Gamma, a startup that creates AI-generated presentations, websites, and social media posts, announced on Monday a $68 million Series B round at a $2.1 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. Co-founder and CEO Grant Lee posted on X that the company has profitably hit $100 million in ARR, with 70 million users. The startup hit $50 million profitably in its first two years, Lee previously posted. Gamma last raised a $12 million Series A round led by Accel in 2024.
African entrepreneurs can build world-class businesses, but investors hesitate because they cannot see how or when they will get their money back. Initial public offerings (IPOs) remain extremely rare, and most exits take the form of trade sales often unpredictable and slow to clear. Our stock exchanges offer little comfort either with liquidity outside the largest firms still limited. Start-ups here can remain start-ups for decades with no clear path to maturity.
The event was held in a private room behind a second-floor restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown San Francisco, just blocks away from the offices of many new AI startups. Lessin said in his introduction that technology doesn't just adopt itself - one often has to "push it into the world." And when you have a new and disruptive product that not everyone will welcome, charisma is the secret ingredient that opens doors.
The most potent form of social today is basically in group chats, which is obviously not new technology, but what it's highlighting is the fact that that's a trusted group of people who you actually know, who are verifiably human
Liquid - $7.6M Seed Liquid, a perp DEX aggregator that routes and executes futures trades across multiple exchanges, has raised $7.6M in Seed funding led by Paradigm. Founded by Franklyn Wang in 2025, Liquid has now raised a total of $7.6M in reported equity funding. AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders.
That was the case with crypto payments firm Mesh, which announced an $82 million Series B this year that included a $20 million payout to its founder. Ditto with the blockchain social network firm Farcaster, which raised an eye-popping $150 million Series A, but saw its CEO carve off at least $15 million of that. You can read about other examples here.
"We've glorified resilience as this virtue," he told me. "Bounce back, return to normal, weather the storm. But the literal definition of resilience is the ability of a system to return to its original baseline after being disturbed."
There's no shortage of noise coming out of San Francisco and New York with AI breakthroughs, billion-dollar valuations and the race to back the next big consumer app or fintech darling. With a crowded landscape sometimes influenced by hype, venture capital has developed a kind of tunnel vision. The fixation on what's shiny and fast-scaling has blinded many investors to the country's most foundational industries, which are the ones that really keep America running.
Joby Aviation ( NYSE: JOBY) will report third-quarter 2025 earnings after the close today. The company's shares, up 135% in the past 6 months, have surged on growing optimism that its long-awaited eVTOL aircraft could enter commercial service within the next 18 months. Following an eventful second quarter marked by the acquisition of Blade's passenger operations, successful flight testing in Dubai, and rapid certification progress, the upcoming update will give investors a clearer picture of how soon "air taxis" might begin generating real revenue.
Grab ran a successful pilot of autonomous vehicles in September, rolled out in partnership with WeRide, a Chinese robotaxi operator. Earlier this year, Grab announced it would make a "strategic equity investment" in WeRide, to be completed in the first half of next year. Then, in late October, Grab also invested in U.S.-based May Mobility, another provider of autonomous vehicles. May Mobility started to provide commercial rides on robotaxis in the U.S. earlier this year.
NVIDIA and Qualcomm Ventures have joined a growing coalition of U.S. and Indian investors backing India's deep tech startups. The group launched in September with more than $1 billion in commitments, timing that aligns with India's new ₹1 trillion (around $12 billion) research and development initiative. NVIDIA has joined the coalition as a strategic technical advisor, without any financial commitments, while Qualcomm Ventures has come on board alongside six Indian venture firms, bringing additional capital commitments totaling more than $850 million.
AI is fueling a surge in cyberattacks. Startups, especially in Israel, are rushing to use their own AI to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. The latest is Tel Aviv-based Daylight, which closed a $33 million Series A round led by Craft Ventures, the San Francisco firm cofounded by PayPal and SpaceX backer David Sacks. The funding comes as Google is attempting to close its $32 billion acquisition of Wiz, another Israeli-founded security firm,
For a safer wager, you might just buy and hold Tesla ( NASDAQ:TSLA) stock since it's a well-known and widely analyzed company with a stake in the self-driving car market. On the other hand, Aurora Innovation stock is low-priced and under the radar, so it has the potential to explode higher. On the other hand, a recently released financial filing should remind investors that Aurora Innovation is still a "show-me" story.
has been on a rally that exceeded bullish expectations several times over. This is largely thanks to the company's management pulling off a PR offensive and then turning it into a windfall for the company's balance sheet. In turn, investors got even more bullish, and QBTS stock has been on a relentless rally. All that said, the past month has been less bullish. QBTS stock is only up 1.2% in the past month after falling from its peak.
The venture capital industry has long operated on a transactional model: evaluate the science, assess the team, write the check, and monitor progress through quarterly board meetings. This approach may work for software startups, but it fundamentally misaligns with biotechnology development realities. The path from laboratory breakthrough to FDA-approved therapy involves navigating regulatory mazes, recruiting specialized talent, and building relationships across interconnected scientific communities-challenges that capital alone cannot solve.
When Arvind Purushotham decided to leave the Sand Hill stalwart Menlo Ventures in 2010 to start a new VC arm for Citibank, he joked with friends that he was going from an operation with 25 people to one with four more zeroes in its workforce. 15 years-and more than 200 investments and 30 exits-later, he has built one of the more formidable Wall Street corporate venture outfits at a moment when frontier technology like AI and blockchain threaten to upend financial services.
Wanka Online Inc. has announced a capital increase in its joint venture, Suzhou Jinglan Cloud Technology Co., Ltd., with the introduction of a new investor, Suzhou Huanxiu Lake Xincheng Phase II Industrial Investment Fund. This capital increase, amounting to RMB60.0 million, aims to expand the joint venture's mobile advertising business and support its rapid growth. Despite the changes in shareholding structure, Wanka Online will maintain its controlling interest, ensuring continued consolidation of the joint venture's financial results into its own statements.
The startup starts with the premise that large language models can't remember past interactions the way humans do. If two people are chatting and the connection drops, they can resume the conversation. AI models, by contrast, forget everything and start from scratch. Mem0 fixes that. Singh calls it a "memory passport," where your AI memory travels with you across apps and agents, just like email or logins do today.
If I were like, a sports star or an artist or something, and just really cared about doing a great job at my thing, and was up at 5 am practicing free throws or whatever, that would seem pretty normal right?
Shayne Coplan, 27, is always in a hurry. Last year, he arrived at a Manhattan dinner hosted by a venture capital firm for networking, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. He had been invited as one of the most promising entrepreneurs of the moment, but after a brief chat, he got up while the main course was being served and left for a concert in Brooklyn. At this pace, Coplan has become the world's youngest self-made billionaire.
