Hopes for a more business-friendly White House to spur mergers and acquisitions activity and bring needed liquidity to private markets has several institutional asset managers looking forward to 2025.
Falling interest rates may also bring some relief to certain private markets as global central bankers, including the Federal Reserve, loosen monetary policy. Yet there is still plenty of uncertainty to leave investors cautious, such as if the U.S. economy sputters. READ MORE
Venture Capitalists Are Not The Startup Team’s Friend
To be successful in their job, by necessity, VCs are friendly and personable. So friendly that it is easy to be lulled into thinking you are forging a real friendship and that they can step outside their fiduciary selves and provide good unbiased advice to a startup founder who needs good unbiased advice a lot. But it is vital the startup founder keep in mind that the VC has a job to do and they are driven first and foremost by that job even in the advice they provide. READ MORE
Number of US venture capital firms falls as cash flows to tech’s top investors
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The number of active venture capital investors has dropped more than a quarter from a peak in 2021, as risk-averse financial institutions focus their money on the biggest firms in Silicon Valley. The tally of VCs investing in US-headquartered companies dropped to 6,175 in 2024 — meaning more than 2,000 have fallen dormant since a peak of 8,315 in 2021, according to data provider PitchBook. READ MORE
ServiceTitan breaks the IPO drought
ServiceTitan, a Glendale, Calif.-based provider of tradesperson SaaS, raised $624.8 million in its IPO, pricing well above the expected range.
Why it matters: There are no more excuses for other VC-backed unicorns (and their VCs) that keep cowering on the sidelines. READ MORE
How Investing In Startups Keeps Corporations At The Cutting Edge Of Technology
Corporations are always looking for cutting-edge technology to keep them more competitive. It’s a challenge because many corporations use traditional technology, yet they need to break out of it to accelerate business growth.
While becoming innovative is possible internally, corporations often struggle with it. They know innovation is critical to getting ahead of the competition, but they also know it is hard to develop innovation in a corporate environment. Let’s learn more about how investing in startups can help corporations find cutting-edge technology and how they can find innovative companies to invest in. READ MORE
Leveraging Social Media in Venture Capital
Social media, believe it or not, can have an effective role in the world of venture capital. At the Houston Smart Business Dealmakers Conference, Carrie Colbert of Curate Capital, Aquila Mendez-Valdez of Haute in Texas and Darek Woodward of ROI Ventures talked with Smart Business’s Dustin Klein about how to craft a captivating online brand that attracts investors, builds a thriving community of future deal flow, and uses influencers to skyrocket the value of your investments. READ MORE
What Forerunner & Bain Capital Ventures Secretly Told Their LPs This Fall
As the year closes out, venture capital firms are giving their limited partners an inside look at what they think is going on in the venture business and what trends they’re watching for next year.
These are the secret state-of-the-industry presentations that the public doesn’t get to see. READ MORE
VC fund extensions are LPs’ new normal—blame sluggish unicorn IPOs
Over 40% of unicorns have been in venture portfolios for at least nine years, pressuring a hallmark of VC: the 10-year fund structure.
Companies with valuations of at least $1 billion now make up two-thirds of the US venture market. Their inability to exit is raising questions about the wisdom of the decade-long fund, according to a recent PitchBook analyst note. READ MORE
9 VC firms collected half of all money raised by US funds in 2024
In 2024, 30 firms raised 74% of all capital raised by VC funds in the US, a powerful signal of how the tech pullback is concentrating influence among the venture industry’s heavyweights.
Just nine of them took in $34 billion—half of the total raised, according to PitchBook data.
And just one firm, Andreessen Horowitz, brought in over 11% of all capital raised. READ MORE
Startup Founders’ Leadership Capability Will Be A Top Priority For VCs In 2025
In the competitive landscape of venture capital, startups are often laser-focused on crafting the perfect pitch deck, proving product-market fit, and showcasing ambitious revenue projections. As an entrepreneur and three-time founder, I’ve been in those rooms, pitching to VCs, fielding tough questions, and navigating the nuances of valuation negotiations. One thing I’ve learned from these experiences is that while metrics and projections are vital, they’re only part of the equation. A strong leadership team—one that inspires confidence, demonstrates resilience, and adapts to shifting landscapes—is often the factor that distinguishes startups commanding top-tier valuations from the rest of the pack. READ MORE
Kevin Ryan Has Invested in More Than 180 Startups. Here’s What He Says Founders Should Focus On
Serial entrepreneur Kevin Ryan is sometimes referred to as the “Godfather” of NYC tech, and for good reason. After making a name for himself by growing digital advertising company DoubleClick from a startup to a public company that eventually sold to Google for $3.1 billion, Ryan co-founded a string of New York-based startups, including Business Insider, the online-shopping company Gilt Groupe, and the wedding-planning site Zola. READ MORE
Successful Private Equity Firms Manage Talent Differently
The private equity industry has long known that it needs new approaches to value creation.
