VCs’ 2026 Tech Bets🤖, AI’s Next Moat🕸️, State of Startups Report📊

Another week, another pulse check on venture.

From top insights and reports to new funds, VC jobs, resources, and the hottest deals, here’s everything you need to stay ahead.

Let’s dive in 👇

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In-Depth Insights 🔍

• VCs’ 2026 Tech Bets: Tiny Teams, Agents, ROI 🤖
  Investors expect lean headcounts, autonomous assistants in production, and stricter payback demands to separate hype from value. They also foresee more acquihires, a reopening IPO window, and a valuation reset as enterprise buyers insist on measurable outcomes. [Business Insider]

  

• The Average Founder Ages 6 Months Each Year 🧓🏽
  A longitudinal look at venture data suggests company builders are getting older as AI and B2B weight experience, networks, and domain depth. Media highlights youthful anomalies, but the center of gravity reflects technical PhDs and seasoned operators commercializing deep tech. [Tomasz Tunguz]

  

• Free Founder OS: 58 Templates + 10k Investors 🧰
  A stage-based workspace bundles idea-to-scale tooling, a large investor database, and Notion-powered workflows to compress cycle times. The pitch: replace operational drag with clearer systems so small teams can iterate faster and raise more predictably.

  

• Meta Buys Manus for ~$2–3B to Own the Agent Layer 🧠
  The deal signals a shift from model supremacy to distribution plus execution, embedding autonomous workflows across consumer and business surfaces. Folding agentic capability into messaging and assistant products aims to turn everyday tasks into automated outcomes at scale.

  

• The $100k Check That Helped Launch Google 🎓
  A fast conviction from a technically credible backer turned an early academic project into a company with generational impact. The story underscores how judgment, timing, and network density can outweigh polish in the earliest moments of company formation.

  

• FanDuel’s Unicorn Exit That Left Founders With Nothing 🚫
  Deal mechanics and preferences can quietly reallocate proceeds despite impressive private valuations. Modeling waterfalls and aligning governance early can prevent headline outcomes that bypass the people who built the business.

  

• Nvidia’s $20B Groq License, No Acquisition 🤝
  A mega-license for core technology accelerates deployment while side-stepping regulatory timelines and preserving independence. This “own access, not ownership” pattern could reshape incentives for teams, investors, and how value flows to employees.

  

• Google Treats EU Fines as a Line Item 🏛️
  Normalizing recurring penalties reframes rule-breaking as a budgeted choice and raises barriers for smaller rivals who can’t amortize compliance shocks. Supporters call it necessary enforcement, while critics see a structure that entrenches scale advantages.

  

• SoftBank Completes $40B OpenAI Investment 💰
  The final tranche lifts the stake to roughly low-teens ownership as the investor aligns capital with rising compute and data center demand. Funds bolster infrastructure buildouts and ecosystem bets amid accelerating AI adoption across industries. [CNBC]

  

• AI’s Next Moat: Context Graphs for Decision Trace 🕸️
  A proposed “context graph” layer records how choices are made. Exceptions, approvals, and cross-system inputs, creating searchable precedent for agentic workflows. Startups embedded in the execution path can capture this lineage and become systems of record for decisions, not just objects. [Jaya Gupta]

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Interesting Reports 📊

• 10 ideas for 2026 📚
  Shreyas Doshi shares crisp lessons on product mastery, decision-making, and cognitive pitfalls that derail performance. Themes include valuing the quality of thought over tactics, avoiding the “I already know that” trap, and practicing logic despite human biases. [Shreyas Doshi]

• The era of experimental AI Agents ends in 2026 🤖
  Industry roadmaps from Google, Gartner, Forrester, PwC, and a16z point to agentic systems orchestrating workflows, hardening security, and driving measurable outcomes. The shift is from demos to deployed architectures with governance, human-in-the-loop controls, and clear ROI. [Rakesh Gohel]

  

• Carta State of Startups 2025 📊
  A data-rich overview highlights rising early-stage valuations, longer fundraising cycles, and AI capturing a large share of venture dollars. Trends include SAFEs dominating pre-priced capital, leaner teams, geographic concentration of premium valuations, and more M&A and secondaries while IPOs lag. [Peter Walker]

  

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Recently Launched Funds 💸

• Lightspeed Venture Partners raised a record $9B+ across multiple funds to double down on global early- to growth-stage tech investing.

• Dragoneer closed a $4.3B venture fund to back high-growth, category-defining technology companies.

• Viola Ventures raised $250M across two new funds to invest in Israeli startups spanning AI, cyber, fintech, and defense tech.

• PSV Hafnium closed a €60M debut fund to support Nordic deeptech spinouts emerging from leading research institutions.

• Cloudberry launched a €30M fund focused on early-stage European semiconductor and chip-tech startups.

• Factorial Capital raised a $25M Fund II to back frontier AI founders at the angel and seed stages.

• Belief Capital closed a $20M debut fund targeting early-stage tech founders across Europe and the U.S.

• makesense launched a €15M fund to support circular economy and socially inclusive ventures.

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Fundraising?

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Fill out this form and we’ll will do our best to connect you with the right investors! 🚀

These are the startups raising NOW

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VC Jobs 💼

• Realyze Ventures (Cologne, Germany): VC Internship (apply here)

• Hello World (Remote): VC Analyst (apply here)

• Coparion (Köln, Germany): VC Associate (apply here)

• CVX Ventures (Lisbon, Portugal): VC Internship (apply here)

• Santander (Madrid, Spain): VC Associate (apply here)

• Newlab (Brooklyn, NY): Managing VC Director (apply here)

• Quanta Ventures Fund (San Francisco, CA): VC Partner (apply here)

• Intuit Ventures (Mountain View, CA): Senior VC Principal (apply here)

• MicroVentures (Austin, TX): IR Manager (apply here)

• D11z Ventures (Heilbronn, Germany): VC Internship (apply here)

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Hottest Deals 💥

• Champ Titles, secured venture funding of $55M to accelerate growth of its digital championship and competition platform. (read more)

• Lemon Slice, raised $10.5M in seed funding to grow its consumer-focused platform and scale operations. (read more)

• Traini, raised $7.5M in funding to expand its AI-driven training and workforce development solutions. (read more)

• BriefCatch, raised $6M in Series A funding to enhance its AI-powered legal writing and editing platform. (read more)

• Vibranium Labs, raised $4.6M in seed funding to scale its technology and expand product development. (read more)

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