A new year brings with it hope for a better tomorrow β kind of, at least. In the world of venture capital, nothing is quite predictable. The number of firms in the U.S. has taken a sharp dip as risk-averse institutional investors splash money on only the biggest names in Silicon Valley, as reported by [β¦]
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Welcome to Startups Weekly β your weekly recap of everything you canβt miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Welcome to 2025! The first half of the week was relatively quiet in terms of startup announcements, but activity is already starting to pick up. Weβre also [β¦]
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Despite Ryan Serhant's standout 2024, he hasn't escaped failure. After creating two apps that ultimately faltered, he's on to his third, raising millions to help catapult it to success.
In December, the real-estate mogul announced that his brokerage firm, Serhant, had raised $45 million in its first equity funding round from the capital firms Camber Creek and Left Lane Capital.
His firm, which he founded in 2020, also increased its year-over-year sales volume by over $1 billion, its annual letter said. In June, Serhant, who starred on Bravo's "Million Dollar Listing New York," debuted his own Netflix show, "Owning Manhattan," which was greenlighted for a second season.
Traditional brokerage firms aren't typically venture-backed. Serhant told Business Insider that much of the VC funding the firm raised would go toward growing its AI-powered app, S.mple.
As its name implies, S.mple is designed to simplify brokers' administrativeΒ work as independent contractors, allowing more time for selling real estate.
Serhant told CNBC last month that the firm's nearly 1,000 agents had been using the app, which launched last January, and that it had saved the firm more than the equivalent of 625 working days in admin time.
S.mple, available only to Serhant agents, allows agents to manage contracts, marketing materials, sales follow-ups, customer-relationship-management metrics, and more from their phones. It's designed to streamline those processes, taking over much of the administrative side of the work.
"It's Instacart for salespeople," Serhant told BI. "It's the least sexy part of what we do."
Contrary to the app's name, the road to launching it was far from simple. Two previous app ventures, Univers, a real-estate brokerage in the metaverse, and Spaces, a video-editing tool, failed to take off as Serhant hoped. But he wasn't deterred.
Serhant broke down his missteps for BI and explained how he learned from his mistakes.
Courtesy of Netflix.
In 2022, Serhant launched Univers, a headquarters for his namesake brokerage in the metaverse that allowed teams anywhere in the world to meet.
Its futuristic virtual office tower was populated with robots, agent avatars, and elevators that moved like spaceships.
It might've been eye-catching, but Serhant said agents didn't find it as useful as he had envisioned. Features like the ability to choose their avatars' hair color or wardrobe weren't helping agents close deals in the real world.
"It didn't actually solve any immediate problems for them," he said.
Serhant realized the same was true for Spaces, a video-editing app he created in 2022 to help sellers' agents design virtual tours and marketing materials.
Serhant saw the potential, but the agents did not. They were more likely to use existing apps and tools they were comfortable with.
"The biggest lesson was don't just give customers what you think they need," Serhant said. "A lot of times it's just about really asking and listening to direct feedback."
He added that the roadblocks Univers and Spaces faced helped him learn about the app-development world.
Serhant said that now he's comfortable interviewing engineers and developers and discussing how they develop models or use machine-learning technologies.
"I didn't know what to ask before," Serhant said. "I didn't know what I didn't know."
He said he persevered because he believes that making useful tech for real-estate agents is good business. He compared his app-development journey to a lawnmower that doesn't start immediately.
"You have to figure out how to get it going," Serhant said.
GP Kidd/Getty Images
Big Pharma will hunt for more acquisitions in 2025 as industry giants face patent expiration for some of their best-selling drugs, according to a top M&A banker.
Merck's cancer drug Keytruda, the top-selling medication in the world, will lose patent exclusivity at the end of 2028.
Eliquis, made by Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb to treat and prevent blood clots, will lose its exclusivity earlier that same year. The two drugs raked in $25 billion and $12 billion, respectively, for their manufacturers in 2023.
When patents expire, pharma company revenue can take a hit as rivals create similar offerings to take market share. Developing brand new drugs is a long, expensive, and risky process, so acquisitions of other companies with new medications in their pipelines offer a potentially faster way to generate new revenue.
This is partly why Chris Roop, head of M&A for the Americas at Jefferies, is expecting biopharma M&A to pick up in 2025.
"The gaps to fill are significant when you think about replacing drugs that achieve peak sales north of $20 billion or $30 billion drug before patent exclusivity expires," Roop told Business Insider in a recent interview.
Large, successful pharmaceutical companies can become victims of their own successes when patents run out on blockbuster treatments, he added.
AbbVie's popular arthritis drug Humira saw its patent exclusivity expire in 2023. In the third quarter of 2024, with patients increasingly turning to similar drugs or other prescriptions, AbbVie saw its revenue from global sales of Humira fall 37% from the previous year's quarter.
To make up for looming revenue gaps, Roop said Big Pharma will increasingly turn to M&A next year, buying smaller biotechs developing drugs in major markets such as obesity and oncology.
Obesity is positioned to be biopharma's hottest market in 2025, Roop predicted.
2024's biggest pharma acquisition was in obesity. Novo Nordisk's controlling shareholder Novo Holdings closed a deal in December to buy development and manufacturing company Catalent for $16.5 billion. The deal gives Novo Nordisk more manufacturing power for its obesity drugs Ozempic and Wegovy.
Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, which makes Mounjaro and Zepbound, have a significant headstart in the exploding field of GLP-1 weight-loss treatments. Originally created to treat diabetes, injectable GLP-1 medications have surged in popularity. In May, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that one in eight US adults had tried a GLP-1 drug.
Many other pharma companies want a piece of that pie, Roop said.
"Obesity is going to be a $100 billion to $150 billion market, so even if you come up with a third or fourth entrant in that market and only achieve 2% to 4% share, you still have a multibillion-dollar drug on your hands," he explained.
Beyond obesity, Roop sees immunology and inflammation drugs as big targets for biopharma M&A next year. That market saw a few large deals in 2024, including Vertex Pharmaceuticals' $4.9 billion purchase of Alpine Immune Sciences, which has a drug in development that targets Berger's disease, an autoimmune kidney condition.
Jefferies
Roop expects oncology to remain a focus area for Big Pharma next year.
He said pharmaceutical companies are especially interested in precision oncology M&A, including drugs targeting more specific cancers and even new methods of personalizing cancer treatment.
AstraZeneca made a precision oncology acquisition in March with its $2.4 billion purchase of Fusion Pharmaceuticals, which is developing a radiopharmaceutical drug, which uses radioactive isotopes to treat midstage prostate cancer.
Finally, Roop said Big Pharma will continue looking to buy companies with cardiovascular drugs in their pipelines. Heart disease and related conditions remain the leading cause of death. The global market for cardiovascular drugs was valued at about $150 billion in 2024, according to Precedence Research.
Novo Nordisk bought Cardior Pharmaceuticals in March in a deal worth up to $1.1 billion to strengthen its cardiovascular drug pipeline.
Roop said both private and public biopharma companies could be acquisition targets next year.
"A lot of what we're doing is trying to find that equilibrium to fund these companies to a point in time where pharma will say β on that data with that amount of patients and with a drug profile like this β I'm willing to take the risk, buy it from that point, and take it forward into late-stage development," he said.
"There are a lot of private and public companies that are in that lane today. We probably have more privates today with advanced data than we did three or four years ago," he added.
Roop said many of these private biopharma companies with advanced data are also well-positioned to potentially go public as the IPO window reopens.
Tacora Capital has raised its second fund, after Peter Thiel backed its first fund with $250 million.
