All posts tagged: venture capital

The climate tech IPO window could finally be cracking open

The climate tech IPO window could finally be cracking open

Published by skeptic

Climate tech startups are capital intensive, timelines are long, and the technology is often considered “first of its kind.” What’s more, a key value proposition is addressing pollution — an externality that is, at best, poorly priced by the market. Those aren’t the qualities stock pickers tend to favor. And yet, public markets appear to be warming to climate tech startups — or at least some of them. This week, nuclear startup X-energy went public, raising $1 billion in an upsized share offering that appears to have delivered a windfall for its investors, including Amazon. Retail investors apparently can’t get enough, with the stock popping 25% in its first hour of trading. Also this week, geothermal startup Fervo said it filed for an initial public offering. The size of the Fervo IPO has yet to be disclosed, but private investors have valued the company at around $3 billion, according to PitchBook. The move to go public aligns with what investors told TechCrunch at the end of last year. After years of tepid attitudes toward climate …

The UK Launches Its 5 Million Sovereign AI Fund

The UK Launches Its $675 Million Sovereign AI Fund

Published by skeptic

The UK government has launched a venture fund for investing in domestic AI startups, part of a bid to minimize the country’s dependence on foreign-made technology. The fund, Sovereign AI, will invest roughly $675 million in homegrown startups in fields ranging from model development, to agentic AI, to drug discovery. In addition, portfolio startups will gain access to the UK’s fleet of supercomputers, free visas for international hires, procurement opportunities, and advice from specialists within government. Sovereign AI will be led by James Wise, a partner at VC firm Balterdon Capital, and Joséphine Kant, formerly of Dogwood Ventures and Y Combinator, an accelerator program whose funding helped establish OpenAI. On Thursday, the fund announced an investment in Callosum, a startup developing software that helps different classes of processors to function effectively alongside one another. The fund has awarded a further six startups—Prima Mente, Cosine, Cursive, Doubleword, Twig Bio, and Odyssey—up to one million GPU hours worth of compute each on the UK’s supercomputer network. They will use that compute to train new models and run …

OpenAI alums have been quietly investing from a new, potentially 0M fund 

OpenAI alums have been quietly investing from a new, potentially $100M fund 

Published by skeptic

A new venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI has made its first close on its $100 million goal, the founders tell TechCrunch. The partners have already written a couple of checks.  The fund is called Zero Shot (a play on the AI training term) and its co-founding team includes several OpenAI OGs who found themselves becoming VCs almost by serendipity.   Three of the founding partners hail from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, the former head of applied engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex, is now at robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s original prompt engineer, is well-known as the host of The OpenAI podcast. Mayne also founded Interdimensional, an AI deployment consultancy. And Shawn Jain is an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI, who then became a VC and is a founder of his own GenAI startup, Synthefy.   The alums are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, previously a founding partner at 01A, the growth-stage venture firm founded by Dick Costello and Adam Bain. The fifth founding member of the fund is Brett Rounsaville, formerly of …

California Suspends Enforcement of Law Requiring VCs to Report Diversity Data

California Suspends Enforcement of Law Requiring VCs to Report Diversity Data

Published by skeptic

Under a new state regulation, venture capital firms operating in California were supposed to submit demographic data about their portfolio companies, including the gender and race of startup founders they backed. But amid public criticism from some tech leaders, the California agency administering the new requirement suspended it just before the Wednesday deadline for firms to make their first disclosures. “The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) has announced that it plans to initiate rulemaking in response to comments by various stakeholders relating to the Fair Investment Practices by Venture Capital Companies Law,” the state agency posted on its website in mid-March. “Implementation and enforcement of the [law] will be suspended pending completion of the rulemaking and until final regulations are in place.” California lawmakers first passed the measure in 2023, and it was signed into law shortly thereafter by Governor Gavin Newsom. For decades, women and people of color have received only a small share of overall startup funding relative to their representation in the US population. Lawmakers hoped putting more public …

‘Uncanny Valley’: Anthropic’s DOD Lawsuit, War Memes, and AI Coming for VC Jobs

‘Uncanny Valley’: Anthropic’s DOD Lawsuit, War Memes, and AI Coming for VC Jobs

Published by skeptic

Brian Barrett: The irony is my favorite part because I feel like venture capitalists have largely positioned themselves as immune to the effects of AI because they’re very special and surely a machine can— Zoë Schiffer: It’s art, not science. Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s art, not science. Machines can take every job, but not us. The ladder stops just below VC for them in a way that is entertaining and fun. So I wonder how many people are actually using this now, especially because venture capitalists themselves are so skeptical of it, it seems like. Who’s the audience? Is it finding real traction out there? Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. So the way that ADIN works is they have scouts that go out and look for potential deals, and then those scouts can make money on said deals. So I think this would be something where VCs wouldn’t necessarily be adopting the network, but people would be going around them and they wouldn’t be as necessary, as useful. I think there was another great irony, which Arielle …

Can AI Kill the Venture Capitalist?

