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The Billion-Dollar Banker: How AI Is Supercharging Wall Street’s Top Talent
By Samir Dutta Even Gordon Gekko would have to admit: AI is taking over Wall Street. And it’s not because jobs are disappearing — it’s because the very best bankers are about to become more valuable than ever. The productivity boom and the new talent arms raceSamir Dutta, co-founder and CEO of Farsight AI Artificial intelligence is turbocharging front-office professionals, setting the stage for a new era where individual productivity and compensation hit unprecedented heights — some estimates suggest that by 2026, AI-empowered investment bankers could generate an additional $3.5 million in revenue each, redefining what it means to be a rainmaker in the industry. The surge in productivity driven by AI is already rewriting the rules of the talent game. As these technologies empower bankers to work smarter and faster, the competition for AI-savvy talent is intensifying. The divide between those fluent in AI and their peers is also widening, creating a new elite class of financial professionals. Early adopters of AI are already reaping major revenue gains, leading to a clear advantage for those who move fast. Compensation structures are evolving in tandem. Bonuses and rewards are increasingly linked to AI-driven revenue and productivity, prompting banks to rethink pay packages to better reflect the outsized value AI-augmented bankers bring to the table. This human-AI partnership is reshaping how financial institutions manage talent and incentivize performance. The new disruptors A variety of tech-forward investment banks are proving to be the nimblest players in this race (at least so far). These firms are adopting AI solutions 2x to 3x faster than their slower-moving counterparts, gaining a competitive edge in deal origination and execution quality. By leveraging AI-driven sourcing, content creation and execution tools, these banks are increasing their competitive advantages in the market and disrupting traditional deal-winning processes. The implications of this shift extend beyond mere productivity. Many banks are now carving out new market share by harnessing AI to identify and execute deals with unprecedented speed and precision. This democratization of technology is reshaping the competitive landscape — forcing all institutions to rethink their strategies or risk losing ground. Human expertise still matters Yet, despite these technological leaps, the human element remains crucial. Security, data privacy and accuracy continue to pose significant challenges for investment banks integrating AI. Success hinges on thoughtful integration with existing workflows and appropriately intertwining deep institutional knowledge into AI systems. Tailored AI solutions and rigorous governance are essential to mitigate risks and maximize benefits. Moreover, the cultural shift within banks is palpable. Teams are evolving, blending traditional financial expertise with new AI fluency. Training programs are being revamped to equip bankers with the skills needed to thrive in this hybrid environment. The future banker is as much a savvy technologist as a dealmaker. The transformation is not only about technology, but also about evolving a banker’s role: Professionals who can blend data-driven insights, relationship management and strategic thinking will become the new power players on Wall Street. As AI systems automate repetitive tasks and surface actionable intelligence, bankers will have more time to focus on creative deal structuring, nuanced negotiations and continuing to build trust with clients — skills that remain uniquely human and irreplaceable. The AI revolution is underway. Firms that embrace this change stand to unlock unprecedented value while those that hesitate risk falling behind. The $3.5 million banker isn’t just a productivity milestone; it’s a fundamental reimagining of what’s possible in financial services. In this new paradigm, human expertise is amplified to extraordinary new heights. The question is no longer if AI will reshape investment banking, but how quickly firms can use it to transform their workforce into the super-bankers of tomorrow. The race is on, and those who lead will define the future of financial advisory for decades to come. Samir Dutta is co-founder and CEO of Farsight, a company accelerating financial workflows by providing the industry’s first AI-powered automation tools that work directly within native software environments. Illustration: Dom Guzman
Thinking Machines Lab’s $2B Seed Round Is Biggest By A Long Shot