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Anuj Christian's green card was approved in 2019, a decade after he first came to the US as a graduate student from India. Since then, he's been waiting to receive it, one of thousands trapped in a lengthy backlog created by America's byzantine immigration system.
Earlier this month, Christian was hopeful for the first time in years. Just before Christmas, Donald Trump announced that Sriram Krishnan, a first-generation Indian American, would serve as a senior White House policy advisor for AI. Krishnan is set to work closely with Trump's new "crypto czar" David Sacks, an early investor in Facebook, SpaceX, Uber, and Palantir.
For Christian, Krishnan's appointment felt personal. "Sriram has personally been through the immigration system," said Christian, who runs an immigration reform group called FAIR. "Someone who has personally been through this issue is close to the president now. That has never happened before."
Krishnan arrived in the US in 2007 from Chennai, India, to begin a six-year stint at Microsoft. From there, he climbed the ranks of Silicon Valley, holding senior roles at Yahoo, Snap, Facebook, and Twitter. In 2020, he moved to venture capital, becoming a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
Along the way, Krishnan became a US citizen in 2016, a milestone that eludes many legal immigrants from India. The green card backlog, a byproduct of per-country caps on employment-based permanent US residency, has left thousands of skilled workers from India in limbo. Wait times can now exceed beyond a lifetime.
Krishnan's appointment comes with a unique resonance for those impacted by this system. He has spoken openly about the challenges of navigating US immigration and has advocated for raising the country-based green card caps. These calls for reform have been a recurring theme of The Aarthi and Sriram Show, a podcast he hosts with his tech entrepreneur wife Aarthi Ramamurthy.
Krishnan's visibility and advocacy have turned him into a lightning rod for MAGA followers, though. In the days since Trump's announcement, the technologist has faced hate speech and racism directed not just at him but also at Indians and legal immigration in general. Krishnan declined to comment.
The backlash began with a tweet from far-right activist Laura Loomer, who criticized his appointment as "deeply disturbing" and said it conflicted with Trump's "America First" agenda.
Loomer accused Krishnan of advocating to "remove all restrictions on green card caps" and enabling foreign workers to take jobs from American STEM graduates, citing Silicon Valley's reliance on international talent as a threat to domestic innovation. Former Congressman Matt Gaetz, who was Trump's initial pick for attorney general, accused "tech bros" of engineering "an immigration policy."
Rahul Menon, an Indian-born engineer from Rhode Island and host of Area51, a podcast about immigration, believes hate speech directed at Krishnan reflects broader misconceptions about skilled immigrants in the US.
"They just assume we are here to steal everyone's jobs," Menon told Business Insider. "If people understood the process of getting through an H-1B and the number of hoops you need to jump through, it's insane. The hate that Sriram is getting is just the beginning. You just need a thick skin to do the job."
Some of the scorn has been directed at H-1Bs, a common visa type that Silicon Valley companies and tech outsourcing firms use to hire foreign workers in the US. This particular system is also overwhelmed by huge volumes of applications for a limited number of slots each year. Bloomberg News uncovered a scheme earlier this year, known as "multiple registration," that manipulates the H-1B program and prevents what it described as legitimate talent from accessing these skilled-worker visa-based opportunities.
Menon noted that optimism around addressing the green card backlog has been steadily growing, fueled by statements from high-profile figures. During a June appearance on the All-In Podcast hosted by VCs including Sacks, Trump expressed support for granting green cards to all US college graduates. Trump also recently voiced support for H-1B visas.
Menon sees Krishnan's appointment as the latest in a series of developments boosting morale among advocates for US immigration reform.
"It started with Trump saying that, then with Vivek, and now with Sriram β it's the cherry on top," Menon said, referring to Vivek Ramaswamy, another Trump advisor whose parents immigrated from Kerala, India. Ramaswamy has repeatedly called for the H-1B lottery system to be replaced with a selection process based on merit.
Others remain skeptical about Krishnan's ability to influence immigration policy in his new role.
Sacks addressed the speculation directly in a tweet: "Sriram has been a US citizen for a decade. He's not 'running America.' He's advising on AI policy. He will have no influence over US immigration policy." The post appeared aimed at calming criticism from MAGA loyalists and quelling hope among some Indian immigrants that Krishnan's appointment would lead to immediate changes.
Ash Arora, a partner at VC firm LocalGlobe, and a friend of Krishnan and his wife, Ramamurthy, cautioned against reading too much into Krishnan's role when it comes to immigration reform.
"Sriram has been hired for AI β and AI stands for artificial intelligence, not American Indian," she told Business Insider. "I'm not sure whether Sriram will have a say in immigration matters, but the optimism about legal immigration being fixed, in my opinion, is misguided."
Ultimately, Krishnan is an AI policy advisor, Area51's Menon said. "I'd like to hope things will change. But let's not count our chickens before they've hatched."
TechCrunchβs Found podcast, which has brought listeners the stories behind the startups since April 2022, released its final episode today. Iβve been one of the hosts of Found since November 2022 and in that time have spoken to more than 75 founders about the startups they are building. These founders hail from many different backgrounds [β¦]
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Courtesy of HoneyHomes, Tour24, Metropolis.
The frozen housing market meant tough times for the proptech β or property technology β industry.
As the market starts to thaw, however, things are looking up for firms that seek to use technology to digitize, automate, or otherwise improve legacy processes in the worlds of residential and commercial real estate.
Business Insider asked 10 venture-capital investors who focus on real-estate and construction technology to nominate the most exciting, promising, and talked-about proptech startups in 2024.
The 20 companies on the final list reveal the breadth of the proptech universe.
Take Steadily, a firm trying to digitize insurance underwriting for real-estate investors, a process that has historically taken a lot of paperwork and time β only to result in policies with steep premiums. Another startup, Arcol, aims to make producing 3D architectural drawings faster and easier. A third, Conservation Labs, uses an AI-powered sensor to detect if water is leaking or being wasted in a building to prevent damage and protect the environment.
In the first half of 2024, venture funding for proptech companies dropped 14.3% from the same period a year prior. Funding totaled $4.37 billion, down from $5.1 billion during the same period in 2023 and dramatically less than the $13.13 billion invested in the first six months of 2022, according to the Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation (CRETI), which surveyed 1,088 proptech startups.
Certain niches, however, hold promise. In 2024, VC investments in AI-powered proptech companies reached a record $3.2 billion, CRETI reported earlier this month.
Here are 20 of the buzziest proptech companies in 2024, presented alphabetically. The companies' fundraising numbers are from PitchBook to ensure a consistent data source.
Did we miss a company you think is disrupting the industry? Send reporter Jordan Pandy an email at [email protected].
City: New York City and Tel Aviv
Year founded: 2019
Total funding: $64.31 million
What it does: Agora is a financial software firm that helps real-estate investors process payments, keep track of tax records, raise money, and generally organize data.
Why it's hot: The firm, which raised a $34 million Series B round in May, said it helps landlords and developers with much-needed modernization.
"Real estate is the largest asset class in the world. However, the market still relies on legacy software providers, inefficient workflows, outdated, fragmented systems, and manual, tedious work," Asaf Raz, Agora's head of marketing, told Business Insider.
"Investors expect a digital-first experience β they're tech-savvy and need access to information quickly. Firms can't work without it, and clients need a platform like Agora more than ever," Raz said.
A challenge it faces: Real-estate investors are still grappling with relatively high interest rates, which makes it harder to borrow money and scale up, and the relatively high price of materials, which makes it tougher to renovate or upgrade properties. Those market forces could make customers more reluctant to spend money on new software.
