Countdown Capital

Last week, my colleague Aria Alamalhodaei wrote an exclusive on defense and space tech venture firm Countdown Capital’s plan to shut down. Jai Malik, the founder of Countdown, said in a letter to his LPs that due to how competitive the industrial tech sector has become, he is no longer confident about smaller venture firms’ ability to secure the meaningful stakes in startups they’d need to produce worthwhile returns. As Aria wrote, the letter reads like a cold glass of water to the face. While…

This is our Friday show, and today, Mary Ann Azevedo and Alex Wilhelm took on the week's biggest tech, startup and venture capital news. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. This is our Friday show, and today, Mary Ann Azevedo and Alex Wilhelm took on the week's biggest tech, startup and venture capital news. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS Read original article here Denial of responsibility! Techno Blender is an automatic…

Countdown Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on hard tech industrial startups, will shut down by the end of March and return uninvested capital, firm founder and solo general partner Jai Malik said in an annual letter. In the letter, which was viewed by TechCrunch, Malik says he decided to close the fund after coming to two main conclusions on the economics of early-stage hard tech investing: that “funding industrial startups is not inefficient enough to justify our existence” and that “larger,…

When news broke last year that AI heavyweight OpenAI and Axel Springer had reached a financial agreement and partnership, it seemed to bode well for harmony between folks who write words, and tech companies that use them to help create and train artificial intelligence models. At the time OpenAI had also come to an agreement with the AP, for reference. Then as the year ended the New York Times sued OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, alleging that the AI company’s generative AI models were “built…