EverythingStartups Weekly

Welcome to everyone new here who signed up last week!

This past week was probably one of Twitter’s best moments, for context scroll to the bottom to see what I’m talking about (if you’re not plugged in on there you will prob be confused as hell).

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

But first, you might find some of these resources helpful:

• 120+ Active Pre-Seed - Series A investors

• New VC Funds database

• Venture Capital Trends October 2025

• 48 pre-seed accelerators

• 350+ SaaS investors

• LPs investing in VC funds 

For partnership queries: [email protected]

New Instagram account with more great startup & VC content.

Cheers,
Ivelina

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New VC Funds 🟣

Fresh capital in the past week…

• GIMIC Ventures – €100M for Health, DeepTech, B2B SaaS across Europe

• Section Partners – $189M for Late-Stage Tech, Structured Equity, Direct Investments

• Balnord – €70M for Frontier Tech, Dual-Use Startups in the Baltic Sea Region

• Founders Co-op – $50M for Early-Stage Startups in the Pacific Northwest

• 359 Capital (formerly Sapphire Sport) – $300M for Sports, Media, Entertainment

• Root Ventures – $190M for Hardware, Robotics, Deep Tech Founders

• Forbion – €200M for Biotech, Sustainability, Climate, Biological Innovation

• Glasswing Ventures – $200M for AI-Native, Frontier Enterprise Tech

• Step Fund – $35M for Early-Stage Startups in Southern Europe

• Vendep Capital – €100M for Early-Stage B2B SaaS in Europe

• Backed VC – $100M for Day 1 Founders, Category-Defining Startups

• Park Rangers Capital – $4.3M for Durable, High-Growth Early-Stage Startups

Check them out here.

Vibe Check 🟣

Signals 📈

• LPs say venture funds are aging badly, with some now stretching to 20 years, with returns increasingly locked in overvalued startups.

• Peter Thiel’s hedge fund quietly sold its entire $100M Nvidia stake last quarter, just ahead of the chipmaker’s earnings. He joins SoftBank and other major players cashing out amid growing fears of an AI valuation bubble.

• AngelList and Entrepreneur spotlight 52 emerging VCs actively backing early-stage startups.

• Lovable has hit $200M ARR just a year after launch, doubling revenue in four months.

• Jeff Bezos is back in operator mode as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a stealth AI startup with $6.2B in funding.

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the AI investment boom shows “elements of irrationality” and warns no company, including Alphabet, is immune if the bubble bursts.

Brain Fuel ⚡

• Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire on why Elon Musk outcompetes everyone.

• 31 ways to grow your startup fast in 2025.

• Harvard Business Review interviews 7 prominent VCs on how gen AI is reshaping VC and the startup landscape.

• Silicon Valley is churning out teen founders as VCs push younger talent into high-pressure pipelines. The YC median founder age is now 24, echoing Hollywood’s Mickey Mouse Club with fame, speed and burnout risks baked in.

• A new wave of “Neolabs” is taking over Silicon Valley: AI startups founded by ex-model lab researchers, many already valued at over $1B at seed with little to no revenue. As Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures puts it, this is venture capital betting on pedigree over product.

• Is Marc Andreessen the face of tech’s moral drift (funding gambling apps, bot farms, and AI misuse) while brushing off ethics as culture war noise?

• The head of Sequoia Capital just stepped down, and these could be part of a bigger shift: top talent is leaving firms to build their own startups. With teams fragmented across thousands of ventures, it’s never been easier to start something, but scaling it to generational size is harder than ever.

• Gemini 3 refused to believe it was 2025, and hilarity ensued.

• a16z on Jevons Paradox in action: cheaper compute drives more demand, not less.

Hot rounds 🔥

• Ramp raised $300 million in a round led by Lightspeed at a $32 billion valuation, with an employee tender offer included.

• Kalshi raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in a round led by Sequoia and CapitalG, with Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Anthos Capital, and Neo also participating. The prediction market lets users bet on future events and closed a $300M round just two months earlier.

• Doppel raised $70 million in a Series C round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, valuing the three-year-old social engineering defense startup at over $600 million. Andreessen Horowitz, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, South Park Commons, and others joined.

• Suno raised $250 million in a Series C round led by Menlo Ventures at a $2.45 billion valuation. Nvidia’s NVentures, Hallwood Media, Lightspeed, and Matrix also participated in the AI music generation startup’s latest round.

• Numeric raised $51 million in a Series B round led by IVP. The AI-powered accounting startup is now backed by Menlo Ventures, Founders Fund, Alkeon, 8VC, and others.

Deep dive of the week: The Complete Guide to Venture Capital Fund Metrics 🟣 

My research work at GoingVC….

Venture capital is a business built on asymmetric outcomes, long feedback loops, and limited visibility. Capital is locked for a decade and success rides on a handful of outliers.

And yet, GPs and LPs need to make high-stakes decisions every quarter with imperfect data. In that kind of environment, metrics are literally survival tools.

But here’s the catch: the same metrics can mean very different things depending on where you sit. A GP might tout a strong TVPI. An LP might want to know how much of that is realized.

In this article I break down the metrics that matter, and show how they work together. From fund-level KPIs like IRR and DPI, to startup performance metrics like CAC and churn, to the platform-level indicators VCs use to run their firms, to the regional variations that change what “good” looks like, we’ll map the full terrain.