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The Last Market Boom Ended 4 Years Ago. Here’s How Current Conditions Look Similar
Nearly four years ago, the market hit a cyclical peak under conditions that in many ways look quite similar to what we’re seeing today. Sky-high public tech valuations. Booming startup investment. Sharply rising valuations. And, a few cracks emerging on the new offering front. Sure, there are quite a few differences in the investment environment, which we’ll explore in a follow-on piece. For this first installment, however, we are focusing on the commonalities, with an eye to the four highlighted above. No. 1: Sky-high public tech valuations First, both then and now, tech stocks hit unprecedented highs. In mid-November 2021, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index hit an all-time peak above 16,000. Gains stemmed largely from sharply rising tech share prices. Today, the Nasdaq is hovering not far below a new all-time high of over 23,000. The five most valuable tech companies have a collective market cap of more than $16 trillion. Other hot companies, like AMD, Palantir Technologies and Broadcom have soared to record heights this year. While private startups don’t see day-to-day valuation gyrations like publicly traded companies, their investors do take cues from public markets. When public-market bullishness subsides, private up rounds tend to diminish as well. No. 2: Booming startup investment In late 2021, just like today, venture investment was going strong. Last time, admittedly, it was much stronger. Global startup funding shattered all records in 2021, with more than $640 billion invested. That was nearly double year-earlier levels. Funding surged to a broad swathe of startup sectors, with fintech in particular leading the gains. For the first three quarters of this year, by contrast, global investment totaled a more modest $303 billion. However, that’s still on track for the highest tally in years. The core driver is, of course, voracious investor appetite for AI leaders, evidenced by OpenAI’s record-setting $40 billion financing in March. The pace of unicorn creation is also picking up, which brings us to our next similarity. No. 3: Up rounds and sharply rising valuations At the last market peak, valuations for hot startups soared, driven in large part by heated competition among startup investors to get into pre-IPO rounds. This time around, we’re also seeing sought-after startups raising follow-on rounds in quick succession, commonly at sharply escalated valuations. Per Crunchbase data, dozens of companies have scaled from Series A to Series C within just a couple of years, including several that took less than 12 months. We’re also seeing prominent unicorns raising follow-on rounds at a rapid pace this year. Standouts include generative AI giants as well as hot startups in vertical AI, cybersecurity and defense tech. No. 4: A few cracks emerging During the 2021 market peak, even when the overall investment climate was buzzier than ever, we did see some worrisome developments and areas of declining valuations. For that period, one of the earlier indicators was share-price deterioration for many of the initial companies to go public via SPAC. By late 2021, it had become clear that there were numerous “truly terrible performers” among the cohort, including well-known names such as WeWork, Metromile and Buzzfeed. This time around, the new offerings market hasn’t been quite so active. But among those that did go public in recent months, performance has been decidedly mixed. Shares of Figma, one of the hottest IPOs in some time, are down more than 60% from the peak. Online banking provider Chime and stablecoin platform Circle have shown similar declines. At this point, these are still generously valued companies by many metrics. But it’s also worth noting the share price direction in recent months has been downward, not upward. Next: Watch for more cracks Looking ahead, one of the more reliable techniques to determine whether we are approaching peak or already past is to look for more cracks in the investment picture. Are GenAI hotshots struggling to secure financing at desired valuations? Is the IPO pipeline still sluggish? Are public tech stocks no longer cresting ever-higher heights? Cracks can take some time to emerge, but inevitably, they do. Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
The Splendor And Misery Of ARR Growth
