EverythingStartups Weekly

Welcome to all the new visionaries here who signed up last week! We’ve updated the EverythingStartups website with a new look, take a peek 🙂 

Also, it’s been a CRAZY week of news in startup world, from CEO affairs, to sky-high valuations, a new unicorn in Europe, top talent bouncing between high-profile startups, and a bunch of top-tier VCs announcing their own funds. Truly - what a week!

Let’s get into this week’s edition on what’s happening in startup & VC world & the main highlights.

But first, check out these resources:

• 120+ Active Pre-Seed - Series A investors

• 48 pre-seed accelerators

• Latest VC funds announced

• 350+ SaaS investors

• LPs investing in VC funds

• Understanding founder vs VC investment memos

Partnership & collaboration opportunities. 

Cheers,
Ivelina

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Important News 🟣

• Cognition picks up what’s left of Windsurf after OpenAI’s $3B deal falls through and Google hires away key talent. No doubt, Agentic IDEs are the next big thing in AI dev tools.

• Former Sequoia partner Matt Miller raises $355 million for new VC firm Evantic, with Sequoia backing the cross-Atlantic fund focused on B2B startups from Series B onward.

• Grayscale confidentially files for IPO with the SEC, looking to follow Circle’s market debut as Trump-era crypto momentum reopens Wall Street’s listing pipeline.

• Anthropic rehires two key engineers behind Claude Code just weeks after they jumped to rival Anysphere. The move shows how intense the talent race in generative AI has become.

• GPx, a new VC firm from Brian Singerman and Lee Linden, targets $500 million for a hybrid strategy blending fund-of-funds and direct Series B co-investments. Peter Thiel is backing the fund to help small VCs retain ownership in breakout startups.

• Lovable becomes a unicorn with $200M Series A just 8 months after launch.

• OpenAI announces ChatGPT agent for web browsing.

• The Coldplay 'kiss cam' clip the internet can't stop talking about. A video appearing to show a tech CEO and his head of HR embracing at a Coldplay concert is spreading around social media at the speed of sound.

Interesting Links 🟣

• $5.4 billion, three deals, one coding startup. Simon Taylor unpacks the wild 72-hour saga of Windsurf, where OpenAI walked, Google paid for the founders, and Cognition scooped up the rest.

• What happens after a VC fund is raised? A breakdown of the full venture cycle, from fundraising to exits, showing how capital flows, power shifts, and carry gets paid (or not) across a decade-long game.

• Private equity’s mid-level hiring market is frozen. A sharp take on why roles from VPs to Principals are stuck in limbo, as exits stall, rates stay high, and firms cling to past carry dreams that may never materialize.

• What do 500 million ChatGPT users actually ask? A new Visual Capitalist breakdown reveals that while software dev still leads, prompts about history, finance, and society are rising fast, hinting at how the AI use case mix is evolving.

• Are AI Overviews citing machines more than humans? Yes, according to new Ahrefs research, with 88% of cited pages showing signs of AI assistance. We may be entering a world where AI-generated content loops back into itself.

• What’s it really like inside OpenAI? Ex-employee Calvin French-Owen lifts the curtain on startup chaos at scale, Slack-driven launches, and the messy magic behind Codex in this candid behind-the-scenes blog post.

• A group chat, a live demo, and one very unfortunate message on the big screen. Jared Hecht shares a cringe-filled fundraising story every founder should read before their next pitch.

🎙️ 10 Actionable Steps to Break Into Venture Capital

From self-starters to future investors, here's what actually works:

 
New VC Fund Highlight: Rex Salisbury’s Cambrian Ventures raises new fund 🟣

Rex Salisbury’s Cambrian Ventures has unleashed Fund II, a $20M fund to back fintech founders building the next wave of financial infrastructure while others flee the sector. Cambrian's writing checks at pre-seed and seed stage, betting on founders who see opportunity where others see saturation.

Based in San Francisco, Cambrian's been grinding since its 2022 debut, focusing on early-stage fintech when "only 1% of global financial services revenues has been captured by fintech" - a contrarian take in a cooled market.

Brownie points for: 

🍪 Graduation machine: With 33 portfolio companies and ~50% securing Series A funding (vs. 15.4% industry average), Cambrian's hit rate screams founder selection mastery.

🍪 Network gravity: Rex's a16z fintech founding member credentials + 20K newsletter subscribers + 1,800-founder Slack = deal flow goldmine and LP roster featuring NerdWallet, Plaid, Betterment execs.

🍪 AI-native vision: Spotting multi-product opportunities like Every (banking + accounting + HR in one) shows Rex gets how AI transforms fintech's unit economics.

But... Can Cambrian keep defying fintech's winter?

Betting big on fintech while rates stay elevated and institutional appetite remains cool - visionary or mistimed?

PS: Track new VC funds raised here.

Top Pre-Seed to Series A Funding Rounds This Week 🟣

• Lovable, a Swedish vibe coding startup, raised $200M Series A in a round led by Accel.

• Duranta, a Seattle-based AI platform for landscapers, raised a $7M seed round led by Base10 Partners.

• Juno, a remote travel management startup for guest travelers, raised $4M seed led by Avid Ventures.

• Kaleidoscope, a New York startup making original science and tech podcasts, raised $5M Series A co-led by Burda and North Base Media.

• ProductNow, a Palo Alto startup using AI agents to help teams plan and execute, raised $6M seed led by Sierra Ventures.