The wire

Global venture funding showed no signs of slowing in July. Startup capital totaled $65 billion, up 100% year over year, as the month notched the highest-ever number of billion-dollar venture rounds on record, per Crunchbase data.

By Ben Chisell The road to the top rarely runs in a straight line, but there are less circuitous routes to becoming CEO. According to one of the largest ongoing studies analyzing every CEO succession in the S&P 500 since 2000, there are four feeder roles: COOs, divisional CEOs, CFOs, and “leapfrog” leaders promoted from […]

We speak with Menlo Ventures' Matt Murphy about why AI is pushing the firm toward larger deals, what it has learned from its Anthropic relationship, and where he sees the next big opportunities.

Another week, another bevy of big rounds. The largest round was a reported $5 billion Nvidia-backed financing for foundational AI unicorn Safe Superintelligence, followed by a $1 billion investment in Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

We identified popular themes for seed-stage investment this year, including cancer therapeutics and space tech.

Amid soaring energy demand from AI data centers, Antora says it will use its new capital to speed up deployment of “large-scale” projects across the country.

Crunchbase News talks with former NEA partner Vanessa Larco about how she evaluates startups based on founder potential rather than initial ideas and how she looks for teams that leverage AI to make products dramatically faster, cheaper, or easier to use.

Centralize, an enterprise sales platform, emerges from stealth and shares exclusive news of its $15 million Series A funding round with Crunchbase News.

The biggest long-term gains from AI will not flow to heavyweight incumbents or many AI-native startups but to scrappy middle-market technology companies, the middleweights, argues Brad Bernstein, managing partner at FTV Capital. In this guest column he shares the five traits the best middleweight technology companies share.

Freehand has raised $75 million in Series B funding to scale autonomous AI agents that manage supply chain spend and back-office operations for enterprises.

Throne Science, a startup that makes an AI-powered toilet camera to track gut health and hydration, has raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Will Ventures, it told Crunchbase News exclusively. Emerson Collective, Workshop, LEAD VC, Salt VC, Accomplice, Moxxie Ventures, and several other investors also participated in the financing. The round […]

Startups at the intersection of AI and security have raised $855 million across more than 150 reported seed-stage rounds this year, per Crunchbase data.

Crunchbase News recently spoke with SE Ventures managing partner Amit Chaturvedy about how the company is backing startups building the technologies that underpin the AI economy — everything from data center infrastructure and grid resilience to robotics and industrial AI.