By Alexander Lis AI startups are raising capital at record speed. According to Crunchbase data, AI-related companies have already raised $118 billion globally in 2025. And, so far, traction looks impressive. AI startups are posting stellar revenue growth, and even the $100 million ARR milestone is often achieved. While this growth is breathtaking, some analysts are beginning to question its sustainability. They warn that AI spending may soon reach a peak and that unprofitable tech companies could be hit hardest when the cycle turns. If that happens, many investors in AI will find themselves in a difficult position. Predicting a bubble is rarely productive, but preparing for volatility is. It would be wise for both founders and investors to ensure that portfolio companies have enough resilience to withstand a potential market shock. The key lies in assessing the durability of ARR. In a major downturn, the “growth game” quickly becomes a survival game. History suggests that while a few companies may continue to grow more slowly, the majority will struggle or disappear. The question, then, is how to tell the difference between sustainable and hype-driven ARR. What distinguishes durable ARR from hype?Alexander Lis Several factors set true, sustainable revenue growth apart from hype. The first is customer commitment. Sustainable revenue comes from multiyear contracts, repeat renewal cycles and budgeted spend within core IT or operating lines. When revenue depends on pilots, proofs of concept or amorphous “innovation” budgets, it can vanish when corporate priorities shift. A company that touts these short trials as ARR is really reporting momentum, not recurring income. This is what investor Jamin Ball has called experimental recurring revenue. Traditional software firms can thrive with monthly churn in the low single digits — think 5% to 7%. But many AI companies are seeing double that. This means they have to sprint just to stand still, constantly replacing users who move on to the next shiny tool. Another differentiator? Integration and workflow depth. Durable ARR is embedded into the customer’s core workflows, data pipelines or multiple teams. Ripping it out would be costly and disruptive. Hype ARR, by contrast, lives on the surface — lightweight integrations, fast deployments and limited stakeholders. Without unique intellectual property or deep workflow integration, such products can be replaced with minimal friction. And finally, real growth is defined by clear value-add. True ARR is backed by measurable ROI, well-defined outcomes and long-term customer roadmaps. In contrast, hype ARR is driven by urgency (we need to show our shareholders our AI deployment ASAP), or undefined ROI. In those cases, customers don’t even know how to define success. They are testing, not committing. Beyond ARR It is important to put ARR traction in context. Investors and founders should focus on a broader set of indicators — conversion from pilots to long-term contracts, contract length and expansion, net revenue retention, and gross margin trajectory. These metrics reveal if growth is sustainable. It would also be helpful to assess the product’s real impact: efficiency uplift (more code, content, or customer conversations per employee-hour), accuracy improvement (e.g. for detecting bad actors), and higher conversion rates, among others. These metrics should exceed client expectations and outperform alternative tools. That’s what signals genuine value creation and a higher chance for experimental revenue to turn into durable ARR. After all, AI may be changing how fast companies can form and grow, but it hasn’t suspended the basic laws of business. For founders, the message is simple: Celebrate ARR if you so wish, but pair it with proof of retention, profitability and defensibility. For investors, resist the urge to chase every eye-popping run rate. The real competitive edge in this next phase of AI is stability, not spectacle. Alexander Lis is the chief investment officer at Social Discovery Ventures. With 10-plus years of experience across public markets, VC, PE and real estate, he has managed a public markets portfolio that outperformed benchmarks, led early investments in Sumsub, Teachmint and Byrd, and achieved 20%-plus IRR by investing in distressed real estate across the U.S. Illustration: Dom Guzman
Dell Technologies Capital On The Next Generation Of AI — And The Data Fueling It
Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series in which Crunchbase News interviews active investors in artificial intelligence. Read previous interviews with Foundation Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Felicis, Battery Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Costanoa, Citi Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Andrew Ng of AI Fund, and True Ventures, as well as highlights from more interviews done in 2023. Fueled by AI, both Dell and its investment arm are on a hot streak this year. The PC maker has seen demand for its server products surge with $20 billion in AI server shipments projected for fiscal 2026. At the same time, its investment arm, Dell Technologies Capital (DTC), has notched five exits — an IPO and four acquisitions — since June, an especially notable track record in a venture industry that has been challenged in recent years by a liquidity crunch. Daniel Docter, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital On the heels of that