Payments startup Forage raised a $40 million Series B to help retailers accept SNAP food assistance benefits wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/… via @WSJ

NY City Council Speaker Julie Menin & a16z’s @dhaber kicked off NY Tech Week at City Hall today. The Speaker proposed a local Y Combinator, praised Cornell Tech & said NY officials shouldn’t use rhetoric that pushes businesses away. Background: the mayor’s spat w/ Ken Griffin

The best founders don't end up in New York by accident. They come because this is where the hardest problems, the biggest customers, and the highest stakes are. The city demands you build something real. I've always believed the best opportunities live between fields of expertise — not inside any single industry, but at the intersections. No city in the world has more intersections than New York. Finance and media. Healthcare and technology. The customers who need AI to actually work — banks, hospitals, newsrooms, asset managers — are all here, within a few miles of each other. AI adoption is accelerating faster than any cycle I've seen. Per @PitchBook, AI is now 65% of NYC venture deal value, up from 16% six years ago. Early-stage funding hit $8.9B in 2025, up 50% in a year. Active unicorns: 32 in 2019, 159 today. The infrastructure of a generational tech hub is being built in real time. We're still early. The biggest deals haven't happened. The companies that define applied AI haven't been built. The founders who build them will be ambitious. They'll want to be where the problems are. They'll be here. NY @Techweek_ starts today. Come build 🗽

New York venture firms are broadening their geographic reach. Examples: Primary, Work-Bench, and Deviation (formerly Two Sigma) Part of the reason: AI mania in SF is hard to ignore. NY seed investing declined as a share of total in the U.S. last year. wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/…

Cerebras IPO is a fund returner for early VCs several times over. Benchmark’s $3.26 billion stake at offering price cost $268 million; Foundation got $2.83 billion on $36.8 million invested, Eclipse turned $145.4 million into $2.49 billion.   wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/…

Scoop: Arif Janmohamed (Lightspeed) and Trevor Oelschig (GC) are raising $375 million for their new firm Duration Ventures to invest in early-stage enterprise AI startups wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/…

A sign of the times: two of crypto's most prominent VC firms have moved into AI investing, too

Two Sigma Ventures has spun out of the hedge fund and is now operating as Deviation Capital. It's raising a $300 million fund, per a source wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/… via @WSJ

Growth more interesting than ever given the magnitude of the outliers in the AI wave. You don’t have to look far….👀 @AnthropicAI @Lovable @suno @WeAreLegora @OpenRouter @WisprFlow @EvidenceOpen (all basically $0 to 100m ramps or > in 1 year)

PitchBook: US growth and late-stage venture funds raised $23.6B YTD, up from $7.4B in 2025 and above the totals for any of the past 12 years, amid the AI boom (@ychernova / Wall Street Journal) wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/… techmeme.com/260415/p10#a260…

LPs love late-stage venture funds nowadays. I noticed this trend going into the new year. Q1 really confirmed it. Late-stage vc funds raised $23.6B, an annual record just through April 13. wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/…

Scoop on fund returns for @apartovi's Neo. Neo's 2018 Fund 1 is at 7.5X, its 2021 Fund 2 is at 6.5X net. There's a widening gap between high performers and everyone else in VC now. More on how Neo did it: wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/…

Space startup Aetherflux, led by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, is raising a new round at a $2 billion valuation, sources say wsj.com/articles/orbital-dat… with @EmilyGlazer via @WSJ

New York tech founders and investors mobilize to fight proposed capital-gains tax hike on startup exits wsj.com/articles/new-york-te… via @WSJ

Scoop out: Prediction-market platform Kalshi is raising about $1 billion in a funding round that values the startup at $22 billion, according to people familiar with the information wsj.com/articles/kalshi-cinc… via @WSJ

Scoop on Kalshi’s $22 billion valuation on Dow Jones Newswires. More coming

Fundrise Innovation Fund is putting its public listing on hold due to the volatility caused by the Iran war, CEO Ben Miller says. “I’m watching the Strait of Hormuz like everyone else" wsj.com/articles/iran-war-pu… via @WSJ

Friday night scoop: Crypto firm Paradigm expands mandate to invest in AI and other frontier tech, sources say. The firm is raising up to $1.5 billion for its next fund, sources say. wsj.com/articles/crypto-firm…

Scoop: Thrive Capital invested about $1 billion into OpenAI at a $285B blended valuation, a fraction of the price in the LLM company's ongoing round wsj.com/articles/thrive-capi… via @WSJ

Every venture firm now says it invests in "early-stage startups that are harnessing artificial intelligence to let people perform more productively." Basis Set's website said this in 2017! Now @xuezhao raised her firm's 4th fund, at $250M. wsj.com/articles/basis-set-v…