Agora CEO Bar Mor told business news site Pulse 2.0 earlier this month, however, that Agora might still appeal to customers because its suite of products could help them "enhance efficiency and save costs."
Acrol
City: New York
Year founded: 2021
Total funding: $5.1 million
What it does: Arcol is a web browser-based design tool predominantly used by architects to create and collaborate on 3D models of buildings and explore their feasibility.
Why it's hot: Architects β Arcol's target audience β have traditionally relied on software design tools like AutoCAD and Revit, which require paid licenses and aren't as collaborative. Arcol has set out to solve that issue with a browser-based format easily shared and edited by anyone involved in a building project.
"These people are core to our society; they're literally building the built world, yet they hate using their tools," said Paul O'Carroll, the son of an architect and founder of Arcol. "The design tool we use to design buildings, we want to rethink for the browser to be collaborative and to be performant."
So far, demand is high. Arcol, run by a team of six, has a waitlist of over 18,000 users, O'Carroll said.
A challenge it faces: There are several other startups in the BIM, or Business Information Modeling, space. Competing with established players like Revit could take a lot of time and money, according to AEC Magazine. (AEC stands for architecture, engineering, and construction.)
Also, Arcol is currently only useful to architects during the conceptual modeling phase, and the company hopes to expand the tool to help with other stages of construction.
Branch Furniture
City: New York City
Year founded: 2018
Total funding: $11.76 million
What it does: Branch Furniture sells office products, like chairs and desks, to businesses and directly to consumers.
Why it's hot: The company's first iteration sold office furniture the old way: B2B, catering to employers outfitting a huge space who would often purchase items in bulk. After the pandemic changed how (and how often) workers occupied offices, Branch pivoted to sell to regular people β wherever they work.
"We launched our D2C business to cater to the future of work, which was definitively hybrid, both during COVID and after β and that's where we sit today," Sib Mahapatra, cofounder of Branch Furniture, told Business Insider.
Branch's ergonomic chair is a bestseller with a 4.6 rating out of five with over 6,000 reviews β it's rated among the best in its category by Business Insider, Architectural Digest, and Wired for its adjustability and sleek design.
In addition to desk chairs β in colors that range from a standard black to salmon-y orange hue called "poppy," the company also sells desks and lamps to outfit a home office. Its inventory includes meeting tables and even phone booths ($6,395) for more commercial office spaces.
A challenge it faces: Branch's products are physical, so it's been plagued by supply-chain delays. Branch is also up against competitors in the good-looking-furniture-that-is-also-comfortable arena, including Herman Miller and Steelcase β though Branch's offerings are often cheaper.
The company is also gaining ground regarding velocity, or the speed at which new products are developed and released.
"We're learning a lot about the pace of iteration in our product category," Mahapatra said. "It's definitely not software, but the benefit is that you get more time to really get things right and to iterate with purpose, and you end up being a little bit more deliberate about how you iterate the product β it just takes longer."
BuildCasa
City: Oakland, California
Year founded: 2022
Total funding: $6.67 million
What it does: BuildCasa helps California homeowners subdivide their lots β thanks to new state laws β and then connects them with local builders who pay the homeowners for a portion of their land and then build new housing on it.
Why it's hot: The national housing crisis is particularly acute in California, which recently passed a series of laws to encourage more building. While others look to transform construction to make cheaper housing, BuildCasa uses technology instead to find more buildable lots in desirable locations like San Francisco and San Jose.
Most massive home-building companies focus on large, master-planned communities, often far from city centers. BuildCasa's vision, said its founders Ben Bear, CEO, and Paul Stiedl, CPO, is to become a large homebuilder focused instead on finding land in already desirable cities and suburbs.
The company works with homeowners to subdivide their land, creating a new, buildable lot. Those lots can then be sold to a local real-estate developer to build on, or BuildCasa can work in partnership with a local builder to erect and then sell a completed home.
A challenge it faces: New laws have simplified the process of subdividing lots, but building in infill areas still requires technical expertise and good relationships with local officials. Building on these smaller lots may be becoming easier, but it still isn't easy.
Conservation Labs
City: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Year founded: 2018
Total funding: $14.68 million
What it does: Conservation Labs developed a smart water sensor that can identify leaks and wasteful water use. The H2know sensor uses machine learning to decode sounds in water pipes and translate them into insights for commercial property owners, including restaurants and hotels.
Why it's hot: The startup is at the intersection of two buzzy topics: AI and sustainability. H2know trains on thousands of hours of water pipe acoustics so that, over time, it becomes more accurate in detecting leaks and inefficient water use in buildings. Customers use that information to fix problems and conserve water, saving them money on utility bills while lowering their overall carbon footprint. Some 20% of home energy use goes to heating water.
"There's a very strong relationship between net-zero carbon emissions and water consumption," said Mark Kovscek, founder and CEO of Conservation Labs.
He added that H2know has detected leaky toilets in nearly every building in which it's installed. Some large properties are wasting 1 million gallons of water a year, he said.
A challenge it faces: H2know starts at $129, and it could be hard to convince cash-strapped commercial real estate owners to spend money to install sensors when the office market is struggling in many parts of the US.
Kovscek said the goal is to scale up to 100,000 sensors installed as soon as possible, or five times what Conservation Labs is currently on track to sell this year. To support that growth, the company needs to hire some of the "best and brightest" data scientists and engineers to further develop the machine-learning platform that underpins H2know, Kovscek said.
Constrafor
City: New York
Year founded: 2019
Total funding: Almost $380 million
What it does: Large general contractors use Constrafor's software to onboard and pay their subcontractors on time β sometimes before the contractors themselves get paid by the clients. Contractors can also use the software to help purchase the supplies and services needed to complete a construction project on time and within budget.
Why it's hot: There's the money raised. In November, Constrafor announced that it raised $14 million in Series A funding as well as a $250 million credit facility.
The issues the firm is trying to address are also key. Construction is booming across the US, thanks in part to President Joe Biden's $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. The rise of AI is also leading to a corresponding increase in the construction of data centers.
The actual process of construction, however, can often be long and complicated. That's why Constrafor's role as a one-stop shop appeals to large general contractors.
"So far, everyone has been focused on just building a very, very small point solution," said Anwar Ghauche, Constrafor's founder. "We're combining multiple different workflows, multiple different departments, all on the same platform."
The main challenges it faces: Next up: Constrafor must try to convince subcontractors to subscribe and pay for its software, too.
Gauch added that Constrafor's contractor clients can face cash-flow crunches. Those can lead to delays on important projects.
After Hurricanes Helene and Milton severely damaged parts of Florida, North Carolina, and other parts of the Southeast, Constrafor launched a disaster relief effort that would allow local contractors who are part of rebuilding efforts "to overcome delays, purchase materials, and ensure timely payment for their teams."
Ease Capital
City: New York
Year founded: 2022
Total funding: $13.95 million
What it does: Ease Capital helps private equity firms and large investors lend to smaller apartment landlords. It uses data and technology that allow the biggest players to lend $5 million to $50 million in deals that would typically be too small for them.
Why it's hot: Sophisticated private lenders usually focus on the largest apartment complexes, meaning that most apartment-building owners have to turn to banks and agencies to borrow money to purchase or refinance properties. However, current high rates have dramatically slowed bank and agency lending and the large private lenders usually won't lend for smallβand medium-sized projects.
Ease uses data and technology to make it easier and more efficient for these large lenders to lend on smaller deals when the need is the highest. In 2023, the company announced a $450 million partnership with major real estate owner and asset manager Taconic Capital Partners, and has already announced multiple successfully originated loans.
