Ben Bergman

Groq, a scrappy challenger to Nvidia that is developing chips powering artificial intelligence, is set to be valued at $2.5 billion in a new funding round led by Blackrock, according to multiple sources.Groq and Blackrock declined to comment.Groq has been rumored to be raising a new round and recently hired Morgan Stanley to help raise $300 million in new funding, the Information previously reported last month. The valuation and lead investor have not been previously reported.The new financing h…

Thrive Capital, a New York venture firm founded in 2009 by Joshua Kushner, is known for its prescient early bets on startups like Instagram, Stripe, Affirm, Robinhood, Spotify, GitHub, Slack, Hims, and Plaid.Now it’s adding a splash of Hollywood to its portfolio, backing A24, the independent studio known for buzzy hits like “Civil War,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Talk to Me,” “Uncut Gems,” “Midsommar,” “Lady Bird,” “Moonlight,” HBO’s “Euphoria,” and Netflix’s “Beef.“Knowledgeable sour…

When longtime venture investor Matt Krna started Two Meter Capital this year he only hired a skeleton team to manage a sprawling portfolio of more than 190 companies. The firm uses generative AI to do the bulk of day-to-day portfolio management, tracking how companies perform and when they might raise another round. Without AI, Krna estimates he would have needed to hire half a dozen analysts.“In terms of personnel efficiencies, if you were hiring an analyst class of six, now it’s three,” Krna s…

Vanta, a startup that helps companies comply with security standards, is set to be valued at more than $2 billion in a new insider funding round, multiple sources told Business Insider.Vanta was last valued at $1.6 billion in a 2022 funding round led by Craft Ventures on October 12, 2022, according to Forbes.CrowdStrike Holdings, Atlassian Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Workday Ventures, Acrew Capital, Pioneer Fund, ASDF Ventures, Zag Capital, Sequoia Capital, Frontline Ventures, Y Combinator and L…

During the middle of 2023, Sara Ledterman, managing partner of 3+ Ventures, was calling around to emerging managers to ask about the health of their portfolios when she discovered something alarming: Some of the limited partners (LPs) who had committed to fund their investments were walking away.“Some of them just decided there’s not really a repercussion for defaulting, so they just defaulted,” Ledterman found.LPs are the pension funds, family offices, and endowments perched atop the now fragil…

Hot AI startup Pika is raising fresh funding to power its text-to-video generator, Business Insider has learned.The startup is closing in on a new funding round that values Pika at more than $500 million, according to two sources with knowledge of the efforts.The raise could value Pika at up to $700 million, per one of those sources. That person said Pika is raising around $70 million in the round.Details are not yet finalized and the figures involved are subject to change. Pika did not respond…

Weights & Biases is now valued at $1.25 billion and is considered one of the leading machine-learning development platforms. But in 2017 — years before the generative-AI boom — the company was raising its seed round, and some investors were skeptical of the startup’s appeal.One investor, however, the Bloomberg Beta partner James Cham, who ranks third on Business Insider’s annual Seed 100 for the second straight year, said he immediately saw the potential after spending time with the company’s CE…

On a Friday morning in September, dozens of employees at ComplYant, a Los Angeles-based tax-compliance startup, logged on to Slack to watch a video their bleary-eyed CEO had recorded in the middle of the night.“I’m coming to you all with some very unfortunate news,” the CEO, Shiloh Johnson, said in the video, a copy of which Business Insider obtained. “I know this comes as a deep shock to everyone, but the company is actually going through a wind-down process, and as a result we were ordered to…

In August 2022, former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann announced he was back, starting a new company named Flow to transform apartment living. Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture firms, invested $350 million, its single largest investment ever, which instantly made Flow worth a billion dollars on paper.Late last year, I was the first reporter to tour Flow’s first residential building in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I spoke with residents and staff, but my many requests to…

A New York venture capital firm was recently given the opportunity to invest in Scale AI, a buzzy startup that helps companies label vast quantities of data.But the firm passed on the deal after learning of the hefty price tag: A $14 billion valuation, twice what Scale AI raised at three years ago. (The valuation was first reported by the Information)“It seems way too expensive based on the run rate and its ‘old school’ business model,” said an investor at the firm, referring to Scale AI’s heavy…