If you were to imagine the kind of startup likely to snag the largest seed round of all time, it would probably look something like Thinking Machines Lab. Launched and led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and joined by AI heavy hitters from Meta, OpenAI, Google and Mistral AI, the San Francisco company certainly has a founding team that investors ought to like. And given prevailing valuations for leading AI unicorns, a $2 billion seed deal doesn’t even sound that big in context. In reality, however, it is a round of unprecedented hugeness. The $2 billion Andreessen Horowitz-led financing that Thinking Machines reportedly just closed at a $10 billion valuation is by far the largest seed round in the Crunchbase dataset. It’s not even close. The next-largest U.S. seed financings 1 have all been in the $200 million to $450 million range, including: In addition to its record-setting size, another standout characteristic of the Thinking Machines round is how little surprise it generated. This seems largely due to its status as a brainchild of top OpenAI alums. After all, if OpenAI managed to secure a recent $300 billion post-money valuation largely driven by the prowess of its team, it’s reasonable to expect great things out of its early leaders in their solo ventures as well. And clearly Thinking Machines is laying out an ambitious mission. The company, founded last year, says its plans “to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable,” and also intends “to build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively.” Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Energy, Defense Tech Led
Want to keep track of the largest startup funding deals in 2025 with our curated list of $100 million-plus venture deals to U.S.-based companies? Check out The Crunchbase Megadeals Board. This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out the week’s biggest funding rounds here. Energy for AI and automated defense tech led this week’s largest U.S. venture funding deals. Vertical software solutions driven by AI in sports, healthcare and financial services were also a strong theme. 1. TerraPower, $650M, energy: Terrapower, co-founded by Bill Gates in 2006, is back on the top of the list with a $650 million funding to build nuclear energy solutions. The Bellevue, Washington-based company’s first nuclear project is being built in Wyoming, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and is slated to be ready in 2030. Nvidia invested in the startup for the first time through its NVentures investment arm, along with Gates and shipbuilder HD Hyundai. 2. Applied Intuition, $600M, autonomous vehicles: Applied Intuition is back on the list with its largest funding to date, a $600 million Series F funding led by BlackRock and Kleiner Perkins. Founded in 2017, the company was valued at $15 billion, up 150% from its $6 billion valuation a year ago. The Mountain View, California-based company’s vehicle intelligence platform is used in the trucking and automotive industry as well as defense, construction, mining and agriculture. The company says its technology is used by 18 of the top 20 automakers as well as the U.S. Department of Defense. 3. Teamworks, $235M, sportstech: Teamworks, a software platform that powers elite sports teams — more than 6,500 of them — raised a $235 million Series F led by Dragoneer Investment Group which valued the company at $1.2 billion. The Durham, North Carolina-based company’s software to manage teams, coaching, performance and recruitment is used by the majority of NFL, MLB , Premier League, NBA, MLS teams, NHL teams, DI NCAA athletic departments, and Olympic federations. The 15-year-old company has raised more than $400 million per Crunchbase data. 4. (tied) Ramp, $200M, fintech: Ramp raised a $200 million Series E valuing the 6-year-old corporate credit card and expense management company at $16 billion. The funding was led by Founders Fund, which has now led multiple rounds in the fintech startup. Ramp’s current valuation more than doubled from its prior valuation just over a year ago at $7.65 billion. New York-based Ramp serves more than 40,000 companies and has raised over $1.4 billion over time. 4. (tied) Commure, $200M, healthcare: Commure closed on $200 million in funding from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. Founded in 2017, Mountain View, California-based Commure counts 130 health systems across the country as customers for its services, which assist hospitals with AI note-taking, billing and customer management. 6. Juniper Square, $130M, fintech: San Francisco-based Juniper Square raised $130 million for fund management software that valued the 2014-founded company at $1.1 billion. The funding was led by fintech investor Ribbit Capital. Over 2,000 funds use the software with adoption growth by private equity and venture capital firms. 7. Tennr, $101M, healthcare: Tenner raised a $101 million Series C funding to address the logjam for healthcare providers when customers referred for specialized services are often lost in the manual process. The funding round was led by IVP with participation from prior investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, among others. The New York-based company, founded in 2021, was valued at $605 million. 8. Mach Industries, $100M, defense tech: Mach Industries manufactures unmanned weapon systems for the defense industry. The 3-year-old company, based in Huntington Beach, California, was valued at $470 million in a round led by Bedrock and Khosla Ventures. The company has raised a total of $185 million, per Crunchbase. 9. EigenLabs, $70M, blockchain: a16z crypto has purchased $70 million in EIGEN tokens from Seattle-based Eigen Foundation. The tokens will support the developer ecosystem building apps on top of Ethereum. 10. Actio Biosciences, $66M, biotech: Actio Biosciences raised a $66 million Series B for advancing trials for precision drugs for epilepsy and Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. The funding to the San Diego-based company founded in 2021 was led by healthcare investors Deerfield Management and Regeneron Ventures. Big global deals The biggest deal of the week came from Europe: Methodology We tracked the largest announced rounds in the Crunchbase database that were raised by U.S.-based companies for the seven-day period of June 14-20. Although most announced rounds are represented in the database, there could be a small time lag as some rounds are reported late in the week. Illustration: Dom Guzman
