EverythingStartups Weekly

Welcome to all the new visionaries here who signed up last week! As usual, there’s loads going on in the startup & VC ecosystem, and this week’s news are more VC centric.

Let’s get into this week’s edition on what’s happening & the main highlights. But first, check out these resources:

• 120+ Active Pre-Seed - Series A Investors

• 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 🟣

• A new tech fund backed by Jeff Bezos is targeting everyday investors with a bet on the next wave of AI and tech innovation.

• OpenAI agrees to acquire Windsurf in a $3 billion deal, tightening its grip on the AI coding assistant market.

• Warren Buffett announces he’ll retire at the end of 2025, signalling the end of an era at Berkshire Hathaway.

• Kapor Capital’s Managing Partner Ulili Onovakpuri is stepping down, marking a major shift at the impact-driven VC firm.

• Venture capital grew 4x in the past decade with global funding jumping from $92B in 2014 to $415B in 2024.

• Fiverr CEO warns AI will take your job and urges workers to lean into adaptability and creativity.
  

• Bill Gates announces his plan to give ‘virtually all’ his money away and end the Gates Foundation in 20 years.
  

• Sequoia leads $1.5B tender offer for sales automation startup Clay. Despite the team’s average short tenure at the company, Clay is allowing employees who have at least a year of tenure to sell some of their shares at a relatively high share price to one of its existing investors, Sequoia.

 
Venture Capital Trends Report: April 2025 🟣

This week our team is excited to share with you our very first report: The Venture Capital Trends Report: April 2025!

We tracked every fund announced in April 2025 across the US and Europe, and here’s what stood out:

• AI isn’t slowing down

• Climate is heating up

• Cybersecurity is getting crowded

• Healthtech is back in the game

• Founders Fund dropped $4.6B on AI and aerospace

• The average fund size = $339M

• And 4 mega-funds took 65% of the capital

In total, April saw $11.87B in fresh capital across 35 new VC funds.

Download the full report over here.

We hope you like it and thank you for being here :)

 
Interesting Links 🟣

• VC firms are starting to act like private equity giants - Lightspeed, a16z, and Thrive are evolving into full-stack platforms, buying companies, not just betting on them.

• Why you cannot do VC if you don’t do pre-seed - Bucky Moore shares why pre-seed investing is essential in today’s VC landscape, with insights from his transition to Lightspeed after 7 years at Kleiner Perkins.

• Introducing the Rippling Founders Program - 1984 Ventures launches a fast-track funding initiative for current and aspiring Rippling employees, offering up to $1.2M to back new founder-led startups.

• The Resurgence of venture capital in San Francisco - VC firms are returning to the Bay Area as AI and Deep Tech concentration, along with shrinking fund sizes, drive a consolidation back to SF.

• What makes a VC Fund “Tier 1”? - A brutally honest look at how opacity, markups, and long timelines make it difficult to judge venture fund quality until nearly a decade has passed.

• Breaking the VC Mold - Why the best investors today don’t fit the traditional Silicon Valley archetype, and how a new generation of VCs is redefining the playbook.

• Luck is mostly just math - Justin Welsh breaks down why consistent effort, not chance, is the real engine behind “luck” in business and content creation.

• KYVC: Know Your VC - Mercury’s CFO shares his personal forecasting model to help startups prep for fundraising, align teams, and communicate clearly with investors.

🎙️ Marketing: Capital is everywhere. Trust isn’t.

Why audience-building might matter more than deal-sourcing for emerging funds.

Olivia O’Sullivan, a Partner at Forum VC, recently made a statement that is exactly where the VC narrative around marketing is heading towards:

If I were launching a venture fund today, I wouldn’t start with an Associate.
I’d start with a Head of Content.

That may sound counterintuitive, but the market has shifted. Last week, I posted about how a16z made headlines for acquiring Turpentine, Eric Torenberg’s media network. The message is clear: storytelling, distribution, and attention are becoming core to venture strategy, not just nice-to-haves.

As Paul Smalera recently put it, “The next legendary VC firm will operate more like a modern media company than a traditional partnership.” He’s not wrong, at least not for emerging managers.

Legacy firms like Sequoia or Benchmark have decades of brand equity. They don’t need a podcast to win a founder's trust. But new and mid-sized firms? They’re fighting for attention in a noisy market.

In that fight, content is what creates and builds trust before a pitch deck is ever opened. It attracts founders long before they’re fundraising. It allows GPs to speak directly to their target audience rather than through PR filters or paywalled interviews, but in their own words, with their own vision. The smartest funds know this, and they’re doubling down on media not as a marketing tool, but as infrastructure.

Capital is everywhere but at the end of the day, what’s scarce is attention, trust, and cultural relevance. The firms that figure out how to build an audience and and more importantly, a sense of fandom, will have a structural advantage.

Not just in sourcing, but in long-term brand durability. Venture capital was always about access. But access, increasingly, is earned through content that resonates.

Read more about marketing in venture capital over here.

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

• Tesseral, an AI-driven startup building authentication infrastructure for B2B software companies, raised a $3.3 million seed round backed by Y Combinator, Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham, and others.

• Foundation Alloy, a MIT spinout designing high-performance alloys for industrial manufacturing, secured $7.5 million in an extension round from Alumni Ventures, America’s Frontier Fund, Yamaha Motor Ventures, and others.

• Pulse Charter Connect, a logistics platform for organ transplants, raised $2 million in seed funding from Ivy Ventures, Simplex Ventures, and Cedars Sinai Health Ventures.

• Agree, an AI-powered e-signature and invoicing platform for SMBs and service professionals, raised a $7.2 million seed round led by Pelion Venture Partners.

• StackOne, a London-based startup using AI agents to streamline software integration for businesses, closed a $20 million Series A round led by GV.