Latest news with #AngelList
Entrepreneur
23-07-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Bengaluru Tops Karnataka's USD 1.7 Bn Tech Funding in H1 2025: Report
Fintech and enterprise applications led sectoral funding, attracting the highest capital. Among investors, Accel topped with the most deals, followed by active participation from Angel List, LetsVenture, and Premji Invest. You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. Karnataka's tech sector recorded a total funding of USD 1.7 billion in the first half of 2025, marking a significant decline from previous periods, as per the latest semi-annual report. The report, which assesses the state's tech funding activity across stages, sectors, and investor trends, highlights a continued slowdown in investment momentum. However, despite this downturn, some areas such as fintech and enterprise applications showed resilience. Bengaluru remained the dominant contributor to the funding activity, reinforcing its position as the core hub of Karnataka's tech landscape. Tracxn, which released the Karnataka Tech H1 2025 Funding Report, noted that the overall capital raised dropped by 30% compared to the second half of 2024 and 44% compared to the first half of 2024. The report attributes this contraction to reduced activity across most funding stages, with the exception of early-stage rounds, which showed a slight improvement. Seed-stage funding amounted to USD 141 million, registering a sharp fall of 39% from USD 233 million in the previous half and 41% from USD 239 million in the same period last year. Early-stage investments reached USD 611 million, reflecting a modest 15% increase from H2 2024, although still down 3% year-on-year. Late-stage deals dropped significantly, totaling USD 930 million in H1 2025, down from USD 1.6 billion in the previous half and USD 2.1 billion in H1 2024. Fintech emerged as the leading sector, attracting USD 701 million, more than triple the USD 197 million raised in H2 2024. This also marked a 57% growth from H1 2024. Enterprise Applications followed with USD 619 million, representing steady growth. Retail saw USD 542 million in funding, which, although up 27% from the previous half, was down substantially from the USD 1 billion raised in H1 2024. Only two companies managed to raise over USD 100 million this half, a drop from five such rounds in the same period last year. Groww raised USD 202 million in its Series F round, while Jumbotail secured USD 120 million through a Series D fundraise. These large rounds were predominantly seen in the fintech and retail sectors. On the public markets front, Ather Energy was the sole company to go public in H1 2025. Meanwhile, the state saw the creation of two unicorns, up from one in H2 2024 but fewer than the three seen in H1 2024. In terms of mergers and acquisitions, there were 26 deals in H1 2025. This marked a slight dip from 27 in the previous half but was an improvement over the 21 recorded in H1 2024. The acquisition of Fisdom by Groww for USD 150 million stood out as the largest deal in this period. The second-highest was the USD 26 million acquisition of Fintellix by ICRA. Bengaluru-based companies continued to dominate, accounting for a majority of the deals and total capital raised across the state. The city's role as the nerve center of Karnataka's tech investment activity remained unchanged. Among investors, Accel led with the most number of investments at 34 rounds. Angel List and LetsVenture were also active across stages. In the seed-stage category, Antler, and Rainmatter stood out. Accel, Alteria Capital and Peak XV Partners were the most prominent in early-stage deals, while Premji Invest, SoftBank Vision Fund and Creaegis took the lead in late-stage rounds. India-based Z47 added three new startups to its portfolio during this period. The funding landscape in Karnataka has undoubtedly cooled in the first half of 2025. However, activity in sectors like fintech and enterprise applications suggests that investor interest remains strong in targeted verticals. While overall deal volumes and mega-rounds declined, the emergence of new unicorns and sustained early-stage funding reflect underlying resilience in the state's innovation ecosystem.