The Great Unicorn Backlog: Visualizing A Decade Of Private-Market Buildup
Editor’s note: This article is part of a series looking at how the venture and startup landscape has evolved over the past 10 years. Read more articles about seed funding, Series B trends and the rise of megafunds over the decade. Over the past decade, Crunchbase has chronicled the rise of unicorn companies — private startups valued at $1 billion or more — as a signal of where venture capital dollars and market enthusiasm flow. What began as a trickle in the early 2010s surged into a flood in 2021, as valuations skyrocketed and new unicorns joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board at a record pace, with new unicorn creation growing threefold year over year. But while the number of unicorns has continued to climb, exits have not kept pace. Today, the board hosts more than 1,500 companies, collectively valued at $6 trillion — most of which have not raised at a disclosed valuation in over three years. The board has continued to grow across all metrics, albeit at a slower pace. Below, we visualize the vast backlog of still-private giant startups, highlighting how the private market boom has evolved into an overhang of capital, value and expectation. To gain some insight on the massive expansion of the board in 2021, we separated out cohorts from 2020 and earlier, the COVID growth years of 2021 which bled into 2022, and the slowdown of the past 2.5 years, even as AI has gained. 2020 and earlier cohorts The 2020 and earlier cohorts have the highest exit proportion and currently also represent the majority of the board’s value, an analysis shows. This is not surprising as these companies have had more time to grow their business and make exits. They also benefited from the boom year of 2021, when a record stream of companies went public. Of the 953 companies that joined the unicorn board before 2021, 46% have since exited, with the majority — by a factor of three —as public debuts vs. M&A exits. Remaining on the board are some 470-plus still-private companies from this era, which account for more than half of the board’s current value at $3.2 trillion. These companies, which have had a longer time to grow, make up many of the most highly valued companies on the board and include SpaceX, OpenAI, ByteDance, Shein, Stripe and Databricks. The youngest of these valued above $60 billion is GenAI giant OpenAI, which will be a decade old by the end of this year, while the oldest is 25-year-old space exploration company SpaceX. Rapid rise in 2021 The 2021 and 2022 cohort of new unicorns account for 54% of the companies currently on the board, and showed a massive increase in companies that joined in a short period of time. These 854 still-private companies are collectively valued at $2 trillion — a third of the current board’s value with nine of the top 50 valued companies. The most highly valued is Anthropic, part of the 2022 cohort of new unicorns and currently valued at $61.5 billion. Slowed since 2023 In 2023 and through May 2025, 257 unicorn companies have joined the board, adding a half-trillion in value. The most valuable of this cohort are AI labs xAI, valued at $50 billion, and Safe Superintelligence at $32 billion. Many of the 2023 through May 2025 cohort of companies experienced an increase in value due to the AI wave. Companies that have joined the board since 2023 match annual counts of earlier years, 2015 through 2017 — with around 100-plus companies per annum. Unicorn overhang The Crunchbase Unicorn Board is close to reaching 1,600 companies, approaching $6 trillion in value, with $1 trillion in funding raised. Only a small count of companies have dropped off the board through a lowered valuation or closure — around 40 since 2022. And as of June 2025, over 60% of companies on the board have not raised funding with a disclosed value in more than three years. While funds have downgraded valuations internally, they are still looking for returns. And in a more uncertain global market and with a slow pace of exits, the board is poised to keep growing. Related Crunchbase unicorn lists: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
AI Autonomous Agents Are Top 2025 Trend For Seed Investment
Earlier this week, we wrote about investment trends popping up at seed stage. However, we left out one area where funding activity was so voluminous it warranted its own dedicated piece. Unsurprisingly, it is about AI. More specifically, Crunchbase data shows a continued boom this year in seed-stage funding to startups working on autonomous AI agents, assistants and companions, with a particular focus on enterprise customers. “It’s the next evolution of doing work,” said Terrence Rohan, managing director of Otherwise Fund, a seed investor network, and a former Figma board director. While the SaaS boom that began in the mid-2000s was all about giving enterprises “power tools” to enhance productivity, Rohan said this next phase is about applications that can actually do jobs themselves. And among startups, progress toward this goal is moving fast. Certainly that’s what the funding data indicates, particularly at seed stage. Per Crunchbase data, investors have poured around $700 million so far this year into seed rounds for artificial intelligence companies with descriptions tied to autonomous agents. 