EverythingStartups Weekly

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

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• Latest VC funds announced

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Important News + Data 🟣

What people are talking about…

• OpenAI announces AI-powered hiring platform to take on LinkedIn. It will connect businesses and employees, a service that would put the outfit in close competition with LinkedIn. The product is called the OpenAI Jobs Platform, and the company expects to launch the service by mid-2026.

• Google launched Nano Banana, its Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, offering instant AI-powered editing and generation that rivals Photoshop with speed, realism, and built-in watermarks for trust and safety.

• Scale AI sues rival Mercor and a former employee for allegedly stealing over 100 confidential documents tied to customer strategies, as the two compete for multimillion-dollar contracts.

• Vibe coding startups face mounting security concerns after breaches and vulnerabilities. Investors keep pouring in as valuations surge, with Loveable eyeing $4 billion and Anysphere doubling every two months.

• Revolut launches a secondary share sale at a $75 billion valuation, up from $45 billion last year, as the fintech accelerates its push to rival major lenders.

• Anthropic raises $13B Series F at a $183B valuation, with ICONIQ, Fidelity, and Lightspeed leading the round as revenue surges past $5B run rate in 2025.

• Human Behavior, a YC startup founded by 20- and 22-year-old dropouts, raised $5 million from General Catalyst, Paul Graham, Vercel Ventures, and Y Combinator to analyze user behavior and product adoption with vision AI.

Interesting Links 🟣

These caught my eye this week…

• Mark Zuckerberg sues Mark Zuckerberg - ok, this one made me laugh a lot!

• Stanford data shows AI may be cutting youth jobs after all. Derek Thompson reviews new Stanford data showing a 13% decline in employment for young workers in AI-exposed roles, raising fresh questions about the future of entry-level work.

• The $100K bet that rewired Silicon Valley. The Thiel Fellowship has produced $750B+ in value with companies like Ethereum, Figma, Scale AI, and OYO. Sourcery interviews co-founder Danielle Strachman on contrarian thinking and what’s next.

• Martin Casado isn’t backing down. In an interview with Eric Newcomer he argues early-stage winners look more like consensus bets than contrarian outliers, unpacking what that means for venture strategy and founder pitches.

• VC fund math can be brutal. Fees, long lockups, and stretched liquidity windows often leave LPs worse off than a simple S&P 500 index fund. Adam Rossi lays out why prestige rarely matches returns.

• The Gen AI consumer app race. Andreessen Horowitz’s fifth Top 100 ranking shows the ecosystem stabilizing, with Google, Grok, and Meta making gains while vibe coding tools like Replit and Lovable break into the mainstream.

🎙️ Venture Capital Trends Report August 2025

I tracked all new VC funds (that have been publicly disclosed) in August and there is a clear pattern - specialization beats scale and the death of the mega-fund era is here.

The full 23-page report with a breakdown of fundraising data, sector and geographic focus, key LPs and backers, what the data means for founders & fund managers, and more, is available over here. 

~31 new funds launched with around $3.5+ billion in capital, and the median fund size was around $79M. 

But instead of mega-funds dominating the headlines, we saw focused managers with operator networks and domain expertise winning LP trust.

The 3 trends reshaping VC:

1. Specialization wins

- AI/ML funds: 21% of all launches
- Healthcare subspecialists: 16%
- Climate tech getting serious institutional backing: 12%
- Defense/Dual-use: 7%

Gone are the days of "spray and pray" generalists. If you don't have deep domain expertise, you're already losing.

2. Geography is flattening

While 56% of funds are still US-based, Croatia, Poland, and Denmark are building institutional-grade funds. The next unicorn might come from Zagreb, not just Silicon Valley.

3. Operators are eating the world

The hottest funds are led by former OpenAI, Palantir, SpaceX, and Coinbase operators. Technical expertise > traditional finance background.

The venture world is shifting from "how much can you deploy?" to "how much value can you add?"

Read more.

(Full table is in the report btw + planning to make this report a new monthly thing!!).

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

Watch out for these…

• Advisor.com, a marketplace connecting individual investors with vetted fiduciary advisors, raised a $9 million Series A round. Walkabout Ventures led the deal.

• Artificial Societies, a startup building AI-driven virtual populations so marketers can test how people might respond to ads and content, raised a $3.35 million seed round from Point72 Ventures and Y Combinator.

• Loman AI, a startup providing AI phone agents for restaurants to handle orders, reservations, and customer questions, raised a $3.5 million seed round. Next Coast Ventures, TenOneTen Ventures, and Antler joined.

• Flex, a startup helping retailers accept health savings and flexible spending accounts directly at checkout, raised a $15 million Series A. The round was co-led by First Round and Core VC, with Rethink Impact and Cameron Ventures also investing.

• Offgrid Energy Labs, an Indian startup developing zinc-bromine batteries as a lower-cost alternative to lithium for energy storage, raised a $15 million Series A round led by Archean Chemicals with Ankur Capital also joining.