CEO Charlie Oshamn told Business Insider earlier this year that the company is often seeing up to $1 billion in loan requests a month. Unlike other firms, which provide an estimated rate upfront that could potentially change over months of negotiation, Ease Capital sticks to its initial offering, eliminating the guessing game for potential clients.
A challenge it faces: Though the founding team has successfully launched other major proptech businesses, like flexible office and event space provider Convene and real-estate data firm Reonomy, it still needs to prove itself as a lender.
Habi
City: Colombia and Mexico
Year founded: 2019
Total funding: $564 million
What it does: Habi has built Latin America's largest proprietary database and utilizes AI-based pricing algorithms to facilitate transactions and financing for homebuyers and sellers. Habi also buys and sells homes, offers mortgages, and posts and publicizes listings of properties for sale.
Why it's hot: The company operates in Colombia and Mexico without centralized MLS. MLS, or multiple listing services, are databases designed to help real estate brokers identify available homes for sale. These systems are abundant in the US, whereas they are scarce in Latin America. Without an MLS, it means homebuyers and sellers in Colombia and Mexico have difficulty knowing which properties are available for sale, their prices, and their listing and pricing history.
By gathering and sharing information on more than 20 million homes, Habi has addressed a critical need in these countries' real estate sector, establishing itself as an authority on housing in the region.
"We've become a household name for low and middle-income sellers and consumers and brokers in Mexico and Colombia," Brynne McNulty Rojas, CEO and cofounder of Habi, told Business Insider.
A challenge it faces: A combination of factors, including shifting economic and political conditions, has stalled the growth of Latin America's real-estate market. To achieve the same level of ubiquity as Zillow in the US, Habi must get real-estate brokers and sellers to list their properties on its platform and entice buyers to use it.
Courtesy of Honey Homes
City: Lafayette, California
Year founded: 2021
Total funding: $21.35 million
What it does: Founder Vishwas Prabhakara envisions Honey Homes as a "primary care physician for your home." For a monthly fee, a dedicated handyman will come once or twice a month to knock off "lightweight" home improvement projects like fixing a leaky faucet, installing a new ceiling fan, or repainting a room.
Why it's hot: With a cooling housing market, Prabhakara believes many homeowners are staying in their homes longer and interested in investing resources in β and enjoying β the property they currently have.
The main challenge it faces: Homeowners who already hire their preferred handymen may not be willing to pay for a service that sends new people, and bigger projects might require more specialized repair professionals. Then there's the cost and current smaller scale of the company: Subscriptions start from $295 a month, or $3,940 a year, according to the company website. The service is only available in parts of San Francisco and the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County, and Dallas, according to the site.
Impulse
City: San Francisco
Year founded: 2021
Total funding: $25 million
What it does: Impulse Labs made a battery-powered induction cooktop that, unlike most of its competitors, which may require an electrical upgrade, can plug into a standard 120-volt outlet. The cooktop can boil water at lightning speeds, and sensors hold heat levels steady even at high temperatures.
Why it's hot: Impulse Labs founder Sam D'Amico said the cooktop offers a better cooking experience than gas burners while promoting more climate-friendly homes. Cooking with gas emits pollutants like methane, benzene, and carbon monoxide, which harm our health and the planet. But it can cost thousands of dollars to rewire a home for an electric induction stove. Impulse Labs' induction cooktop avoids those pollutants and the cost of home retrofits.
The battery in Impulse Labs' stove also stores enough power to make three meals if the power goes out, D'Amico said.
"One of the cheapest ways to deploy battery storage is in the appliances we have to buy anyways," he added.
The main challenge it faces: The cooktop costs $5,999. The price is high, D'Amico said, but similar to other premium appliances. The price is lower if buyers qualify for tax breaks and rebates from federal and state governments, as well as some utilities. It's also only a cooktop β not a full stove β but D'Amico said the company eventually wants to sell a suite of appliances that can be a whole-home battery solution. Impulse Labs is accepting pre-orders, with plans to ship in the first quarter of 2025, according to its website.
KeyWay
City: New York City
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $43 million
What it does: Keyway uses machine learning and AI to aid institutional investors in sourcing, underwriting, and managing portfolios of properties.
Why it's hot: Companies that use AI have become commonplace today, but Keyway believes it is ahead of the pack in adopting and applying AI technology to real-estate investing.
"We were very early on in the AI game in 2020, and I think we've built a really strong backend of data with lots of APIs that allows us to integrate very segregated data very fast," CEO and cofounder Matias Recchia told Business Insider. "The fact that we built our system in a modular way also allows us to customize our product to a lot of our customers β so it's really not one solution fits all."
The main challenge it faces: New technology like Keyway can be hard to push on seasoned real-estate investors as they're used to using old-school methods like manually sourcing, underwriting, and managing portfolios.
"We're merging two cultures that are very different," Recchia said. "The real-estate industry requires a lot of proof to show them that data can really help them make better decisions. So there's a little bit of a culture shift that we're bringing to real estate as we sell them these tools and we partner with them."
Latii
City: Brooklyn, New York
Year founded: 2023
Total funding: $8.82 million
What it does: Latii is a sourcing platform that uses AI-powered tools to help North American-based architects and contractors save up to 60% by connecting with Latin American, southern European, and northern African window and door fabricators.
Why it's hot: Architects often include custom windows and doors in their designs, but hiring contractors and craftspeople overseas can cost their property-owning clients thousands of dollars. The architects who work with Latii, however, can source materials faster and at lower costs, cofounder and CEO Santiago Bueno told Business Insider.
"We're able to produce either equal or higher quality products at a less expensive rate," Bueno said.
In October, Latti announced that it had raised $5 million in seed-round funding, which it will use to expand in the Pacific Northwest, Mountain states, and the New York tri-state area.
The main challenge it faces: When working with fabricators in Latin America, challenges can arise in managing certifications, enforcing warranties, and overcoming language barriers. The region's use of the metric system can also be difficult for North America-based architects to navigate.
City: Scottsdale, Arizona
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $713.8 million
What it does: Lessen's software allows commercial and residential landlords to track maintenance needs, connect with service providers, and buy products.
Why it's hot: In August, Inc. magazine named Lessen the fastest-growing private software company in the US, citing its $1.1 billion valuation.
The valuation preceded a major acquisition in 2023: Lessen spent $950 million to buy property maintenance management firm SMS Assist in what the Commercial Observer called the largest proptech acquisition in history.
Lessen's software is widely used, handling 3 million work orders a year across 250,000 properties, according to Fifth Wall, an investor in the firm. Lessen also launched Lessen Advantage Marketplace, which allows its landlord customers to buy materials like glass, floors, and doors and find better insurance and loan rates.
The main challenge it faces: Like many real-estate firms, Lessen faces an overall slowdown in both the commercial and residential sectors, with mortgage rates remaining elevated. One big potential client base for Lessen is office building owners and property managers, but the office market right now is struggling, with vacancies around the US at record highs.
"We typically grow hand-in-hand with our clients, serving them in additional properties and markets as they expand. So, for example, interest rates can influence growth in some areas of our business," said Michael Tanner, senior vice president of marketing at Lessen.
A dearth of tradespeople is also a challenge for the company's platform that connects them to landlords, Tanner said.
Finally, the firm competes in a crowded market of competitors offering software for landlords, including Stessa, AppFolio, TenantCloud, and more.
Metropolis
City: Santa Monica
Year founded: 2017
Total funding raised by the company: $1.93 billion
What it does: Metropolis uses a computer vision platform powered by artificial intelligence to enable checkout-free payment at parking facilities. After registering their vehicles on the Metropolis app, customers can simply drive in and drive out without the hassle of paying with credit cards or ticket machines.
