EC venture capital

It’s a story as old as time: Startup founder raises giant sack of that sweet, sweet VC money. Next, they have to search for product-market fit. Easy, right? Just pour all of that money into sales and marketing, and they’re off to the races. Not so fast. If you throw enough money at advertising, anyone can get the growth chart to go up and to the right. But the thing is, you need to find the right way to do growth, and that’s a lot harder. Matt Lerner spent 11 years running marketing at PayPal,…

After watching Lucy pull the football from Charlie Brown’s foot at the last possible moment time and time again, we have learned our lesson and are therefore hesitant to believe that 2024 will be the year of the IPO market’s return. It may or may not happen, but we’re not betting on it. Alternative sources of liquidity are therefore top of mind — there’s a towering pile of private companies in need of an exit, or a bailout. Recent research from Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee underscores how quickly illiquid wealth was…

Noor Siddiqui Contributor Noor Siddiqui, a Thiel Fellow and Stanford-trained computer scientist, is the CEO and founder of Orchid. Moonshot startups, those daring ideas that promise to reshape our world, are inherently about venturing into uncharted territory, giving us new superpowers and creating new markets. They’re high stakes, high reward, and, more often than not, deeply technical. As someone who navigates these waters, I see firsthand that when…

In 2021, it felt like every startup was able to raise at an inflated valuation no matter its size, sector or underlying business model. Today, things look a lot different. Comparing pre-money valuations, every startup fundraising stage except seed saw median valuations decline last year compared to 2022, according to data from PitchBook. Things were slightly better in 2022, when only the median late-stage and growth-stage valuations were down from 2021, while the median early-stage valuation…

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…

Even though news of potential interest rate cuts has led to optimism that the IPO window might reopen and things might improve in startup land, it appears the global venture capital market has yet to level out: Early data from PitchBook indicates global VC investment in startups continued to slide in the fourth quarter of 2023. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. While things are down sharply in…

Artificial intelligence startups had a wild ride in 2023. Everyone and their grandmother tried out some sort of AI tool, startups in the space raised rounds at 2021 valuations, there were high-profile shutdowns, and then to close out the year, we had all the drama surrounding Sam Altman and OpenAI — plus New York Times’ lawsuit against the company. With so much in the rearview mirror, it’s hard to predict what will happen with AI startups in 2024. But some people, like investors, make their…

With just a couple of days left in 2023, there’s no better time to take a moment to reflect on all that’s happened this year. From the Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse and crypto’s widespread troubles to AI’s ascent amid a volatile fundraising market, there was a lot to talk about this year, and investors and founders sure did share their thoughts freely with us in our surveys. Of course, some sectors are going to be more pertinent than others going into 2024, so we’ve listed some of our most…

If I had to characterize 2023, I’d say it was the year of the great venture divide. Many aspects of venture didn’t follow one trend, but instead saw the emergence of extremes on either side of the spectrum. Most startups continued to struggle to fundraise, but if you happened to be building in AI or defense, you could pretty much raise money like it was still the high-flying market of 2021. Exits remained at their lowest level in years and we saw what might have been the largest startup acquisition of all time get…

A couple years ago, when the pandemic was still in full swing, Raj Kapoor and Josh Felser started making some investments in climate tech startups. They called their operation Climactic, and initially they placed bets using their own money. Both are experienced founders, operators and investors, but they were new to focusing on this particular sector and began by testing the waters. Things must have gone well, because now they’re jumping in: The firm today said it has closed a $65 million…