Forbes
29-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Attention: The Real Currency Of Life, According To Naval Ravikant
Rarely can a three-hour podcast hold my attention. But Chris Williamson's conversation with Naval Ravikant did, in part because of the mic-dropping moment nestled near the end: 'The currency of life isn't money. It's not even time. It's attention.' AngelList Co-Founder and CEO Naval Ravikant I'm not sure there is a modern wisdom saying that better encapsulates the battle we all face in the frenetic information age in which we find ourselves. 'Money is important,' Naval explains, 'and let's you trade certain things for time, but it doesn't really buy you time.' He invites us to ask Warren Buffett or Michael Bloomberg if they can buy more time. (I'll be sure to send them a note.) And while access to good medical care is certainly a financial hurdle for many, the point is well taken: Even the richest person on their deathbed can't buy themselves another day of life. 'Time itself doesn't even mean that much,' Ravikant continues, 'because the time can be wasted because you're not really present for it. You're not really paying attention.' And that's where the killer question hits us right in the gut: I need look no further than yesterday to recall a moment where I found myself checking X and LinkedIn—while in the presence of my 19-month-old daughter, who resorted to irresistible adorableness to reclaim my attention. 'Hug?' she asked, reaching her little arms in my direction. 'Kiff?' (Her vernacular for kiss.) She offered instantaneous forgiveness, while I lamented the fact that I'd have to make this confession public, because the example is all too perfect for the point I'm making now: Unlike money, our time is a true zero-sum game. We can make more money in a myriad of ways, but each minute expires at the end of 60 seconds, regardless of the health of our cash flow or net worth statements. Time vs. Money vs. Attention How much of this most precious of currencies do we fritter away every day? Even those among us who may be inclined to wear our busyness as a badge of business honor. Perhaps especially us? Do the accolades, likes, and shares compensate for the misallocation of our attention? Don't get me wrong—I'm not telling you how to spend your attention. Sure, things like social media and video games might be easy targets for examples of misallocated musing, but the potentially life-changing insight illuminated here was first shared on social media, for goodness' sake. Furthermore, for more than a decade, my 19-year-old son has been able to spend quality hours of kinship with his cousin—700 miles away—every week, thanks to the advent of collaborative video games. The lesson isn't to eliminate, but to direct: choose the apps, the times, even the posts that reinforce your attention, not fracture it. Ravikant addresses another low-hanging fruit for judgementalism, the negative news. We can spend our attention on the news, Ravikant concedes. 'And if you want to, that's fine. There's no right or wrong here.' It's more about what you do with the attention we dedicate that makes the difference. 'Maybe you need to pick something in the news, learn about that problem, adopt that problem, and solve it,' for example. 'But be careful,' he concludes, 'because your attention is the only thing you have.' Lastly, I want to conclude with what this attention acknowledgment is not: It's not a rallying cry for glorifying the grind or a time-driven demand to maximize every moment with (apparent) productivity. Ravikant bursts a lot of hustle-culture bubbles when he says, 'Hard work is really overrated. How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy.' (Heresy!?) Elsewhere, he concludes that discipline is a poor substitute for genuine passion: 'Discipline is just you fighting with yourself to do something you don't want to do. So, I would say it's more important to find something that you want to do.' So, perhaps this is the conclusion, in the form of three questions:
Business Wire
26-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Secureframe and Fleet Forge Strategic Partnership to Enhance Open-Source Security Compliance
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Secureframe, the leading provider of security compliance automation, today announced that it has installed Fleet, the open-source platform for security and IT teams, as the default agent within Secureframe. This collaboration integrates Fleet's capabilities into Secureframe's platform, bringing the power of open device management to thousands of customers, including AngelList, Generali, Rand McNally, and Coda, enhancing their security posture and simplifying compliance at scale. "Our strategic partnership with Fleet delivers unparalleled value to our customers through lightning-fast performance and support across all computing platforms,' says Shrav Mehta, Founder and CEO of Secureframe. Share "Our strategic partnership with Fleet delivers unparalleled value to our customers through lightning-fast performance and support across all computing platforms,' says Shrav Mehta, Founder and CEO of Secureframe. "This collaboration provides security teams with the access needed to perform effectively, while ensuring complete transparency for employees regarding the code running on their systems." A cornerstone of this partnership is Fleet's open-source foundation. In today's security-conscious landscape, transparency is essential. Fleet's core, built upon the widely adopted open-source osquery project created by Fleet's cofounder, allows customers and the broader community to audit and verify the software's functionality. This commitment to openness fosters trust with employees and aligns with Secureframe's mission to empower businesses with trustworthy security and compliance solutions. "The integration of Secureframe and Fleet represents a significant advancement for our organization," says Thomas Buley, Secureframe customer and CEO at Sightglass. "Having access to the same open-source technology trusted by companies like Stripe gives us confidence in our security infrastructure." This partnership enhances Secureframe's scalability, making it an even more compelling solution for organizations of all sizes looking to automate compliance. As organizations grow, their needs evolve rapidly. They secure deals requiring new compliance standards, teams expand globally, employees require various operating systems, product features demand testing across different platforms, and acquisitions may introduce unique IT and security approaches. "When companies grow, the growth can happen very suddenly," says Mike McNeil, CEO at Fleet, "Secureframe gives companies the immediate compliance wins they need to run their business, while future-proofing the next chapter of their growth so they don't