success, we recently spoke with Dell Technologies Capital managing director Daniel Docter and partner Elana Lian. DTC was founded more than a decade ago and operates as a full-stack investor, backing everything from silicon to applications. “One big part of our network is the Dell relationship, which is the leader in GPU servers,” said Docter. As a result, Dell is connected to all the major players in the AI space, he said. Elana Lian, partner at Dell Technologies Capital One of its earliest AI investments was during the machine-learning era in 2014 in a company called Moogsoft. Dell went on to acquire the alert remediation company in 2023. DTC’s investment thesis was that the advent of machine learning was going to disrupt the tech industry. At that time, data had expanded to such a degree that new tools were required by the market to analyze data and find patterns, which informed the firm’s early investments in AI. The investment team at DTC is largely comprised of technical people, often “double E” degree engineers. Docter has an electrical engineering background, worked at Hughes Research Labs, now HRL Laboratories, and transitioned from engineering to business development. He joined the venture industry 25 years ago and spent more than a decade at Intel. He joined DTC in 2016 through Dell’s EMC acquisition. Lian worked in semiconductors for a decade, joined Intel Capital in 2010, and then joined Dell Technologies Capital in 2024. Data evolution Docter believes we are in the fifth generation of AI, which becomes more powerful with every iteration. “We’re seeing that AI is almost a data problem,” said Lian. “For AI to get better and better, there’s an uncapped ceiling where there’s high-quality data coming in.” The team is meeting startups focused on training, inference, reasoning and continuous learning along with safety requirements. Data is core to these advancements. Even the definition of data is changing. “It used to be a word, then it was a context, then it was a task or a rationale or a path. Then it’s reasoning,” said Docter. “Who knows what’s next?” As AI improves, there is demand for frontier data and for specialized data in fields such as philosophy, physics, chemistry and business. Humans are in the loop as these capabilities expand, said Docter, which has informed some of the firm’s investments. On deal flow DTC is a financial investor, assessing a potential company on whether it is a good investment, rather than backing businesses based on Dell’s strategic goals. Startup revenue is exceeding what was previously possible, Docter said: “I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’ve never seen companies that have this type of revenue growth.” The best deals are always hotly contested, he noted. The question to ask when it comes to revenue, Docter said, is: “Is that an innovation CTO office budget? Or is that a VP of engineering budget?” When assessing a potential portfolio investment the team asks: “Is revenue durable? Is there value in using this?” The pace of investment also seems unprecedented. “We’ll meet with a company on a Tuesday for the first time and sometimes by Thursday, they have a term sheet that they’ve already signed,” he said. The firm does not have a dedicated fund size, which is an advantage as it can be flexible in the size of the check as well as the stage to make a commitment and how it invests over time. DTC has invested $1.8 billion to date across 165 companies. It likes to invest early, at seed or Series A, with check sizes running from $2 million to $12 million, and leads or co-leads 80% of new deals. The firm makes around 15 to 16 new investments per year. Once DTC has invested, it looks at how the firm can help portfolio companies sell to potential customers across Dell’s deal partner network. This year, DTC has posted five exits, including Netskope’s IPO and four acquisitions: Rivos by Meta, SingleStore by Vector Capital, TheLoops by Industrial & Financial Systems and Regrello by Salesforce 1. Notable AI investments DTC is investing a little more actively than it has in the past, but remains disciplined, Docter said. The investment team is focused on complex enterprise use cases and challenges, following the Warren Buffett rule, which is to invest in what you know. The firm invests at the silicon level because you “can be incredibly disruptive to the ecosystem,” said Docter. The DTC portfolio companies we discussed include the following in areas ranging from silicon to applications. Infrastructure and hardware layer: Applications: What’s next? A major area of interest for Lian is advancements in voice AI, the day-to-day human interaction with a machine. It’s hard to imagine that the transformer architecture is the last and final architecture, said Docter. The firm has made investments in companies creating different architectures in Cartesia, a leader in state-space model, which has a longer context window building a new reasoning model with a different architecture, initially focused on voice AI. DTC has also invested in Israeli-based AA-I Technologies, which is working on a new type of reasoning model architecture. “Right now, the opportunity of AI is this big, but this ball keeps on exploding,” said Lian. “The contact area is getting bigger and bigger. And that’s the same for the data.” Related Crunchbase list: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Why This VC Firm Bought Telemedicine Company Lemonaid Out Of The 23AndMe Bankruptcy
