parodies the old Mac vs. PC commercials, the venture firm — better known as GC — posted a “VC vs GC” video on Wednesday. The VC was played by a tall actor in a baggy shirt and vest with a distinctly large, bald head — an apparent dig at Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen. (But the real Andreessen never looks that disheveled). The GC character was played by a man with a thick head of dark hair, white kicks, and a tendency to stare deeply into the camera. He was clearly supposed to represent actor Justin Long’s cooler, “hipper” Mac character from the original commercials, in contrast to John Hodgman’s straight-laced “square” PC persona. GC asks VC about his robotic dog. VC explains, “This is Woof AI” and then extols the virtues of the artificial companion (you don’t need to walk it or break the news to the kids …

Musely secures 0M from General Catalyst without giving up equity

Musely secures $360M from General Catalyst without giving up equity

Published by skeptic

Musely, a direct-to-consumer telemedicine platform, has secured over $360 million in non-dilutive capital from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF). The company specializes in compounded treatments for skin, hair, and menopause care. Musely co-founder and CEO Jack Jia told TechCrunch that when CVF investors reached out to him last year, he wasn’t looking to raise capital. That’s because Musely, which was founded in 2014 as a wellness community before pivoting to prescription skincare in 2019, has been cash flow positive for years, he said. Jia didn’t want to reduce his ownership in the company by selling off a chunk of it to VCs. They frequently approached him about a potential round and he consistently turned them down, he said. But unlike traditional venture capital, CVF wasn’t looking to take an equity stake, nor was it offering a loan that would carry interest rate charges. Instead, CVF’s alternative financing is similar to a tiny revenue-share agreement: Companies with predictable revenue streams borrow capital, and then repay the funds along with a fixed, capped percentage of revenue …

Sales automation startup Rox AI hits .2B valuation, sources say

Sales automation startup Rox AI hits $1.2B valuation, sources say

Published by skeptic

Rox, a startup developing autonomous AI agents to boost sales productivity, has raised a new funding round valuing the company at $1.2 billion, according to multiple sources. The funding included a lead investment from returning backer General Catalyst, two of the people said. Rox and General Catalyst did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. At the time of the fundraise, which closed last year, Rox was projected to close 2025 with $8 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), according to two people familiar with the deal. In November 2024, Rox announced it had raised a total of $50 million, including a seed round led by Sequoia and a Series A round led by General Catalyst, with participation from GV. Rox was founded in 2024 by the former chief growth officer of New Relic, Ishan Mukherjee. Mukherjee joined New Relic following its 2020 acquisition of Pixie, a software monitoring startup he co-founded. The startup positions itself as an intelligent revenue operating system that plugs into a company’s current software setup — from Salesforce to Zendesk …

VC mega funds are back with General Catalyst, Spark rumored to be raising billions

VC mega funds are back with General Catalyst, Spark rumored to be raising billions

Published by skeptic

Following news last month that New York’s hottest venture firm, Thrive, just raised $10 billion for a new fund — its largest ever, double the previous one — another big-name VC firm is attempting to equal that raise. General Catalyst is in talks to raise $10 billion, unnamed sources tell Bloomberg. This firm, which has recast itself as a broader financial services company, raised $8 billion just a couple of years ago in 2024. Meanwhile, Spark Capital is trying to raise $3 billion, sources tell The Information, which would also be a big boost from its previous funds. And, as TechCrunch just exclusively reported, Founders Fund is about to close a new $6 billion fund, too. All of this follows Andreessen Horowitz’s $15 billion in new funding announced in January. Venture firms were already sitting on a record amount of so-called dry powder, meaning money available but not yet invested, at the end of 2025, according to the year-end report by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. But 2026 is already shaping up as …

India’s Pronto formalizes house help as its valuation jumps 8x in under a year

India’s Pronto formalizes house help as its valuation jumps 8x in under a year

Published by skeptic

Bengaluru-based Pronto is helping to bring India’s largely informal domestic help market online. As daily bookings climb and its city footprint expands, investors are opening their wallets. The startup said Tuesday that it raised a $25 million Series B round led by Epiq Capital, valuing the nine-month-old company at $100 million. That’s more than double its $45 million valuation in August 2025 and over eight times the $12.5 million level when it emerged from stealth in May. Existing investors Glade Brook Capital, General Catalyst, and Bain Capital Ventures also participated, bringing total funding to around $40 million. Pronto offers quick, structured services for everyday chores — from mopping to utensil cleaning — promising trained, background-verified professionals on demand. The startup says it can dispatch workers within about 10 minutes in several of its micromarkets (servicable locations within cities it operates), positioning the service closer to quick commerce than traditional home services. Each worker — whom the company calls a “Pro” — undergoes in-person training and background verification before taking bookings and is assigned structured shifts …