have to rebuild everything from scratch." This strategic alliance between Secureframe and Fleet signals a shift toward a more open, transparent, and automated future for security and compliance built on open-source technologies. About Fleet Fleet is the open-source platform for IT and security teams with thousands of computers. Organizations like MrBeast, Uber, and hundreds more use Fleet to improve and simplify how they manage and secure devices. Fleet's mission is to bring transparency and control to the world of computing devices through its open and extensible platform. Learn more at About Secureframe Secureframe is the leading security and privacy compliance automation platform, helping organizations achieve and maintain continuous compliance with standards like CMMC 2.0, FedRAMP 20x, SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and more. Thousands of fast-growing startups and global enterprises trust Secureframe to simplify compliance, reduce risk, and build trust with customers and partners. Backed by top-tier investors including Kleiner Perkins, Gradient Ventures, and Base10 Partners, Secureframe is redefining what's possible in security and compliance. Learn more at
Business Insider
06-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Marc Andreessen thinks AI can do every job in the world — except his
Think I'm kidding? On an a16z podcast last week, Andreessen opined that being a venture capitalist may be a profession that is "quite literally timeless." "When the AIs are doing everything else," he continued, "that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing." Here's the logic. Andreessen starts by talking about all the things that people thought might disrupt the way VCs operate — like the Craigslist-style approach of AngelList, or crowdfunding. "The other form of structural change, of course, is AI," Andreessen says. Then he issues a challenge to the AI crowd: "All right, smart guys. You're sitting around doing all this analysis, and you have all these smart people doing all this modeling and all this research and so forth. Why can't you just plug this into Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini and have it tell you what to invest in?" The reason, Andreessen explains, is that it takes a VC like him to know how to pick a winner. He throws out a bunch of examples, going all the way back to the whaling industry 500 years ago: book publishers, movie studio executives, talent scouts at music labels. (I'll spare you the details here, but I spoke with an economist who has analyzed the whaling industry, and he says MarcGPT is pretty much wrong on every count.) Andreessen insists that these are key jobs that spring up "any time you have a part of the economy in which you have an entrepreneur going on a high-risk, high-return endeavor where it is far from clear what is going to work, and there are many more aspirants than there is money to fund them." Here, Andreessen argues, is where the human element is irreplaceable. "You're not just funding them," he says. "You have to actually work with them to execute the entire project. That's art. That's not science. That's art. We would like it to be science, but, like, it's art." Now correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a lot of AI folks have been trying to tell us that AI can make art. Last year, even Andreessen said that AI had enough of a sense of humor to " save comedy." But apparently it can't do his art. Which brings us to the wildest bit. Andreessen says he knows that venture investing is an ineffable, intuitive, intrinsically human skill precisely because venture capitalists are very bad at it. "The great VCs have a success rate of getting, I don't know, two out of 10 of the great companies of the decade, right?" he says. "If it was science, you could eventually have somebody who just dials in and gets eight out of 10. But in the real world, it's not like that. You're in the fluke business, and there's an intangibility to it. There's a taste aspect." Even accepting Andreessen's premise — that VCs contribute better advice than AI on how to run a business — it looks like he's wrong about whether he's replaceable. In a recent survey by the enterprise software company SAP, 75% of C-level executives at billion-dollar companies said AI already gives better business advice than their friends and colleagues. And 38% said they trust AI to make business decisions. The kind of people Andreessen counts on for his livelihood are already starting to think he's obsolete. But Andreessen's portrait of how venture capital works doesn't actually accord with reality. VC investors say they're looking for disruptive innovation. In practice, they have operated pretty much like any good-old-boy network, consistently funding way more white men than women or people of color — often the same white men they knew from previous startups, whether they succeeded or not. And economists say it's an open question whether VCs actually add value or are just the most basic kind of "pickers," identifying companies that would have been successful without them. That's the kind of operation that large language models are pretty good at. Identifying patterns in big sets of data is, like, their whole thing. I actually kind of agree with Andreessen. I'm skeptical that any form of AI — much less the generative, chatbot-type products of OpenAI or Google — will ever be able to do high-level critical and creative thinking as well as a human. But the reality is, the quality of the AI's work might not matter. History is essentially one big graveyard of artisanal jobs that wound up being automated, even though the automation produced an objectively inferior product. Andreessen, like so many of us, wants to think he's special — that no machine can ever do what he does. But he can't have it both ways. If he's right that artificial intelligence can't perform the kinds of skills his job requires, then he's wrong to be investing in companies that promise it can. In any case, when Andreessen says "AI can't do my job," the job he's describing isn't a venture capitalist. It's not even a run-of-the-mill investor, who buys stock in a company. The core function that Andreessen is lionizing is being a gatekeeper — the power over who gets to join the club of influence. An AI that trained on every decision every venture capitalist ever made and tried to make them line up with various definitions of success might go on to choose very different kinds of companies. In a world of vcAI, startups might finally get backed on their merit, instead of on how much their founders look and talk like Andreessen. Who knows? An AI VC's loony, black-box heuristics might favor things like whether an idea is "good for humanity" or "promotes class mobility." What if it started to hallucinate something about "redistributing wealth"?