1 Top funding recipients Many of these rounds are on the large side, particularly by seed-stage standards. To illustrate, we put together a list of 16 of the largest funding recipients, targeting sectors from drug discovery to construction to real estate sales to manufacturing. The biggest seed-stage funding recipient hailed from the life science space: Lila Sciences, a startup that uses AI software to run experiments in automated labs. The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company publicly launched in March with a $200 million investment backed by Flagship Pioneering. Others raised large rounds for tools automating aspects of desk work and everyday online drudgery. This includes Augment, developer of Augie, a self-described “AI teammate for shippers brokers and carriers,” as well as Yutori, which wants to develop “an AI chief-of-staff for everyone.” Seed-stage companies are also attracting investors for tools and technologies aimed at helping enable the spread of automated agents. For instance, Jozu picked up $4 million last month to develop tools for AI model and agent orchestration, while Phonic closed on the same sum for a platform for building and evaluating voice AI agents. Logical tasks first Going forward, Rohan predicts the startups best poised for early success will be those focused on logical, factual matters, as this is where AI functions best. As a result, we’re seeing early applications gain traction in areas like legal tech and coding, where AI agents also benefit from plentiful, easily accessible data. Of course, in the real world, many of our tasks and decisionmaking require a mix of logical and subjective considerations. As anyone who’s asked a chatbot for recommendations can attest, this is also an area where AI agents are quite willing to participate. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Meet PostHog, A Startup That Just Raised A $70M Series D Led By Stripe From A Single Tweet
On June 9, PostHog, which aims to help developers build “successful products,” quietly announced it had raised $70 million in a Series D funding round led by digital payments giant Stripe. The funding was raised at a $920 million valuation. Y Combinator, GV and Formus Capital also participated in the financing, which brings PostHog’s total raised since its 2020 inception to about $107 million, per Crunchbase data. In a nutshell, PostHog started as a product analytics tool. Over the years, it has evolved with the mission of giving businesses “full control” of their customer data with its open-source platform. Notably, PostHog’s Series D amounts to more than double of all the capital it had previously raised combined. Its new valuation also is roughly double its valuation at the time of its $15 million Series B in 2021, according to co-founder and co-CEO James Hawkins. Series D rounds aren’t necessarily remarkable in and of themselves these days, and neither are near-unicorn valuations. But what stands out about this round is the way it came about. One day in November 2023, Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison “just out of the blue tweeted” about PostHog’s site “being cool,” said Hawkins. (Specifically, Collison said the site was “very well done,” and tagged Hawkins and Tim Glaser, PostHog’s other co-founder and co-CEO.) The company took the compliment as a way to get in front of Collison, and asked for a meeting. “We did so and just talked about a bunch of topics that were on our mind,” Hawkins told Crunchbase News. “We got really excited about working together.” Stripe declined to comment on its leading PostHog’s latest raise, although it did confirm its investment. GV general partner Crystal Huang said her firm was so impressed with PostHog’s potential to “unify a fragmented developer tools landscape” that it has invested in every round since leading PostHog’s $9 millionSeries A in 2020. “PostHog’s ambition to automate the entire development stack with AI, from data warehousing to LLM observability and beyond, represents a significant leap forward for builders,” she said. “We believe this integrated approach empowers developers to innovate faster and with greater confidence.” “Their modular offerings and transparent pricing have resonated deeply with customers. The ability to ship full product stacks, including a platform that delivers the most complete customer data, highlights the strength of their approach. At a time when developers need more than a collection of disconnected tools, PostHog provides a cohesive AI-powered environment that reduces complexity, accelerates product velocity, and drives measurable business results.” Full-stack approach Hawkins and Glaser started working on PostHog during Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch. The company focused on just open source software (vs. revenue) for the first year and a half. Today, PostHog provides what Hawkins describes as “customer infrastructure.” “This means every single customer-related software product in one place,” he explained. “The end result is a perfect customer data record without any integrations needed. This starts from day one of a startup, when the first line of code