Today, we dig into the recent flurry of enterprise M&A for clues on who’s buying, why, and whether startups should stay the course or cash their checks. Last week, we wrote about AI’s pre-product investment frenzy and the AI talent wars. While the average knowledge worker isn’t commanding eight-digit salaries, the AI race is already […]
Fintech Nexus asked peers to recommend female fintech founders who they felt we all should watch over the next year. Today is part one of our series recognizing a group of women who are inspiring the future of the financial technology industry, according to their peers. Fintech Nexus asked the LinkedIn universe, “who are female […]
Fintech Nexus talked to three fintech experts about trends, among them, exits, stablecoins and AI. Financial services is having a moment in 2025, from companies announcing they are going public to talks of more mergers and acquisitions and venture capital funding being pumped into the sector. Fintech Nexus spoke about these fintech trends with investors […]
No product? No problem. With a voting structure that makes Murati untouchable, Thinking Machines joins a new wave of speculative bets on founder-as-future. There’s a new superscaler in town — maybe. In late June, Thinking Machines Lab, led by Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, closed on a Seed-stage fundraise that saw […]
Investors aren’t just funding ideas anymore. They’re staking bets on people. Indeed, the AI talent wars are abound. In the last few months, we’ve seen Meta try to poach Mira Murati’s team with billion-dollar comp packages. We’ve seen entire companies — like Scale AI — funded as talent plays. And while Microsoft has scooped up […]
It’s gonna get worse before it gets better. With what we see with increasing prices because of the tariffs and things that are going on right now, that expense to the consumer is going to go up. As long as banks and other holders of consumer financial data continue to play fair — a tenuous […]
It is a great irony that the fate of the U.S. economy is now interwoven with that of an industry entirely dependent on clean, applicable, trustworthy data — a tenuous paradigm the government is now upending by sullying the trustworthiness of data collection and reporting. This has systemic implications for a financial system built on […]
Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight early-stage bets on the future of tech. Today’s issue highlights a strategic AI customs startup emerging to solve a multibillion-dollar blind spot in global trade. Caspian, a San Francisco-based trade advisory platform, has raised $5.4 million in seed funding to help businesses recover duty refunds left […]
An EO From the Trump administration mandates the government to modernize payments–but may not move the needle much In late March, the Trump administration placed a rush order on a nominally major reshuffle to a government system pumping more than $5 trillion across the country. The White House’s executive order titled “Modernizing Payments To and […]
AI is rewriting the rules of ad-making, from bringing scripts to life on screen to driving better ad conversion. When prediction market Kalshi aired a 30-second ‘unhinged’ GTA-style cinematic ad during the NBA finals, it looked like something straight out of a high-end production studio: sweeping visuals, polished storytelling, and immersive sound. One would imagine […]