As startup valuations reset and venture capital firms hunt for unconventional deals, one investor is looking to the bankruptcy courts. Bambu Ventures, an early-stage VC firm, last month agreed to acquire telemedicine company Lemonaid Health — once a $400 million bet by 23andMe — for just $10 million. The transaction is more than a bargain buy. It’s also an intriguing deal that illustrates how an early-stage VC firm can operate by a private-equity playbook to revive a distressed asset. DNA testing company 23andMe acquired Lemonaid for $400 million in 2021. Lemonaid operated as a division of 23andMe until the parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year. Last month, New York-based Bambu made a deal with Chrome Holding Co. — the rebranded former parent company 23andMe Holding — in which the venture firm agreed to buy Lemonaid for a staggering 40x less than the DNA company had originally paid for the telehealth brand. Kyle Pretsch, COO of Lemonaid SPV Inc. So why did Bambu Ventures make a play for Lemonaid? Just how did it win the bid? And what are its plans for the asset? Crunchbase News recently spoke with Kyle Pretsch, COO of Lemonaid SPV Inc. and general partner at Bambu Ventures, to discuss all this and more. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. This is not your typical startup purchase. What prompted you to buy Lemonaid? Are you going to operate as an independent startup? Lemonaid wasn’t just a company. It was a vision. It was an incredibly exciting team. It’s an incredible, exciting market, and it’s a mission that we can all feel good about, which is increasing accessibility to healthcare. Obviously, there’s a phenomenal market for that, but at the end of the day, we are working to provide improved transparency, the ability to improve your lifestyle at an affordable cost, and do it in a nice, systemic fashion, to reach more people. 23andMe has been an incredible custodian of this company and so we didn’t just see it as a company. We saw something much, much more. We plan to operate it independently. We like the fact that this is a space we’re familiar with. This is a space we have other holdings in. We expect there will be opportunities along the way to use those contributions to help grow Lemonaid. I understand that you’re paying about $10 million for Lemonaid when 23andMe paid $400 million to acquire it just a few years ago. Do you view this as an incredible opportunity? Yes. We don’t believe the value of the asset has eroded since 2021. Regeneron is buying the rest of 23andMe. How did you end up with Lemonaid? Regeneron actually didn’t bid for Lemonade. It excluded it from their purchase. And technically Regeneron didn’t win 23andMe, either. At one point, it had been identified as the winning bidder, but an organization called TTAM Research Institute, which was a research institute founded in part by Anne Wojcicki, the original founder of 23andMe, ended up prevailing in the repurchasing of the assets out of bankruptcy. It, too, excluded Lemonaid from its bid. So both organizations put forth what’s called a stalking horse bid, which is if no one else bids, they would absorb the asset for a certain amount. And we ended up bidding in excess of that. This feels very similar to a private-equity play. Do you think this sort of transaction is becoming more common? Are you going to do it more often? This is a really unique situation, and for so many reasons I don’t think venture capital is going to find itself stalking the bankruptcy courts. Nor do I think this was a standard bankruptcy case. But I do think our firm specifically brings a very PE style to venture capital. That’s what we do as a firm. And I think this was an exceptional opportunity where you have a venture-like company with PE idealism and process that can go ahead and reconstitute its growth track. We expect venture growth with PE discipline, and we’re happy to marry the two. The fact that we identified it in bankruptcy court is a huge testament to our firm, how we worked and how we adapted to chase after a vision that we really, really, found meaningful. I believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So it’s not something you’ve done before? I have some experience in this space, but this is not a situation that I’ve ever come across. We’ve looked at things in bankruptcy before, but I think if you talk to anybody involved in this particular case, they would