Why it's hot: Metropolis announced its acquisition of SP Plus, the largest parking network in North America, for $1.5 billion in October 2023 and closed the deal in May 2024. The move allowed Metropolis to rapidly scale its technology and reach 50 million customers across 4,000 locations.
"We've seen success and are continuing to scale and grow because Metropolis' checkout-free experiences give people the gift of time back, so they can spend it on the things that matter the most," cofounder and CEO Alex Israel told Business Insider.
The main challenge it faces: Israel said that most of the parking payments and transactions in the world are still analog.
"We envision a future where checkout-free payments travel with you, but scaling this technology across industries is complicated β it requires remarkable proprietary technology and boots on the ground," he said.
PredictAP
City: Boston
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $13.17 million
What it does: PredictAP makes real estate invoice processing simple and easy. It uses AI to code invoices quickly.
"So the accounting rules can become very complicated in commercial real estate at big companies," said CEO and founder David Stifter, describing the journey of how an invoice is processed.
He said an invoice would come in first, and someone would need to determine which accounting rules to apply. Predict AP will be useful at this stage because the AI will understand and use the accounting rules correctly. Then, it will go through the rest of the accounts payable process, a department responsible for paying vendors for services or goods at the company. Then, someone will approve it and then pay for it.
Why it's hot: Predict AP serves every corner of the real estate sector. The company said its customers are publicly traded companies that own real estate, private companies that own and operate real estate, or customers who provide services for those big companies.
The company has been able to help AP specialists and property managers face difficulties entering invoices because it takes a lot of time and effort.
"We're able to help folks with that difficult task of coding invoices and it's particularly painful in real estate where there's a lot of complexity," said CEO and founder David Stifter. He added: "Nobody wants to be typing 15-digit invoice numbers; that's not fun."
Russell Franks, the president and cofounder of Predict AP, added to his comments and noted that Predict AP could process an invoice in 30 to 40 seconds faster than the normal processing time of five to 10 minutes.
The main challenge it faces: The company shared that it is hard to find funding in this tough economy, and it is not easy to grow and expand.
Propexo
City: Boston
Year Founded: 2022
Total funding: $7.97 million
What it does: Propexo's unified API, or application programming interface, helps other real-estate tech companies quickly and easily integrate with property-management systems.
Why it's hot: Real-estate tech companies use APIs to integrate with data from external sources, like lead generation systems or rent roll systems.
However, existing APIs and the technology around them are outdated.
That means companies lose time and money that could be used to develop their product while trying to integrate with these APIs, said COO Ben Keller.
Propexo's unified API improves the developer experience by making the integration process simpler, faster, and cheaper. "We're really the first engineering infrastructure product in the proptech ecosystem," said Keller.
The main challenge it faces: It's not easy to convince property managers and owner-operators to change how they've been running their businesses for many years.
In August, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, alleging that the property-management software company allows landlords to coordinate and unfairly keep rents high. This is causing some landlords to rethink how they handle and process information, according to trade publication Multifamily Dive.
Rent Butter
City: Chicago
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $4 million
What it does: Rent Butter has created an alternative tenant screening process that gives landlords a more comprehensive view of applicants' financial history.
Why it's hot: Landlords have historically relied on static credit reports and background checks when evaluating potential tenants. Doing so creates a barrier for applicants with financial difficulties early in their adult lives, as credit scores are a difficult metric to improve.
Rent Butter is trying to eliminate that barrier and change the narrative around who is a "good" candidate by providing landlords with additional information that can more accurately assess a person's financial reliability.
Their application connects to an applicant's bank account, credit history, and employment, criminal, and rent payment history to provide a detailed one-page report highlighting their financial behaviors and potential risks.
"Our whole approach is: How do we show who the person is today β not who they were seven or 10 years ago," cofounder and CTO Christopher Rankin told Business Insider.
The main challenge it faces: Rent Butter partners with landlords, rather than selling directly to consumers, which makes scaling a challenge. Most landlords already have a tenant-vetting process, so it could be hard to convince them to change to Rent Butter.
Shepherd
City: San Francisco
Year founded: 2021
Total funding: $22.27 million
What it does: Shepherd is a Managing General Underwriter (MGU) leveraging tech to make underwriting commercial construction insurance more efficient. It also wields data to create more informed risk selection and price recommendations, often leading to upfront and long-term savings for policyholders.
Why it's hot: Insurers partner with MGUs to provide clients with insurance, with the MGU underwriting policies for clients and selling to potential policyholders. Shepherd adapts the typical MGU model by cutting the underwriting process from weeks to hours and incorporating risk assessment tech into its platform, making it a one-stop shop for insurers and clients. By working faster and putting these services in one place, Shepherd can better serve construction companies and insurers while fostering more involved relationships.
The main challenges it faces: Both insurance brokers and potential clients have some healthy skepticism about a new model for commercial construction insurance, so it falls on Shepherd to earn their trust to gain their business.
Courtesy of Steadliy
City: Austin
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $60.1 million
What it does: Steadily is a digital insurance company for real-estate investors that promises a "faster, better, and cheaper" underwriting experience.
Why it's hot: Steadily founder Darren Nix first encountered the outdated nature of insurance underwriting, trying to find quotes for his own rental property in Chicago.
Terrible customer service and shockingly high quotes stopped him in his tracks.
"It was like rolling back the clock to the mid-1990s," he told Business Insider. Focusing on selling insurance to real-estate investors has helped Steadily grow to about 140 employees across Austin and Kansas City, Missouri.
In November, Steadily announced it had started to actively write new business on its own insurance carrier. "Nothing says 'we believe in the product we've built' more strongly than underwriting risk as the carrier," Nix said in a statement.
The main challenge it faces: Steadily has started selling insurance to short-term-rental investors, which presents different challenges than underwriting more traditional, longer-term rentals.
The market represents significant growth β accounting for nearly 20% of Steadily's current business β but the pricing is tricker.
"The people coming in and out of those properties don't take care of them at the same level of responsibility," Nix explained. "One of the things that a host can do to demonstrate that they are a good insurance risk is to point to their Airbnb or VRBO history and show that they're a super host, they take great care of their property, they don't host ragers."
Courtesy of Tour24.
City: Medfield, Massachusetts
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $20.35 million
What it does: Tour24 is an app that lets prospective tenants take self-guided apartment tours without a leasing agent present.
Why it's hot: In many cities, renting an apartment can be cutthroat, with open-house lines and bidding wars to nab a good unit at a reasonable price.
More than ever, people are deciding on places to live quickly β sometimes even committing before they've even seen the unit because they aren't able to schedule a walkthrough that jives with their working hours.
Tour24 allows users β who are ID- and credit card-verified β to tour apartments when leasing agents aren't available, such as on evenings and weekends.
"We are seeing that certainly millennials really prefer self-guided experience," Georgianna W. Oliver, the founder of Tour24, told Business Insider.
Oliver said many of their leasing-agency clients offer Tour24's self-guided tours as well as leasing agent-led tours and virtual tours β and have given feedback that the more options they give potential renters, the better.
"People have the options," she said. "And they really like having the options."
The main challenge it faces: Since the worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic, many individual leasing agencies have been offering some version of a self-guided tour on their own with their own video Tour24 also competes with other self-guided rental-tour apps like Rently and CareTaker.
Tour24 seems to be holding its own: The startup announced in October that it raised $5 million in a Series B round, noting that it had doubled in size in 2024 to reach 525,000 units across over 2,060 multifamily properties.