is written and that’s when we get in — with developers. We’re then upstream of every piece of software they’ll ever buy.” Currently, PostHog, which is San Francisco-based but fully remote, has 14 products aimed mostly at product and engineering use cases to help those teams better understand and work with customers. As with many other startups, artificial intelligence has led to PostHog starting to automate those products with a new platform that is generally available as an open beta: Max AI. Hawkins declined to reveal hard revenue figures, saying only that PostHog has “multiple $10s of millions of ARR and 3x year-over-year growth.” He claims that the company is seeing its growth rate increase over time. Users include Y Combinator, 1Password, Mistrial AI, Airbus and Eleven Labs, among others. While PostHog is not profitable, Hawkins said the company has been cashflow positive both late last year and in recent months. It had about 80 employees at the end of 2024. Its goal is to one day “ship the entire stack of tools that relate to sales, support, or marketing — basically anything that relates to customer data. … then we’ll automate all of it with AI,” he said. Stripe as investor Stripe is one of the world’s most valuable private companies and believed to be the most valuable private fintech company. In February, it announced a tender offer in which investors would buy shares from past and present employees at a valuation of $91.5 billion. Since its 2010 inception, Stripe has invested in dozens of companies, per Crunchbase data. Besides PostHog, in 2025 so far it has also participated in expense management startup Ramp‘s March 2025 $150 million secondary share sale. It has also acquired at least 17 companies, according to Crunchbase. On June 11, Stripe announced it was picking up crypto wallet provider Privy, a 4-year-old startup which had raised over $40 million in funding. Illustration: Dom Guzman
Report: Fintech Startup Ramp Said To Be Raising $200M At A $16B Valuation
Expense management startup Ramp is in discussions to raise around $200 million in a round of funding that would bump its valuation to about $16 billion, according to The Information. Founders Fund, an early and repeat backer, is reportedly aiming to lead the investment. Other existing investors such as Sands Capital and Khosla Ventures are believed to be participating as well. New York-based Ramp has evolved into a fintech darling since its 2019 inception. The company has branched out from offering a corporate card into travel, bill pay and a new treasury product. It crossed $700 million in annualized revenue as of January of this year, sources previously told TechCrunch. Just over three months ago, in early March, Ramp announced it had nearly doubled its valuation to $13 billion after a $150 million secondary share sale. The company declined to comment on the rumored latest financing. To date, Ramp has secured a total of $1.2 billion in equity financing and $700 million in committed debt funding. Other investors include General Catalyst, Stripe, Citi and Sequoia Capital. Ramp competes in a crowded space that includes the likes of Brex, Navan, Mercury, Rho and Mesh Payments. The company’s biggest revenue generator is earning interchange fees from its cards. It also makes money through transaction fees on bill payments, SaaS revenue via its Plus offering, foreign exchange from global money movement, and affiliate fees through its travel product, among other things. If confirmed, Ramp’s latest funding would be another notch in what is turning out to be somewhat of a comeback year for fintech. On June 12, digital bank Chime made its public market debut, shooting up 37% in first-day trading Thursday on Nasdaq. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Chime Climbs In Market Debut
Shares of online banking company Chime shot up 37% in first-day trading Thursday on Nasdaq, the latest in a string of high-performing IPOs. San Francisco-based Chime priced shares for its IPO at $27 each on Wednesday, above the projected range of $24 to $26. The company raised roughly $700 million in the offering, with another $165 million in shares sold by existing investors. Shares closed at $37. The offering comes amid an increasingly busy period for unicorn IPOs. On Wednesday, space and defense tech startup Voyager Technologies made its New York Stock Exchange debut to strong demand. And last week, stablecoin issuer Circle saw its shares soar in initial trading. Unlike many venture-backed IPO candidates, both Chime and Circle are profitable. Chime posted net income of $12.9 million in the first quarter of this year. It also reported Q1 revenue of $519 million, up 33% from a year ago. Founded in 2012, Chime was also a heavy fundraiser in its startup days. Between 2013 and 2021, it raised $2.3 billion in known equity funding, with DST Global, Crosslink Capital and Menlo Ventures among its largest venture stakeholders. Pipeline heating up While the IPO market overall is looking more active, the fintech space in particular appears to be heating up. Besides Chime and Circle, another one to watch is Swedish buy-now, pay-later provider Klarna. Klarna filed to go public in March but delayed its offering when markets turned bearish. With the IPO market looking receptive these days, however, we wouldn’t be surprised to see it make its entry soon as well. Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman