Through Pivotal Ventures, Melinda French Gates is betting that women founders, women's health startups and economic mobility initiatives represent one of venture capital's biggest overlooked opportunities.
Invisix’s €20 million funding round highlights growing investor interest in semiconductor infrastructure startups and the role former ASML talent is playing in building the industry's next generation of companies.
Piper Serica’s ₹800 crore Bharat Tech Fund reflects a growing shift in venture capital toward AI, enterprise software and deep-tech startups as investors search for India’s next wave of innovation.
Salesforce would sell to every company, regardless of industry. HubSpot would do marketing for everyone. Workday would handle HR for anyone. The logic was seductive: build once, sell infinitely. But that logic has cracked. A new generation of startups has discovered that the biggest opportunities are not in the center of the market. They are in the long tail – the obscure, idiosyncratic, underserved industries that horizontal software ignores. Plumbing companies. Funeral homes. Daycare centers. Auto repair shops. Dental offices.
For decades, quantum computing has been the tech industry's most tantalizing promise – and its most frustrating tease. Every few years, a headline would scream: "Quantum Breakthrough!" Then, nothing. The machines remained too noisy, too expensive, too impossible to program. Skeptics called it a forever‑away technology.
For most of startup history, there was only one way for employees to turn their stock options into real money: wait for an IPO. That could take a decade. If it happened at all. And if the company succeeded. Many did not. But that brutal calculus has changed. Over the past three years, a new ecosystem of secondary markets has emerged – platforms that allow employees, early investors, and even founders to sell their shares to private buyers long before a public offering. The result is a revolution in startup liquidity, one that is reshaping compensation, retention, and the very meaning of "building for the long term." The numbers are staggering. According to Forge Global, one of the largest secondary trading platforms, $60 billion in private shares changed hands in 2025 – up 150% from 2023. Carta and Hiive have seen similar growth. And the trend is accelerating. "Employees used to have one lottery ticket: the IPO," says Kelly Rodriques, CEO of Forge Global. "Now they have multiple liquidity events along the way. They can buy a house, pay for college, diversify their portfolio – all while staying at the company. That is a game‑changer.
For decades, there was an unwritten rule in Silicon Valley: don't do defense. The Pentagon was slow, bureaucratic, and morally suspect. Top engineers wanted to change the world with social media and self‑driving cars, not missiles and drones. Venture capitalists who funded weapons makers were seen as pariahs. That rule has been incinerated.
Factories closed. Jobs moved overseas. Rust Belt cities became punchlines. The assumption was ironclad: the United States would design, China would build, and everyone would get rich. That assumption has been shattered.
Neobanks like Chime and Nubank promised to replace traditional banking. Robinhood made trading free. Stripe made payments invisible. The narrative was simple: fintech startups would eat the legacy financial system one vertical at a time. But that war is over. And neither side won.
Three years ago, biotech was the hottest ticket in venture capital. Startups with names like Grail, Tempus, and 23andMe raised billions to sequence the world's DNA. The promise was intoxicating: big data would unlock the secrets of cancer, aging, and every rare disease. Investors threw money at anything with a sequencer and a cloud platform.