While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises β arguably the techβs biggest potential customer base β have been slow to adopt AI. While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year weβd start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didnβt play out as [β¦]
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Fidelity has lifted its valuation of two Elon Musk-controlled tech companies even higher, according to recent filings.
This was the third month in a row that the mutual-fund giant raised the value of its stakes in xAI and the social-media platform X, the filings show.
The Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund valued its xAI shares at $79,857,865 at the end of November, a monthly report posted at the end of December said. That's a 6.4% increase from October, when the fund valued its stake in xAI at $75,062,706, and an increase from September, when the value was $44,152,362.
The fund's annual report, published at the end of September, said that at the end of July it owned 3,688,585 xAI shares, which were acquired on May 13 for $44,152,000.
However, xAI recently closed a hotly anticipated funding round that Fidelity participated in alongside A16z, BlackRock, Kingdom Holding, Lightspeed, and other investors. xAI confirmed the $6 billion round in a blog post on December 23.
It's unclear how many shares of xAI the Blue Chip Growth Fund has now, but previous filings showed that the price from September to October rose to $20.35 a pop from $11.96.
Fidelity's Blue Chip Growth Fund also increased the value of its shares in X in November to $5,797,734, according to the filings. That's about a 5% increase from October, when shares were valued at $5,530,358, and a 39% increase from September, when Fidelity valued its stake in X at $4,185,614.
Musk's 2022 acquisition was panned as one of the most overvalued tech acquisitions in recent memory. But the deal has provided significant benefits for Musk. After using X to support Donald Trump's reelection, he's set to wield considerable influence in the incoming Trump administration.
X has also been a lucrative source of training data for xAI, which has used content on the social-media platform to develop powerful AI models that compete with similar offerings from OpenAI, Google and other tech companies.
But the X deal still hasn't worked out that well for investors, at least not yet.
Despite three straight months of increases, Fidelity still values its X stake far lower than it did in late 2022, when Musk purchased X for $44 billion. Earlier filings indicate Fidelity's Blue Chip Growth Fund at the time invested $19.66 million.
Representatives for Fidelity declined to comment on Monday. Representatives for X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Sydney Bradley/Business Insider
Making new friends, it turns out, is pretty hard.
While the dominant social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat have proclaimed that they connect us with our friends, many users feel less connected and more alone than ever.
A new wave of apps is trying to fill that void by replacing content algorithms with features designed to help users get together in real life. This year, several of these apps hit new peaks in popular culture and adoption.
One of the biggest stars in the space is Partiful, an events app that has replaced Facebook Events for many. Google named it the 2024 "app of the year," and it was even used for the viral TimothΓ©e Chalamet lookalike contest.
Then there's Timeleft, a European startup that gets groups of people together over dinner every Wednesday night in over 60 counties. It was also recognized by Google this year as a "hidden gem." Timeleft, which launched in 2020, expanded to the US in March.
"This year, we found product-market fit," Lais De Oliveira, head of North America for Timeleft, told Business Insider. "We've had over 20,000 people dining with us this year in the US and we've been handling weekly about 6,000 people dining with us across the US."
IRL social startups are not just getting users to download their apps. Some are also gettingΒ investorsΒ on board.
Posh, another events app that offers a feed of nearby happenings, closed a $22 million Series A round this year led by Goodwater Capital. Other firms, like FirstMark, Forerunner, and Best Nights VC, have also participated in IRL-focused tech.
For Zehra Naqvi, an angel investor and VC focused on consumer startups, IRL has been a core concept in her investing thesis this year.
"There is this overwhelming desire for people to just connect with one another," Naqvi said.
She sees IRL social apps right now falling into two camps. One is advanced event tech that makes things easier on hosts and attendees (like Partiful, Posh, or Luma), and the second is apps that foster a sense of "whimsical" in-person connection (like Timeleft and 222, another app that connects strangers over dinner or activities).
Some IRL apps are tackling monetization, though others are not in that stage yet. Posh, for example, takes a percentage of ticket sales, and 222 has a subscription model for access to curated events.
Read more of BI's coverage of emerging IRL social companies.
These IRL social startups have raised millions of dollars:
Meet the founders behind the apps trying to help people make friends:
A business built around increasingly customized ready-to-eat meals has netted Middle Eastern startup Calo a sizeable funding injection as it looks to expand both what it can offer its time-strapped customers and where it delivers its growing range of just-heat-to-eat dishes. The meal delivery market in the Middle East will hit $11.2 billion by 2030, [β¦]
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With trillions of dollars in assets and dozens of billionaires, the hedge fund industry is doing fine, even if there's been a renewed push from the industry's biggest backers to rein in costs.
Funds performed well in 2024, returning more than 10% through November, according to industry tracker PivotalPath β even though the average firm won't match the returns of the S&P 500, which is on track to finish above 20% for the second year in a row. Managers handled the volatility around the reelection of former president Donald Trump well, and top managers can still command eye-popping fees and yearslong lock-up periods.
But, like any sector, the industry is increasingly splitting between the haves and the have-nots. Based on conversations with a dozen industry insiders β from LPs to prime brokers to fund executives themselves β Business Insider compiled a list of 10 hedge funds to watch in the coming year.
It's a mix of longtime giants, new launches, struggling managers, and overseas specialists.
Walleye Capital
$7.4 billion Walleye β a firm that is hoping to be the best midsize multistrategy fund in the industry β spent 2024 reconfiguring.
Coming into the firm were big names from bigger firms: former Citadel executives and investors like Matt Giannini and Rory Murphy, one-time ExodusPoint marketer Anil Jethanandani, former Balyasny PM Anil Gondi, WorldQuant's options head Rupert Graham, and more. Meanwhile, leaders like Raj Sethi, who topped the manager's macro and fixed-income team, and Anuraj Dua, who had led some systematic macro efforts at the firm, departed the manager.
The firm's ambitions have grown. The manager, which started in Minnesota as an options market maker, now has offices across the US as well as in London and Dubai. And it has former Citadel executive Tom DeAngelis as president.
With strong performance in 2024 β Walleye was up 15.4% through November β the firm is set to continue to make headlines in 2025.
Reuters/Carlos Barria
Asia's hedge fund scene has been booming, with new launches in Singapore and Hong Kong from former Millennium executives as well as expansions from regional players like Dymon Asia. But while many players in the region focus on markets like Japan or South Korea β or look westward to the Middle East β Pinpoint boasts its China focus proudly.
The manager, which has headquarters in Hong Kong but offices in Shanghai, is set to have its best year in its $1.2 billion multistrategy fund since 2020, with an 8.6% gain through November. Yet it is the firm's China fund, which is soft closed, that has been the story of the year, with a 17.3% gain through November, according to HSBC's Hedge Weekly report. As Trump woos China's leader, Xi Jinping, Pinpoint hopes its expertise in the country will set it apart in 2025.
Photo: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Another year, another CIO departure. Since 2015, Viking Global, the $48 billion stockpicker run by cofounder Andreas Halvorsen, has had four CIOs or co-CIOs depart the firm, including Ning Jin, who left the firm in August.
Viking, however, has proven its ability to train the next generation of investment talent internally and keep the trains on schedule when a senior leader departs.
As Jin follows the path of many former Viking investing heads in setting up a new fund, the firm β up 12.2% through November β has tapped portfolio manager Justin Walsh to be its latest CIO.
According to a presentation he gave to Harvard Business School students this year, one of his biggest worries is a possible multistrategy meltdown.