Cyera, a New York-based data security startup founded in 2021, is raising a new funding round that values the company at as much as $1.55 billion, three sources familiar with the matter told Business Insider.The valuation is a significant increase from the $500 million that Cyera raised at last year in a round led by Accel, according to Pitchbook data. That round brought Cyera’s total funding to $160 million. The startup is raising $150 to $200 million in this latest round, according to multiple…

This is how dire it has become for venture firms in 2024: When founders are raising money for their startups, the first thing they should do is verify the firm they are talking to is actually still in business, multiple founders and VCs told Business Insider.“Ask how many checks they have written in the past year and whether they are actively deploying capital,” advised Anna Barber, a partner at M13.It may seem redundant to ask a venture firm whose only mandate is to invest if they are indeed in…

The tech industry layoffs have continued this year, and many are likely searching for their next opportunity. Business Insider rounded up the startups that are growing. Here are our top picks.

Yumi, a startup backed by a long list of prominent Silicon Valley investors that makes high-end organic baby food, is raising a down round that values the company at around $40 million, Business Insider has learned.The funding represents a substantial discount from Yumi’s Series B round in 2021, which valued the company at more than $300 million, according to Pitchbook data. It also means Yumi has burned through more than twice as much cash, nearly $90 million dollars, as it is currently worth.A…

There are around 300,000 active angel investors, but who are the best of the best? In an industry full of marketing and hype where investments take over a decade to bear fruit, it can be hard to tell.TRAC, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm cofounded by Fred Campbell, Joseph Aaron, Scott Pyne, Steve Marek, and Dick Fredericks in 2020, has set about to take a more systematic approach to venture capital.The firm developed a proprietary model it calls “Moneyball for venture capital” tha…

Sequoia Capital, founded in 1972, is widely considered to be one of the most successful venture firms of all time, making lucrative early bets on Apple, Cisco Systems, PayPal and YouTube.Like most venture firms, Sequoia operates with under extreme secrecy, closely guarding the details of its fund performance. But now, Business Insider been able to get a peak behind the curtain.Sequoia told its limited partners in a letter last week it distributed over $42 billion to its investors over the past 5…

A few weeks ago, Ben Lerer, managing parter of Lerer Hippeau, a New York-based early-stage venture firm, set his sights on leading a young enterprise software startup’s seed round. Given it has been a struggle for non-AI startups to raise capital in 2023, he did not expect much competition with other investors.“I thought everyone’s been slow to deploy and we’re in this time where there’s not a bunch of capital availability,” said Lerer, who was not ready to share the startup’s name.But Lerer was…

When I walked into the lobby of Society Las Olas, an Adam Neumann-owned apartment building in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I felt like I was entering a WeWork. There were playful neon signs on the wall (“Choose Happiness”), colorful midcentury-modern furniture, soft lighting, and lush greenery.I had come here to try to better understand Neumann’s secretive new residential real estate startup, Flow.Last month, Neumann’s people agreed to let me tour Society Las Olas, which will officially be Flow’s f…

Matthew Sorrentino, a young life-insurance broker, was sitting in the coworking space of his Fort Lauderdale high-rise, Society Las Olas, when a 6-foot-5 man with long dark hair wandered over to ask how he liked the building. The man told Sorrentino he owned a lot of real estate.Then he introduced himself as Adam Neumann.“I didn’t know who he was,” Sorrentino said. “I actually pitched him insurance. He was like, ‘I don’t know if they make policies big enough.’“In tech circles, there have been fe…

Andreessen Horowitz is reshuffling parts of its investment organization to sharpen its focus on artificial intelligence, according to people with knowledge of the situation.The changes will center the venture capital firm on two main themes: AI applications and AI infrastructure, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private matters.The AI applications group is being headed by general partner Alex Rampell, according to the sources. Rampell also leads the firm’s fintech stra…