PE firms are holding onto companies in their portfolios for longer time periods and doing more complex transactions (such as industry “roll-ups”). There is more money chasing fewer potential acquisitions, and higher interest rates are creating higher bars for performance. These factors explain why operational performance now accounts for twice as much value creation as deal-making and financing. Executives have also known—or claimed to know—that leadership, human capital, and people skills are the sparks that ignite value creation: 69% of PE and portfolio company leaders cite talent, more than name operating efficiency (49%) or organic growth (30%), as the most important factor. READ MORE
AI startup gold rush: Inside the high-stakes world of AI investments
Nvidia might have become the world’s most valuable company for a brief period this year – but when it comes to investments in AI, 2024 represented yet another landmark 12 months for venture capital flowing into AI startups around the globe.
The likes of Anthropic, Scale AI, Cohere, Mistral, Figure and Elon Musk’s xAI all raised hundreds of millions of dollars in 2024 to fund their AI development and expansion efforts. READ MORE
Reimagining Venture Capital In The Age Of Exponential Technology And Big Bang Disruption
The venture capital landscape is evolving rapidly, shaped by the pace of technological advances and increasingly decentralized global business models. In particular, exponential technologies—innovations from different backgrounds that come together and double in capacity and halve in cost at astonishing speed—are generating a wave of high-impact disruptions, often known as “Big Bang Disruptions.” These disruptions shake markets almost overnight, scale fast (as they don’t need to win all five categories of sequential innovators and go after two at most) and quickly render existing solutions obsolete. READ MORE
Dimension raises $500M second fund for investing at the intersection tech and life sciences
Many VCs, particularly newer firms, readily admit that 2024 has been a challenging year for raising fresh capital.
Dimension Capital, a two-year-old venture outfit, had a different experience when raising its second fund. READ MORE
It’s Time To Break Up Silicon Valley’s Venture Capital Good Ole Boys Club
When a (potentially or obviously) lucrative private startup raises money, it’s always the usual suspects who are part of the funding round.
Big venture capitalists, such as Sequoia Capital. Big investment banks like Fidelity. And big companies with their own VC arms. Google. Apple. Amazon. Even Uber.
Driverless car company, Waymo, just closed an “oversubscribed” $5.6 billion funding round. READ MORE
How Startups Can Raise Capital In Low Liquidity Markets
Venture capital has grown out of Silicon Valley and become global by default, mirroring the industry that receives the majority of its attention: tech.
Fund managers in the U.S. and Europe still dominate the headlines, but quietly (and in fact increasingly noisily) other investors in emerging markets are honing their craft in contrasting circumstances. READ MORE
Global VC Funding Ticked Up In November Thanks To AI And Billion-Dollar Deals
Global venture funding totaled $28 billion in November 2024, Crunchbase data shows. That’s down from the $32 billion raised in October 2024, but up from the $21 billion raised in November 2023.
More than a third of funding last month came from just three companies that each raised billion-dollar-plus rounds: AI foundation model companies xAI and Anthropic, and quality engineering testing service Tricentis. READ MORE
VC Firms Like to Invest Locally
How beneficial is location when it comes to venture capital funding?
During the Covid-19 pandemic, when lavish tech campuses shuttered and tech workers began working from home, prominent venture partners announced they would whisk themselves to different, less costly pastures. Suddenly, as tech companies adopted remote work policies and meetings moved from Sand Hill Road to Zoom, it seemed like California’s badge as the tech startup capital of the U.S. was about to be revoked. READ MORE
They Turned Down an Early Pay Day to Maintain Control of Their Business. And Then Went on to Raise $190 Million.
"The next generation of consumers are living their best lives in online worlds like Roblox, Fortnite, and Discord." So says Jason Yeh, Co-Founder and General Partner of early-stage venture firm Patron. "We're all about investing in early-stage consumer companies that will shape how this gaming-native generation learns, shops, socializes, plays, invests, and, let's be honest, procrastinates online," he explained to Entrepreneur.
Patron launched in the fall of 2021. After starting their careers in venture capital, both Yeh and Patron co-founder Brian Cho went on to hold leadership positions at Riot Games, where Yeh helped launch and scale League of Legends over the next nine years. Their third Partner, Amber Atherton, built a YC and Forerunner-backed community platform that was acquired by Discord, where she helped the company scale to audiences outside of games. READ MORE