Eisler Capital
Ed Eisler's eponymous firm has struggled to keep up with the multistrategy pack. With most firms in the firm's peer group expected to return around 10% or more this year, $4 billion Eisler will likely end 2024 with returns below 5%. The manager had returned a little over 2% on the year through November, a person close to the manager said.
It's not for a lack of trying, of course β another person familiar with the firm told BI that Eisler forced portfolio managers to be fully deployed earlier, meaning all of the capital they managed had to be invested in something, even if they didn't necessarily see a good opportunity.
One tough year doesn't doom a manager, and turnaround stories like Schonfeld prove that any fund is just a strong stretch of performance away from being back on top. Whether Eisler can rise to the occasion in 2025 remains to be seen.
Photo by: Heidi Gutman/CNBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
One of London's blue-chip managers, $70 billion Marshall Wace spent 2024 institutionalizing even further. The firm is fully invested in the war for talent, despite its billionaire cofounder speaking out against the trend β the manager has spent recent years poaching talent from rivals and added a talent surcharge on top of its existing fees.
It led to some growing pains internally, as Business Insider reported, as some of the new hires clashed with some of the firm's old guard. Still, the manager is on as stable a ground as ever.
The firm's expansion to the Middle East, with a new office in Abu Dhabi, is proof that it's not slowing down, and the firm just nabbed a former Citadel portfolio manager to trade for them. Its Eureka multistrategy fund was up 14.5% through October, a person close to the firm said.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
A new San Francisco-based hedge fund is set to launch in the new year with serious backers and Silicon Valley-flavored team.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee who graduated from Columbia at 19, is set to launch his AI-powered fund with capital from Stripe's founding brothers, Patrick and John Collison, as well as former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross and one-time GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
Named after a series of blogs Aschenbrenner wrote on AI's impending might, Situational Awareness will be a good test of what pure AI can do in the hypercompetitive investing industry.
Karl Hendon/Getty Images
2024's biggest launch, Bobby Jain's new firm, has sputtered out of the gate. One of the biggest from 2023 has not faced the same challenges β and is attracting new capital.
Ilex Capital, a stock-picking multimanager run by former Citadel employees Jonas Diedrich and Dave Sutton out of London, is set to end the year with more than $3 billion in assets after raising another $1.5 billion this year. The firm is one of the most notable, alongside former Millennium PM Diego Megia's Taula Capital, to spin out of the big multistrategy firms.
As managers like Millennium look for places to put their ever-growing assets, deals with former employees looking to start their own firm offer an interesting opportunity.
YouTube/ TFANow
Long-running Tiger Cub Lone Pine Capital is getting its mojo back. Its long-short hedge fund Cypress made 9% in November alone, bumping its 2024 gains to 34.3% through the year's first 11 months.
Beyond strong performance though, the firm is investing in its business and looking to grow. After the retirement of its billionaire founder Steve Mandel five years ago, and the departure of buzzy industry star Mala Gaonkar in 2022, the $16 billion Connecticut-based manager has dealt with rocky performance and outflows.
In response, the firm has performed well the last two years and β for the first time in its history β put resources into its marketing. The 27-year-old manager hired Pat Cronin to be its first-ever business development leader in 2022, redid its website, and even attended last January's iConnections conference in Miami to meet with potential investors.
While some managers slowly fade away after a founder steps back, Lone Pine has decided to ramp up β and has two strong years of performance to go off of.
TED
The late Jim Simons had already passed the torch of his legendary quant manager Renaissance to the next generation, but his death in May was still a monumental milestone for the asset manager.
Renaissance, known for the world-beating performance of its Medallion fund, which is only available to fund employees, had battled redemptions and poor performance in recent years in its largest strategies available to outside investors. But 2024 was a strong year, as its largest external fund returned close to 24% through November.
Unlike some of its quant rivals like Two Sigma and D.E. Shaw, Renaissance has not expanded into non-systematic strategies. In its first year without its visionary founder, the Long Island-based manager is one to watch.
Boston-based Whale Rock has dealt with the market's peaks and valleys in recent years. It surged 32% in 2023 after losing 40% and 9%, respectively, the two years prior. This year was another peak.
The manager's flagship fund is up 51% through November, thanks to a tech-heavy portfolio full of big-name US companies and under-the-radar international firms. A recent report notes that Alex Sacerdote's $9 billion firm plans to reopen to new capital, hoping to raise between $200 million and $300 million.
Nichole Wischoff
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nichole Wischoff, 34, founder of Wischoff Ventures. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider previously published essays about her first recruit at Wischoff Ventures, Neal Mintz, and his hiring experience.
I picked up running while on a high school student exchange in Belgium.
Running taught me a lot. For one, there are no short-term wins in running. If you want to finish a marathon, you need to put in a lot of super-consistent work to build up your mileage.
Running taught me to keep chipping away at the things that I really want. There's no such thing as short-term success when building your career. But one thing's for sure β if you are willing to put in the work every day, you will see results over time.
Before I entered the startup world, I worked on project finance at Citi Community Capital, an arm of Citi that deals with community development lending and investing.
Even though I made a lot of money in banking, I didn't enjoy working there.
To be sure, I loved the work itself. It was challenging and super interesting, but I felt suffocated in that environment. But I felt like I was chained to my desk for 14 to 16 hours a day, working continuously and skipping lunch breaks.
Fortunately, because I was based in the Bay Area, I was able to make friends in tech and learn more about their careers.
My then-boyfriend, now husband, worked in tech and he encouraged me to give tech a shot.
When I was recruited by my first tech company, a fintech company named Blend, he helped me negotiate the offer. I ended up getting roughly 40% more than what I was making in banking.
After accumulating years of experience in the startup world, I started making angel investments in startups.
Eventually, I started my early-stage venture capital firm, Wischoff Ventures.
Nichole Wischoff
Looking back at my career, I would say that working with and in startups was a good match for my personality. Startups allow you to do as much as you possibly want until you can't take it anymore.
In contrast, your role will be very structured and defined if you work in a big corporate company. There won't be a lot of flexibility. You will be given three to five objectives, and you need to hit them.
In startups, you get to do a lot of things. You can dabble in business development, product management, and fundraising. I enjoy having variety in my work.
I know, too, that I'm not meant for the boardroom. Even now, as a VC, I don't take board seats because I don't find them to be very interesting or useful. What I want is to help get companies off the ground. I don't want to manage hundreds of employees or report to tons of people.
Of course, I do get really bad days in venture capital now and then. But I have stuck on it because I love the adrenaline of clinching a deal. It could be an addiction, but I love momentum and knowing that I'm making progress every single day.
The truth is, you have to be crazy to raise a venture capital fund. You need to make hundreds of pitches and stomach the rejections.
It is a lot like running a marathon. You have to put in the work every day, and it's not sexy. That's what it takes to make it as a VC. You have to like pain and doing hard things.
iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
One of the most intriguing hedge-fund personnel moves in 2024 came late in the year. It wasn't a superstar portfolio manager or another big bank executive migrating to the buy side.
It was someone with barely any media profile at all: Matthew Giannini, a senior leader in Citadel's business-development unit whom Walleye Capital hired in October as chief operating officer of its long-short equities business.
The move from the industry's $66 billion killer whale to a much smaller fish surprised several industry insiders Business Insider spoke with at the time, underscoring the continued demand for the niche role of vetting and wooing investment professionals.
BI wrote in May about the evolution of the "business development" role, which has grown into a coveted specialty amid the boom in multimanager hedge funds. These firms, prized by investors for robust returns uncorrelated with the stock market, have added $200 billion in assets since 2019. Hiring has followed suit β head count since then soared by 90% at multimanagers compared with just 6% at other hedge funds β provoking a talent war that has been one of the industry's defining themes and challenges over the past few years.