Can AI Kill the Venture Capitalist?

Published by skeptic

Last fall, as venture capitalists were sinking record sums into artificial intelligence, a group of investors gathered to appraise a new startup. The company, Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, made software to automatically tune AI models, making them faster and cheaper. The founding team seemed strong, and the market was rapidly expanding. Half of the investors were cautious; the other half saw dollar signs. One of them dubbed the deal an “absolute banger.” This startup was real, and so was the $100,000 the VCs invested in its seed round. But the VCs themselves were all AI agents, part of a new platform called ADIN, the Autonomous Deal Investing Network. Launched in 2025, ADIN uses AI to replace the human analysts involved in venture dealmaking. Put in a startup’s pitch deck, and out comes a detailed analysis of its business model and founding team, a list of diligence questions and compliance risks, an estimate of the total addressable market, and a suggested valuation. ADIN has about a dozen different agentic investors, each with a distinct persona and …

Code Metal Raises 5 Million to Rewrite the Defense Industry’s Code With AI

Code Metal Raises $125 Million to Rewrite the Defense Industry’s Code With AI

Published by skeptic

Code Metal, a Boston-based startup that uses AI to write code and translate it into other programming languages, just closed a $125 million Series B funding round from new and existing investors. The news comes just a few months after the startup raised $36 million in series A financing led by Accel. Code Metal is part of a new wave of startups aiming to modernize the tech industry by using AI to generate code and translate it across programming languages. One of the questions that persists about AI-assisted code, though, is whether the output is any good—and what the consequences might be if it’s not. Over the past two years companies like Antithesis, Code Rabbit, Synthesized, Theorem, and Harness have all secured millions in backing from venture capitalists for their approaches to automating, validating, testing, and securing AI-generated code. These startups are selling the “picks and shovels” of the AI gold rush—tech tools that serve a larger industry. While some of the methodologies behind their technology remain unproven, investors are willing to gamble that at …

Inside the Gay Tech Mafia

Inside the Gay Tech Mafia

Published by skeptic

No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley. They seem to have dominated its upper ranks at least the past five years, maybe more. On platforms like X, the clues are there: whispers of private-island retreats, tech executives going “gay for clout,” and the suggestion that a “seed round” is not, strictly speaking, a financial term. It is an idea so taken for granted, in fact, that when I call up a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask his thoughts about what is sometimes referred to in industry circles as the “gay tech mafia,” he audibly yawns. “Of course,” he says. “This has always been the case.” It had been the case, the hedge funder says, back in 2012, when he was raising money from a venture capitalist whose office was staffed with dozens of “attractive, strong young men,” all of whom were “under 30” and looked as though they had freshly decamped from “the high school debate club.” “They were all sleeping with each other and starting companies,” …

Climactic launches hybrid fund to get startups through the ‘valley of death’

Climactic launches hybrid fund to get startups through the ‘valley of death’

Published by skeptic

It’s a challenge every startup faces: they’ve made a prototype and proven the thing works, but now have to sell the product and produce enough to get past the “valley of death” that kills so many companies. “They are chicken and egg stuck,” Josh Felser, co-founder and managing partner of early-stage venture firm Climactic, told TechCrunch. The hurdle is particularly high for companies making physical goods. Felser noticed it was a common occurrence among startups producing novel materials. Fesler, who previously founded and invested in software startups, said the problem they faced seemed a bit unfair.  “Software companies sell at a negative margin all the time in the beginning, you know, Uber, Lyft, you can look at lots of different examples,” he said. “But for materials companies, they they’re not allowed to do that. One of the questions I had is, ‘why is that?’” Felser found that unlike software companies, which can quickly add more capacity from cloud service providers, materials startups face a market skeptical of their ability to scale up production without a …

Measuring the deep tech gender gap – POLITICO

Measuring the deep tech gender gap – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

A central output of the project is the Gender Gap in Investments Dashboard, developed by Dealroom. The dashboard is a prototype repository that already presents a clear picture of the current state of the gender investment gap using Dealroom data. It brings together information on company founding teams and venture funding outcomes across Europe in a single, accessible interface. The dashboard is not an endpoint. It is designed as a foundation that can, over time, incorporate additional data sources, improve coverage, and offer a more nuanced view of how gender, sector, funding stage and geography interact. The long-term ambition is to support the development of a credible, shared European data infrastructure on gender and investment. What the data show: Deep tech remains highly skewed Even at this early stage, the dashboard reveals persistent imbalances. Across Europe, startups with at least one woman founder raise just 14.4 percent of all venture capital (VC) rounds and 12 percent of total VC funding. In deep tech, the imbalance is even starker. Around 80 percent of deep-tech companies are founded by all-male …