Fundraising

Over the years, I’ve spoken with a quite a few startup founders. Many of them are smart, likable and have really great ideas that they’re able to convey in a pitch deck. Yet many of them struggle to get funded. Why is it so hard to get a term sheet? If everything seems to be going well,

The late-stage market is truly whacked. But it's not just the startups that are suffering. Insight Partners, a double-dipper growth equity and late-stage venture investor, recently reduced its fundraising target of $20 billion to $15 billion after raising a measly $2 billion of the pot.

In a world where people working from home still need access to networks and a ton of other use cases, Netmaker lets users create and manage VPN connections without the learning curve, as Romain wrote last year when the company announced its seed round. Netmaker submitted its pitch deck to TechCrun

British early-stage venture firm Black Seed has raised £5 million ($6.2 million) as part of its inaugural fund to solely support Black founders in the country. The round was led by asset manager M&G Investments, with additional support from Atomico and Molten Ventures. The firm is hoping to ra

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank left a small but noticeable hole in the venture debt market that private lenders don’t find attractive enough to fill. When SVB went under in March, the startup ecosystem was primarily concerned about what would happen to startup and venture capital firm ba

Crunchbase announced Thursday that it is starting to track the amount of venture capital dollars invested in founders who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community. The new data source is an addition to Crunchbase's Diversity Spotlight, which tracks the amount of venture capital funding raised b

Most of the pitch decks we cover in the Pitch Deck Teardown series are for relatively young companies, but to celebrate our 50th pitch deck teardown, I figured I’d do something slightly different. Today, we’re looking at Ageras‘ pitch deck, which it used to raise a $35 million pr

Last year, Americans bought more heat pumps than gas furnaces, a striking split that's likely to widen in the coming years as consumer awareness and climate regulations foster their uptake. Heat pumps are already widely used to cool homes across the Southeast, and they're making inroads in

The venture community has realized several things in recent years: Climate change isn't going away, and there is a huge opportunity to invest in companies that promise to define entire segments of the future economy. With a few hiccups along the way, venture dollars have begun to flow with incr

“Batteries are hard,” an expert once said. He wasn't kidding. Designing and manufacturing pouches, slabs or cylinders filled with volatile chemicals that are capable of recharging ever more quickly is far from easy. Just ask LG, which had to pay GM nearly $2 billion for a costly manufacturi

We are in very interesting times today. It’s rare to see so many tectonic shifts happening in real time: High interest rates, declining equity values, SVB and other banks failing with a continued contagion risk and a recession looming. There has been an aggressive shift in assumed equity retu

We've spent the last century and a half pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and it's clear that we'll have to spend the coming decades removing a significant fraction of that. But then what do we do with it all? Some people are proposing pumping it underground. Others think we c

Nonprofit Arts Help is launching a $6 million fund to build the world's first digital climate library to provide public access to the archives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC, which was formed in 1992, has more than 1.7 million paper documents r

Preparing to raise a round of funding is one of the most important tasks every founder has to do. Compiling a deck, a teaser, and an executive summary requires a thorough understanding of a startup's story and the market in which it operates. But for many founders, the most challenging item req