Business Insider
06-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
AI for thee, but not for VC
Marc Andreessen is, arguably, the most famous venture capitalist on earth. Cofounder of the legendary VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, inventor of the first popular web browser, and by reputation such a widely read intellectual egghead that his colleagues call him "MarcGPT." And as befits his nickname, Andreessen is a big believer in a future powered by artificial intelligence. His firm — "a16z" to Silicon Valley sophisticates — has invested in Elon Musk's xAI and Sam Altman's OpenAI. Andreessen has called AI"our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone," and "a universal problem solver" that "ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves." But for Andreessen, there is one job that AI will never do as well as a living, breathing human being: his. Think I'm kidding? On an a16z podcast last week, Andreessen opined that being a venture capitalist may be a profession that is "quite literally timeless." "When the AIs are doing everything else," he continued, "that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing." Here's the logic. Andreessen starts by talking about all the things that people thought might disrupt the way VCs operate — like the Craigslist-style approach of AngelList, or crowdfunding. "The other form of structural change, of course, is AI," Andreessen says. Then he issues a challenge to the AI crowd: "All right, smart guys. You're sitting around doing all this analysis, and you have all these smart people doing all this modeling and all this research and so forth. Why can't you just plug this into Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini and have it tell you what to invest in?" The reason, Andreessen explains, is that it takes a VC like him to know how to pick a winner. He throws out a bunch of examples, going all the way back to the whaling industry 500 years ago: book publishers, movie studio executives, talent scouts at music labels. (I'll spare you the details here, but I spoke with an economist who has analyzed the whaling industry, and he says MarcGPT is pretty much wrong on every count.) Andreessen insists that these are key jobs that spring up "any time you have a part of the economy in which you have an entrepreneur going on a high-risk, high-return endeavor where it is far from clear what is going to work, and there are many more aspirants than there is money to fund them." Here, Andreessen argues, is where the human element is irreplaceable. "You're not just funding them," he says. "You have to actually work with them to execute the entire project. That's art. That's not science. That's art. We would like it to be science, but, like, it's art." Now correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a lot of AI folks have been trying to tell us that AI can make art. Last year, even Andreessen said that AI had enough of a sense of humor to " save comedy." But apparently it can't do his art. Which brings us to the wildest bit. Andreessen says he knows that venture investing is an ineffable, intuitive, intrinsically human skill precisely because venture capitalists are very bad at it. "The great VCs have a success rate of getting, I don't know, two out of 10 of the great companies of the decade, right?" he says. "If it was science, you could eventually have somebody who just dials in and gets eight out of 10. But in the real world, it's not like that. You're in the fluke business, and there's an intangibility to it. There's a taste aspect." Even accepting Andreessen's premise — that VCs contribute better advice than AI on how to run a business — it looks like he's wrong about whether he's replaceable. In a recent survey by the enterprise software company SAP, 75% of C-level executives at billion-dollar companies said AI already gives better business advice than their friends and colleagues. And 38% said they trust AI to make business decisions. The kind of people Andreessen counts on for his livelihood are already starting to think he's obsolete. But Andreessen's portrait of how venture capital works doesn't actually accord with reality. VC investors say they're looking for disruptive innovation. In practice, they have operated pretty much like any good-old-boy network, consistently funding way more white men than women or people of color — often the same white men they knew from previous startups, whether they succeeded or not. And economists say it's an open question whether VCs actually add value or are just the most basic kind of "pickers," identifying companies that would have been successful without them. That's the kind of operation that large language models are pretty good at. Identifying patterns in big sets of data is, like, their whole thing. I actually kind of agree with Andreessen. I'm skeptical that any form of AI — much less the generative, chatbot-type products of OpenAI or Google — will ever be able to do high-level critical and creative thinking as well as a human. But the reality is, the quality of the AI's work might not matter. History is essentially one big graveyard of artisanal jobs that wound up being automated, even though the automation produced an objectively inferior product. Andreessen, like so many of us, wants to think he's special — that no machine can ever do what he does. But he can't have it both ways. If he's right that artificial intelligence can't perform the kinds of skills his job requires, then he's wrong to be investing in companies that promise it can. In any case, when Andreessen says "AI can't do my job," the job he's describing isn't a venture capitalist. It's not even a run-of-the-mill investor, who buys stock in a company. The core function that Andreessen is lionizing is being a gatekeeper — the power over who gets to join the club of influence. An AI that trained on every decision every venture capitalist ever made and tried to make them line up with various definitions of success might go on to choose very different kinds of companies. In a world of vcAI, startups might finally get backed on their merit, instead of on how much their founders look and talk like Andreessen. Who knows? An AI VC's loony, black-box heuristics might favor things like whether an idea is "good for humanity" or "promotes class mobility." What if it started to hallucinate something about "redistributing wealth"? him.