say: “Never has anything like this existed” for 10 different reasons. How do you distinguish yourselves as a VC firm, and did Bambu Ventures actually conduct this acquisition? Bambu Ventures is an operating firm for a variety of venture capital funds. Specifically, our key fund right now is a $50 million to $100 million fund, and Lemonaid is not being purchased from the fund. We offer co-investments and sometimes pursue side deals, and this was something that I think the fund will have some participation in, but this is an act outside of that fund. The same principles, however exist, which is, as a firm we believe in finding the companies that are being given these low values, or are being sometimes overshadowed or overlooked, and then bringing our team to it, and bringing discipline and execution to it, and reinvigorating growth — overlooked assets, plus PE discipline in well-known environments. And that, plus our team, is a formula for our success. The purchasing entity is actually Lemonaid SPV. Bambu Ventures is a guarantor, because that’s a new company. How is this transaction similar or different from a PE-type acquisition? The mechanics are a little bit different in that it’s not being owned by a fund or an LP. It’s owned by an SPV. This is very similar to any kind of corporate transaction. We have a cap table. We have set up what we think is an incredible list of investors. We’ve taken some fund money from other VC funds to help instill that it has a list of interested LPs and parties. So I would say this is very, very similar. The only key difference is we’re investing in a different company … From an organizational governance perspective, we went ahead and moved the investor funds directly into a top, or holding, company with its own cap table, versus a fund. What will you do differently with Lemonaid? The 23andMe team have been great stewards to this company, they’ve been great partners in transition and have really set this transaction up for success. I think there are immediate opportunities to advance within patient care, and that’s adding product and reaching more patients. We plan on investing in marketing spend. Obviously 23andMe, through its process, had reduced that marketing spend heavily. Will you be competing with companies such as Ro and Hims & Hers? There is more than enough white space that we can all operate within our own moats and in our own domains without this warriors’ battle. I will say that we do have visions of incredible growth, and we do have visions of creating a holistic offering that serves more and creates an improved consumer experience. Illustration: Dom Guzman
Exclusive: Findem Lands $36M Series C To Supercharge AI-Powered Hiring
In a competitive hiring environment, the ability to find exceptional talent that isn’t necessarily knocking down your door is hugely desired and not always easy to attain. That’s why so many companies these days are turning to AI-powered talent acquisition and management startups to help them mine for exceptional candidates. One such startup, Findem, has secured $51 million in equity and debt funding, the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively. The raise includes a $36 million Series C led by SLW (Silver Lake Waterman) with participation from Wing Venture Capital, Harmony Capital and Four Rivers Group, as well as $15 million in growth financing from JP Morgan. The financing brings Findem’s total funding since its 2019 inception to $105 million, with $90 million of that being equity, per the company. Redwood City, California-based Findem’s mission is simple, even if its methods are not. It aims to transform how businesses “identify, attract and engage top talent.” The startup uses what it calls 3D talent data (out of a dataset developed out of 1.6 trillion data points) that it combines with AI to automate “key parts of the talent lifecycle.” And those parts include building “top-of-funnel” pipelines of interested candidates, executive search and analyzing workforce and labor markets. In an interview with Crunchbase News, co-founder and CEO Hari Kolam said that Findem’s user base surged by “about 100x” in the last 12 months and that the company is experiencing 3x year-over-year growth. Its enterprise customer base increased by 3x over the last year. It has a user base of more than 12,000 customers, including from Adobe, Box, Medallia, Nutanix and RingCentral, Kolam said. Currently, Findem operates under a SaaS business model, charging per seat. As it expands its agentic abilities, the company plans to add an outcome-based model as well, according to Kolam. It is not yet profitable. Findem is just one of more than a dozen startups at the intersection of AI and recruitment globally that have raised venture capital in 2025. As of early September, global startup investment for startups in the HR, recruitment and employment categories totaled around $2.3 billion, per Crunchbase data. That puts funding on track for a year-over-year gain, even as investment remains at a fraction of the levels hit during the market peak, as charted below. How it works Watching Findem’s platform in action provides better insight into just how it helps companies zero in on the specific talent for which they’re searching. Say a startup wants to hire a software engineer who has worked at a company from its early days until it raised a Series C funding round. But it also wants that engineer to have a GitHub profile that it can view. Or, say a company wants to hire competitive coders who have seen a successful exit, or a CFOs who drove a company from a negative operating margin to a positive one. Findem’s software will allow you to filter for all those desired attributes. The startup says it’s able to help companies recruit so specifically because its 3D data combines people and company data over time into a format suitable for AI analysis. It claims that the “continuously enhanced” 3D dataset is “exponentially larger and more factual” than traditional sources of candidate data, making it a powerful tool for deep insights and automated workflows. Using the combination of the data and AI, Findem creates 3D profiles, also dubbed “enriched” profiles, for every candidate it helps surface. The goal of the profiles is to provide “a detailed and factual view” of an individual’s “professional journey and impact,” So just where does all this data come from? Findem says it continuously leverages a language model to generate that 3D data from more than 100,000 sources that are chronologically gathered (from earliest to latest). Those sources include LinkedIn, GitHub, Doximity, WordPress, personal websites, the U.S. Census Bureau, company funding announcements and IPO details, business models, more than 300 million patents and publications, over 5 million open datasets and ML projects and over 200 million open source code repositories. It also pulls applicant profile information from applicant tracking systems such as Workday, BambooHR, Bullhorn, Greenhouse, Jobvite and Lever, among others. This comprehensive data pull is what helps set Findem apart, in Kolam’s view. Some other hiring tools rely on one-dimensional data from resumes or LinkedIn profiles, which, he argues, “give only a snapshot of someone’s career…without the context that reveals true potential.” Kolam contends that it takes “extensive manual effort” to verify and interpret the data. “Just looking at a resume on paper really doesn’t come close to telling the whole story of how really qualified a candidate could be, or if they can really fit the criteria that a particular employer is looking for,” Kolam maintains. Findem is primarily focused on North American customers who have users across the globe. It’s also expanding into Europe. The company has a second headquarters in Bangalore, India. Kolam declined to reveal Findem’s valuation, saying only that it was “a significant up round and more than 2x” compared to its valuation when it raised a $17-plus million Series B extension in December 2023. Shawn O’Neill, managing partner at SLW, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm first got to know Kolam before Findem raised its Series B and then “tracked the company’s trajectory for some time.” ‘’What drew us to Findem wasn’t just the technology, it was the traction,” he said. The team has achieved strong commercial momentum while tackling one of the most persistent challenges in HR — connecting data, insight and human potential in a way that actually drives business outcomes.” But the technology didn’t hurt. In O’Neill’s view, Findem’s main differentiator is its “data advantage…in a market where most companies are simply wrapping LLMs.” “The depth and breadth of their 3D profiles and web-scale dataset are unlike anything else in the market,” he said. “The UX is excellent, but the magic is really in how the platform leverages that data — it makes finding and understanding people effortless. We use it ourselves and see the power firsthand.” Related Crunchbase lists and queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
What The Second Wave Of Layoffs Means For Workers And Startups
By Pavel Shynkarenko After the 2024-25 job cuts at Google, Amazon and other tech companies, the second wave of tech layoffs is rewriting the startup labor market. Skilled professionals are suddenly available, creating both opportunity and pressure for founders and workers alike. Startups now compete for talent that once seemed untouchable, while employees face longer job hunts and rethink how and where they work. Higher expectations, more side gigsPavel Shynkarenko With talent flooding the market, candidates are demanding more flexibility and clearer growth paths, even as many accept contract work or lower pay to stay employed. The typical job search now stretches six to seven months, even longer for those needing visas or relocation. That uncertainty has fueled a surge in freelancing and side projects. Bankrate reports that 36% of American adults now have a side gig, with more than half of them having started in the past two years. While many professionals didn’t plan to freelance, they turned to it because they had no other choice. For some, it has proved liberating, with confidence and job satisfaction rising compared with corporate roles, according to our internal data. Despite all the buzz in the media and even on Reddit, overemployment — the trend of holding two jobs — remains a niche phenomenon, affecting roughly 5% of workers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The more common pattern is a mix of contract work and short-term projects, which gives startups a chance to hire A-level talent for fractional roles they couldn’t have afforded before. Smaller, sharper teams Payroll is every startup’s biggest cost, and founders are trimming teams while raising output per employee. The examples are striking. Midjourney reports about $200 million in ARR with a staff of only 11. Cursor has reached roughly $100 million with 15-20 people. Data from Carta shows that the average seed-stage team in the consumer and fintech sectors has declined by nearly half since 2022. This lean approach is spreading beyond early-stage ventures. Around 90% of tech executives say they are open to hiring freelancers during peak workloads; more than 28% already integrate them into daily operations. As this makes clear, smaller core teams, supplemented by trusted project-based workers, can move faster and spend less. Opportunity on both sides For workers, the takeaway is that startups may now be the safer bet. Mid-sized firms that once promised stability are cutting jobs, while startups are candid about their risks and can reward performance with equity or future roles. A short contract can become a long-term stake. On the other hand, for founders, today’s market is a chance to recruit top engineers, designers and operators at terms that were impossible two years ago. It also demands a new mindset involving compensation flexibility, project-based roles and hiring processes built for speed. All in all, the second wave of layoffs has changed expectations and shifted supply and demand in the job market. Workers are blending traditional jobs with side gigs, and startups are proving that small, focused teams can out-execute much larger competitors. On both sides, adaptability is now the ultimate advantage; companies that remain nimble will win. Pavel Shynkarenko, founder and CEO of Mellow, is an entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience, and a freelance economy pioneer who aims to transform how companies engage with contractors. In 2014, Shynkarenko launched his first HR tech company, Solar Staff, a fintech payroll company for freelancers, which showed $10 million-plus in revenue for 2022 and 2023. In early 2024, responding to the growing demand for specialized solutions for long-term interaction with contractors, Solar Staff, as a global company, pivoted to Mellow ($1 million MRR). Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
A Record Share Of Startup Funding Is Going To $100M+ Rounds
The percentage of U.S. startup funding going to rounds of $100 million or more reached an all-time high in 2025. It’s a development that should surprise no one who has been following the rise of AI megarounds. An estimated 70% of all U.S. startup funding 1 this year went to jumbo-sized financings of $100 million and up, per Crunchbase data. That equates to around $157 billion spread across more than 300 reported rounds. For a sense of how that compares to prior years, we took a look at the share of investment to these big rounds over the past eight years. How 2025 compares to the last peak Notably, this year’s tally is not the highest dollar sum on record. That title goes to 2021, the peak of the last bull market. Four years ago, a red-hot IPO market, soaring tech stock prices, and startup investors’ ample appetite for writing big checks helped send funding totals to stratospheric levels. While much of that went to prominent unicorns, early stage dealmaking was also way up. This year, by contrast, a few big names are taking a much larger share of the funding pie. The largest deal — OpenAI’s unprecedented $40 billion SoftBank-backed financing — alone accounts for roughly a quarter of all funding to $100 million+ megarounds. Investment is also, of course, much more heavily concentrated around artificial intelligence. More than two-thirds of megaround investment this year went to companies in AI-related categories, per Crunchbase data. The global state of megarounds Globally, the megaround picture doesn’t look dramatically different. For 2025, around 60% of all startup funding went to financings of $100 million or more, per Crunchbase data. That puts this year roughly on par with the 2021 market peak for funding share, as charted below. Evolution of an asset class So will this increasing capital concentration last? Every time we see a new trend emerge in venture funding, the question arises: Is this a cyclical blip or simply the new normal? This time around, a solid case could be made both ways for the rise in funding share going to big rounds. On the “blip” side, it does look like the rise of Generative AI behemoths is a phenomenon very specific to this cycle. Yet concentration of capital among a smaller collection of megarounds isn’t only a Gen AI thing. Investors are also scaling up in the age old pursuit of having the most likely companies to succeed in their portfolios. They’re willing to write bigger checks at higher valuations for the privilege of getting into a competitive deal. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Wearables Startups Are Having A Moment
Generally speaking, if you’re wearing a technology on your body, you have to really love it or find it deeply useful or even essential. That’s a high bar, which helps explain why wearables have long been a fairly niche area for startup investment. Per Crunchbase data, the category reliably attracts less than 1% of all venture funding in a given year. This year, however, the space is looking comparatively perky. Largely that’s due to a single company: Oura, maker of a smart ring that collects data on dozens of personal health and wellness metrics. Earlier this month, the 12-year-old Finnish company announced that it closed on more than $900 million in a Fidelity-led financing at an impressive $11 billion valuation. The raise comes in the wake of sharp growth, with Oura expecting to reach $1 billion in sales this year. Beyond Oura But Oura isn’t the only wearables-related company pulling in significant venture investment recently. Using Crunchbase data, we put together a sample list of 18 companies funded in roughly the past year innovating in this area. Funded startups have a broad array of chosen use cases as well. While medical and health monitoring remains the most prevalent application, we’re also seeing the AI boom trickling into more consumer-focused offerings outside the health care realm. Smart lenses, glasses and cow collars In this arena, one of the largest and most recent rounds went to Xpanceo, a startup developing smart contact lenses that incorporate a microdisplay and external sensors to provide wearers with useful information based on their focus. The 4-year-old, Dubai-based company raised $250 million this summer at a $1.35 billion valuation. Nothing, a maker of Android smartphones, earbuds and watches, is another wearables developer, albeit not a pure-play in the space, with a big round of late. The startup closed on a $200 million Series C last month to further its vision of an “AI-native platform in which hardware and software converge into a single intelligent system.” The company cited smart glasses as one of the devices in which it envisions incorporating its operating system. And while wearables is usually understood to be a category for humans, we did mix it up a bit in our list by including Halter, a maker of a platform that combines smart collars and virtual fencing for ranchers to manage their cattle. It closed on $100 million in Series D funding this summer at a $1 billion valuation. Health and medical conditions Wearables for monitoring medical conditions are also still drawing investors’ attention with two established names each picking up $100 million financings this year. San Diego-based Biolinq, which has developed a wearable biosensor that measures glucose levels continuously just beneath the skin’s surface, secured its $100 million round in March. A month earlier, VitalConnect, a San Jose, California-based maker of wearable, connected patches for remote monitoring of cardiac health, secured a round of the same size, led by Ally Bridge Group. We’re also still seeing some varied startup activity around health-monitoring wearables. An offbeat one that caught our eye was Epicore Biosystems, which develops a wearable that tracks biomarkers in sweat to measure hydration, nutrition, stress and other physiological data. Deep-pocketed competition Being in an offbeat niche might provide considerable advantages to a startup. That’s because wearables startups play in a space that also happens to draw the largest technology companies in the world. From Apple watches to Google Fitbit devices to Meta’s AI glasses, giants with valuations in the trillions are finding appeal in the space. One of Apple’s newest offerings — AirPods with live translation — shows the technological sophistication of wearables is only on the rise. Even so, we’re betting startups will continue to find ways to innovate in ways that differentiate them from the tech giants. In particular, they have the advantage of marketing to a small initial early-adopter crowd and tweaking a product until it’s ripe for a much wider audience. Related Crunchbase query: Illustration: Dom Guzman