Venture

Why this year’s best tech talks happened over cocktails at StrictlyVC

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In an industry that reinvents itself before most people finish their breakfast scone, TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC events series has become something rare: a constant. These evenings offer a chance to step back from the blur of headlines and hype cycles, to sit with the people actually driving change, and to understand what’s really happening behind the […]

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Solo VC and Lovable investor Neil Murray raises third Nordic-focused fund

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The Nordic red-hot startup movement continues. On Tuesday, Neil Murray, founder and general partner at Copenhagen-based firm The Nordic Web Ventures, announced the close of a $6 million Fund III to continue investing in early-stage founders in the region.   The fund will focus on writing the first institutional checks to companies focused on robotics, AI-native companies, and deep tech founders.   Murray, a solo GP,

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Netflix is showing Hollywood what happens when a startup grows up 

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A baby was born in a Waymo this week, and it wasn’t even the first one.  What started as a novelty story quickly became a reminder of how autonomous vehicles have quietly become part of everyday life, complete with all the messiness that entails. The real coming-of-age story this week, however, wasn’t happening in San Francisco’s robotaxis. It was playing out in

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Stanford’s star reporter takes on Silicon Valley’s ‘money-soaked’ startup culture

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Theo Baker is truly an outlier. While journalism as a major has seen shrinking enrollment for years and is even being dropped by some schools entirely, Baker, a senior at Stanford University, has doubled down on old-school investigative reporting, and it is paying off spectacularly. Baker first made headlines as a college freshman when his

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The market has ‘switched’ and founders have the power now, VCs say

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The way venture capitalists think about fund-raising can be a black box. But investors must think about their go-to-market strategy for raising their own funds, just as much as they think about how their portfolio companies find their market fit.   All season on Build Mode, we’ve explored how founders should approach marketing, but this week we’re exploring how VCs sell themselves to founders as trustworthy partners, and

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Capital is a commodity (but your investor relationships aren’t)

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Venture capitalists Ross Fubini (XYZ Ventures) and Leslie Feinzaig (Graham & Walker Ventures) pull back the curtain on how VCs build their own go-to-market strategies — not just how they evaluate startups, but also how they win over LPs and founders alike. In this episode of Build Mode, they share hard-won lessons from raising their first funds and how that experience allows

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Runware raises $50M Series A to help make image, video generation easier for developers

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Flaviu Radulesc started Runware in 2023 when he was testing a text-to-image company and realized that, though genAI tech was powerful, it was slow in generating images. So Radulesc teamed up with Ioana Hreninciuc and launched Runware as a dev tool platform that specializes in generating images, videos, and audio in real time. The company has seen much

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