Venture capitalists have convinced themselves they’ve found the next big investing edge: using AI to wring software-like margins out of traditionally labor-intensive services businesses. The strategy involves acquiring mature professional services firms, implementing AI to automate tasks, then using the improved cash flow to roll up more companies. Leading the charge is General Catalyst (GC),…
Eight U.S. and Indian venture capital and private equity firms — including storied investors Accel, Blume Ventures, Celesta Capital, and Premji Invest — have formed an unusual coalition to back India’s deep tech startups, pledging more than $1 billion over the next decade to strengthen U.S.-India tech ties. The alliance addresses longstanding funding concerns. In…
Weeks after the revelation that Google paid Windsurf $2.4 billion to license its technology, while simultaneously hiring away its CEO and top talent, the deal’s implications are still rattling some founders and startup employees across Silicon Valley. Google’s payment to the startup was effectively split in two equal parts, according to two people familiar with…
Venture capitalists have always focused on investing in companies that leverage technology to either disrupt established industries or create entirely new business categories. But some VCs are starting to flip the script on their investing styles. Rather than funding startups, they are acquiring mature businesses — such as call centers, accounting firms, and other professional…
While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI. While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as…
When you really probe venture capitalists about investing in AI startups, they’ll tell you that businesses are experimenting wildly but are very slow to add AI solutions into their ongoing business processes. But there are some exceptions. And one of them appears to be an area known as AI sales development representatives, or AI SDRs….
President-elect Donald Trump made no secret during his campaigning that he doesn’t think the U.S. should take an aggressive stance on climate change. From leading chants of “drill, baby, drill” to frequently criticizing everything from wind turbines to electric vehicles, he appears poised to cast a shadow over the climate tech sector for the next…
Pear VC, a prominent pre-seed and seed-focused venture firm, has been running an accelerator for about a decade with about 10 startups in each batch. Over those years, the small but mighty program has helped launch numerous companies like Viz.ai, whose FDA-approved AI can diagnose strokes (and was valued at $1.2 billion in 2022), relationship…
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This week in AI, two startups developing tools to generate and suggest code — Magic and Codeium — raised nearly half a billion dollars combined. The rounds were high even by AI sector standards, especially considering…
VCs are increasingly buying shares of late-stage startups on the secondary market as they try to get pieces of the hottest ones — especially AI companies. But they are also increasingly doing so through financial instruments called special purpose vehicles (SVPs). Some of those SPVs are becoming such hot commodities that they are commanding premium…