RankIng The World's Top Venture Capitalists In 2025
O
ver the last two decades, a big stock market listing or sale were key for VCs to land a spot on the Midas List. Now the soaring valuations of a new crop of super-sized private startups like OpenAI, SpaceX and Databricks are shaking up the rankings of the world's best tech investors.
That shift has seen investors from Silicon Valley like Sequoia and the so-called PayPal Mafia further locking in their positions on the list but it's also brought a crop of new faces with a talent for picking future unicorns.
Cody Pickens for Forbes
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32 minutes ago
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It's All Going On: Business And Society In The Next Few Years
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L answers this by saying that the company will be 'especially vulnerable, since they rely heavily on consumers, and are also increasingly a product company that competes with products built on their API.' The author's take on the company's likely strategy goes like this: 'Their strategy (internally and to investors, though not publicly) is to be the first to achieve something like a drop-in agentic AI worker and use that to convert their tech lead over open source into >10% of world GDP in revenues. They've raised tens of billions and make billions in revenue from their products anyway, so they can bankroll these efforts just fine.' Meanwhile, the author calls Anthropic a 'jewel of model quality' and a 'Mecca of technical talent', in some great alliteration, while suggesting that XAI and DeepSeek will be the open source leaders. As for winners and losers, here's the take: 'Investors want to see 'real AGI', not just post-scarcity in software. 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Consider, if you will, the prophetic visions of call centers: 'A surprisingly retro success is call centers of humans who are ready to jump in and put an AI agent back on task, or where AI agents can offload work chunks that are heavy on trust/authentication (like confirming a transaction) or on button-clicking UI complexity (like lots of poor legacy software), to human crowdworkers who click the buttons for them, while the AI does the knowledge/intelligence-intensive parts of the job on its own.' On a sidenote, L also imagines the Nobel prize might be contested between a human and an AI. I liked this part (italics mine): 'Credit for the Nobel Prize is the subject of much discussion, but eventually (in 2030) ends up split between Demis Hassabis, one of the physicists who was most involved, and the most important AI system. Everyone has Opinions.' Theorizing that the Communist Chinese Party unveiled its 15th five year plan in 2026, L also talks about the rivalry between the two major empires – the middle kingdom in Asia, and America in the west. The author also notes that companies like Huawei may be close on Nvidia's heels. The American industry and government, L notes, will be likely focusing on strategies to contain China and prevent it from getting key technologies to dominate the global market and pursue espionage goals. 'There's increasing demand for really air-tight software from a US defense establishment that is obsessed with cyber advantage over especially China, but also Russia, Iran, and North Korea,' L writes. There's even a part where L suggests that human populations will decline because people will be choosing to spend time with their robotic companions instead of other flesh and blood humans, whereby the old manual system of procreation may take a backseat. Besides a trend toward human-AI romances, L also goes into some of how the rank and file may react to these changes. The author talks about 'ChatGPTese' as the noticeable product of the LLM to human audiences. Here's the take on what's likely to happen with AI fakers calling humans on the phone or whatever interface is predominant: 'AI scam calls with deepfaked audio and video start being a nuisance by mid 2025 but are mostly reined in by a series of security measures pushed by platforms (and by regulation in the EU), people creating new trust protocols with each other ('what's our secret passphrase?'), increased ID verification features, and growing social distrust towards any evidence that's only digital.' Basically, L predicts, we will learn to live with normalized AI and what that looks like, as a world with intense automation emerges. Most of us know this intuitively, are preparing for it now. But I would think that for most people, it's extremely hard to envision just how this will work. In any case, do yourself a favor, read the entire essay, and think about all of these predictions as a whole, to try to read the tea leaves on the rest of the 21st century.
Business Wire
an hour ago
- Business Wire
HubSpot Launches First CRM Deep Research Connector With ChatGPT
BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--More than 250,000 businesses rely on HubSpot as their single source of truth for customer data across marketing, sales, and service. This complete view of the customer journey gives our customers an edge, especially in an era where AI is only as powerful as the data behind it. Today, we're excited to announce that HubSpot is the first CRM to launch a deep research connector with ChatGPT. With over 75% of HubSpot customers already using ChatGPT*, we're making it easy for them to apply powerful, doctorate-level research and analysis to their own customer data and context–and to put those business insights to work. This is game-changing for go-to-market teams. Within ChatGPT, for example: Marketers can ask 'find my highest-converting cohorts from recent contacts and create a tailored nurture sequence to boost engagement,' then use the insights to launch an automated workflow in HubSpot. Sales teams can find new opportunities by asking, 'segment my target companies by annual revenue, industry, and technology stack. Based on that, identify the top opportunities for enterprise expansion,' then bring them back to HubSpot for prospecting. Customer success teams can say, 'identify inactive companies with growth potential and generate targeted plays to re-engage and revive pipeline,' then take those actions in HubSpot to drive retention. Support teams can say, 'analyze seasonal patterns in ticket volume by category to forecast support team staffing needs for the upcoming quarter,' and activate Breeze Customer Agent in HubSpot to handle spikes in support tickets. 'Launching the HubSpot deep research connector means businesses and their employees get faster, better insights because ChatGPT has more context. We're thrilled to work together to bring powerful AI to many of today's most important workflows.' - Nate Gonzalez, Head of Business Products at OpenAI. 'The HubSpot connector is like having an extra analyst on the team, empowering sales reps to identify risks, opportunities, and next best actions,' said Colin Johnson, Senior Manager, CRM at Youth Enrichment Brands. 'For a non-technical user, the fact that it's easy to use and talks directly to my data is huge.' 'We're building tools that help businesses lead through the AI shift, not just adapt to it,' said Karen Ng, SVP of Product and Partnerships at HubSpot. 'By connecting HubSpot CRM data directly to ChatGPT, even small teams without time or data resources can run deep analysis and take action on those insights — fueling better outcomes across marketing, sales, and service.' Easy to use and easy to trust HubSpot customers who have admin controls can enable the connector for their organization by going to ChatGPT and turning on the HubSpot deep research connector function, selecting HubSpot as a data source, and authenticating their account. From there, any user in the organization can toggle it on, sign in, and start asking questions. In addition to being easy to use, the HubSpot deep research connector is also easy to trust. We built it to ensure users only see the CRM data they're allowed to access in HubSpot. For example, individual sales reps will only see pipeline data for deals they own or manage. With the HubSpot deep research connector, customer data is not used for AI training in ChatGPT. Availability The HubSpot deep research connector will automatically be available to all HubSpot customers across all tiers with a paid ChatGPT plan. (EU: Team, Enterprise, and Edu; all other regions: Team, Enterprise, Pro, Plus, and Edu). All available languages can be found here. *HubSpot 2025 Q1 AI customer sentiment survey About HubSpot HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) is the leading AI-powered customer platform for growing businesses. The platform includes engagement hubs for marketing, sales, and customer service, a connected Smart CRM, and an ecosystem of over 1,800 integrations—all built on a unified data foundation that powers HubSpot's AI and enables smarter, faster, more personalized customer experiences. More than 250,000 customers across 135+ countries use HubSpot to unify their data, align their teams, and grow better. HubSpot is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Learn more at
Yahoo
an hour ago
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HubSpot Launches First CRM Deep Research Connector With ChatGPT
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