General Catalyst commits B to India over five years

General Catalyst commits $5B to India over five years

Published by skeptic

General Catalyst, a Silicon Valley-based venture firm with more than $43 billion in assets under management, has announced it plans to invest $5 billion in India over the next five years, sharply expanding its push into the country’s startup ecosystem less than two years after merging with local venture firm Venture Highway. The commitment, unveiled at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Friday, will target startups across artificial intelligence, healthcare, defense technology, fintech, and consumer technology. The announcement marks a significant increase from the $500 million to $1 billion the firm had previously earmarked for India. India, the world’s most populous country with more than a billion internet users, is positioning itself as a major AI investment destination. New Delhi aims to attract over $200 billion in AI infrastructure investments over the next two years as it hosts the India AI Impact Summit with participation from companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. “India will build the next generation of global platform companies,” General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja (pictured above) said, adding that …

AI inference startup Modal Labs in talks to raise at .5B valuation, sources say

AI inference startup Modal Labs in talks to raise at $2.5B valuation, sources say

Published by skeptic

Modal Labs, a startup specializing in AI inference infrastructure, is talking to VCs about a new round at a valuation of about $2.5 billion, according to four people with knowledge of the deal. Should the deal close at these terms, the funding round would more than double the company’s valuation of $1.1 billion announced less than five months ago. General Catalyst is in talks to lead the round, the people told TechCrunch. Modal’s annualized revenue run rate (ARR) is approximately $50 million, our sources said. The discussions are early, and terms could still change.   Modal Labs co-founder and CEO Erik Bernhardsson denied that his company was actively fundraising and characterized his recent interactions with VCs as general conversations. General Catalyst did not respond to our requests for comment. Modal is focused on optimizing inference, the process of running trained AI models to generate answers from user requests. Improving inference efficiency reduces compute costs and cuts down the lag time between a user’s prompt and the AI’s response. Modal is one of the handful of inference-focused …

Bolna nabs .3M from General Catalyst for its India-focused voice orchestration platform

Bolna nabs $6.3M from General Catalyst for its India-focused voice orchestration platform

Published by skeptic

Industry reports and the growth of voice model companies in the Indian market suggest that there is a growing demand for voice AI solutions in the country. Voice is a popular medium for communication among people and businesses in India. That’s why enterprises and startups are eager to use voice AI to be more efficient at customer support, sales, customer acquisition, hiring, and training. But recognizing market demand is one thing — proving businesses will pay is another. Y Combinator rejected the application from Bolna, a voice orchestration startup built by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times before finally accepting it into the fall 2025 batch, skeptical that the founders could turn interest into revenue. “When we were applying for Y Combinator, the feedback we got was, ‘great to see that you have a product that can create realistic voice agents, but Indian enterprises are not going to pay, and you are not going to make money out of this,’” Wagh told TechCrunch. The startup applied with the same idea for the fall batch …

From OpenAI’s offices to a deal with Eli Lilly — how Chai Discovery became one of the flashiest names in AI drug development

From OpenAI’s offices to a deal with Eli Lilly — how Chai Discovery became one of the flashiest names in AI drug development

Published by skeptic

Drug discovery, the art of identifying new molecules to develop pharmaceuticals, is a notoriously time-consuming and difficult process. Traditional techniques, like high-throughput screening, offer an expensive scattershot approach — one that is not often successful. However, a new breed of biotech companies are leveraging AI and advanced data technologies in an attempt to accelerate and streamline the process. Chai Discovery, an AI startup founded in 2024, is one such company. In a little over 12 months, its young co-founders have managed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and rally the backing of some of Silicon Valley’s most influential investors, making it one of the flashiest firms in a growing industry. In December, the company completed its Series B, bringing in an additional $130 million and a valuation of $1.3 billion. Last Friday, Chai also announced a partnership with Eli Lilly, a deal in which the pharmaceutical giant will use the startup’s software to help develop new medicines. Chai’s algorithm, called Chai-2, is designed to develop antibodies — the proteins necessary to fight illnesses. The …