Though total assets managed by these firms declined in 2024 for the first time in seven years (some investors pulled money amid growing costs paired with lackluster returns in 2023), "the war for talent appears to be continuing unabated," Goldman Sachs' prime-services team said in a September report on multimanager hedge funds. These roughly 50 firms added 2,400 employees over the previous year, Goldman found, a 15% increase.
Goldman Sachs Prime Services
Business development was no exception, with dozens of hires by top hedge funds in 2024, according to industry sources, LinkedIn bios, and publicly reported moves.
Millennium, the largest multimanager, with $72.1 billion in assets under management and more than 6,000 employees, hired at least 10 people in business development in 2024, BI found. Balyasny, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars hiring PMs this year, added at least six new BD executives to facilitate hiring, including three managing directors β most recently the commodities specialist David O'Connor, who joined in November from the external search firm Maven.
Citadel has been hiring as well, adding a handful of people to one of the most revered BD units in the industry. The hedge fund last year became the most profitable of all time, something its founder and CEO, Ken Griffin, attributed in part to an "unparalleled" ability to "recruit experienced professionals to Citadel" and "tremendous success attracting gifted graduates from the premier colleges and universities." Unsurprisingly, Griffin's talent whisperers are highly sought after.
Perhaps none has more gravitas than Giannini. Several industry professionals who know him say he's tall, charismatic, intelligent, and deft at winning over PMs β someone who provides an actual edge in an industry desperate for it. Giannini's leaving Balyasny in 2018 to rejoin Citadel contributed to a turf war between the funds.
"Matt is, if not the best, one of the best closers I've ever met," a BD professional told BI this year.
Leaving Citadel for Walleye may raise some eyebrows, but joining Walleye offers a potentially lucrative upside for Giannini compared with a typical BD role. Business group heads at these funds usually take home a cut of their unit's profits, and while Walleye struggled in 2023, it has been executing an overhaul that's bearing fruit. The fund was up by 15.4% through November, putting it near the top of its peer group for 2024.
He also joins some familiar faces at Walleye, including Thomas DeAngelis, an ex-Citadel BD leader who's now Walleye's president, and Anil Gondi, a longtime PM who joined from Balyasny this summer and will oversee the long-short equities division with Giannini. The two overlapped at Balyasny in the 2010s.
The hiring of Giannini and dozens of others at top funds in 2024 signals that the burning demand for investment talent, and those gifted in recruiting it, isn't likely to dim anytime soon.
"One clear theme from our conversations with multimanagers was that the 'war for talent' synonymous with this segment has not seen any material de-escalation in the last year," Goldman Sachs said in its report.
BI tracked business-development professionals who joined top funds in 2024, using industry sources, LinkedIn bios, and publicly reported moves. This list isn't exhaustive, and we may update it as we learn more.
| Firm | Name of hire | Previous firm |
| Balyasny | Nicole Amen | DRW |
| Balyasny | Daniel Anzalone | BlueCrest |
| Balyasny | Harry Case | Verition |
| Balyasny | David Matz | Smith Hanley |
| Balyasny | David O'Connor | Maven Search |
| Balyasny | Kelly Suter | IMC |
| BlueCrest | Josh Beals | Chi-Rho Financial |
| Capstone Investment Advisors | Grace Guo | Goldman Sachs |
| Capstone Investment Advisors | Brian Hopkins | Hudson Bay |
| Citadel | Trystan Davies-Tommason | The Omerta Group |
| Citadel | Donata Leonova | Millennium |
| Citadel | Olivia Rees | Goldsmith & Co |
| Citadel | Hannah Rosenthal | |
| Citadel | Michelle Tsang | Two Sigma |
| Eisler | Ruvhen Chinaire | The Omerta Group |
| Eisler | Chris Harnett | Citadel |
| Freestone Grove | Christopher Aldaco | D.E. Shaw |
| Freestone Grove | Brittany Lynch | Schonfeld |
| Graham Capital | Danielle Greenberg | Maven Investment Partners |
| Hudson Bay | Chris Padfield | Citadel |
| LMR Partners | Melissa Bosem | Millennium |
| Millennium | Maureen Chang | Point72 |
| Millennium | Derek Chiang | Selby Jennings |
| Millennium | Sarka Dillingerova | Execuzen |
| Millennium | Katie Gordon | Cybernetic Search |
| Millennium | Brian Kimmel | Citadel |
| Millennium | Lauren Kraus | Garda Capital |
| Millennium | Terence Lee | Blackstone |
| Millennium | Steven Rosen | Morgan Stanley Investment Management |
| Millennium | Natalia Skrzeczkowska | Dartmouth Partners |
| Millennium | Stella Xuan | Tenere Capital |
| Paloma | Kristin Cohen | Walleye |
| Point72 | Joe Beach | Aksia |
| Point72 | Lauren Croucher | Dartmouth Partners |
| Point72 | Nicole Deng | UBS |
| Qube Research & Technologies | Caroline Kadhim | Brevan Howard |
| Taula Capital | Robert Featherstone | Citadel |
| Verition | Adam Donaldson | Marble Bar Asset Management |
| Verition | Stephanie Melendez | Schonfeld |
| Walleye Capital | Carling DiGiacomo | Citadel |
| Walleye Capital | Matthew Giannini | Citadel |
| Walleye Capital | Jen Pascal | Neuberger Berman |
| Walleye Capital | Maureen Reed | Goldman Sachs |
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Elon Musk's xAI has completed its Series C funding round, raising a total of $6 billion, it revealed in a Monday blog post.
Musk's artificial intelligence company said the participants included a16z, Sequoia Capital, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Fidelity, Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holdings, Oman and Qatar's sovereign wealth funds, California-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, Chicago-based Valor Equity Partners, Dubai-based Vy Capital, and UAE-based tech investor MGX.
xAI added that chipmakers Nvidia and AMD took part as strategic investors and "continue to support xAI in rapidly scaling our infrastructure."
Musk shared the news on his X platform, writing, "A lot of compute is needed." He also tagged xAI in a meme generated by xAI's Grok chatbot that riffed on a famous line from the movie "Jaws."
βWe are gonna need a bigger compute!β@xAI
β Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 24, 2024
https://t.co/ckc78vJhL6
Musk was likely underscoring the vast amount of processing power needed to train and run AI models, which has fueled enormous demand for microchips and underpinned a roughly eightfold rise in Nvidia stock since the start of 2023.
xAI, founded in March last year, raised $6 billion at a post-money valuation of $24 billion in its Series B round in May. The Wall Street Journal reported in late November that it had raised a further $5 billion at a $50 billion valuation. It appears xAI ultimately raised a bigger round of $6 billion, but the valuation wasn't disclosed.
The startup highlighted its progress since May in its blog post, including its launch of Colossus β the world's largest AI supercomputer powered by 100,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs, which xAI plans to double in size to 200,000 chips soon.
xAI also released version two of Grok, an application programming interface (API) for developers to build on its platform, its Aurora image generation model for Grok, and Grok on X.
The company said it's training Grok 3 and "focused on launching innovative new consumer and enterprise products that will leverage the power of Grok, Colossus, and X to transform the way we live, work, and play."
Musk's fledgling business said it would use the Series C funds to accelerate its infrastructure growth, ship new products, and speed up its research and development of tech that will enable its "mission to understand the true nature of the universe."
From Keith Rabois to Matt Miller, a lot of VCs have switched firms or spun out of storied VC institutions this year. These employment changes are surprising because unlike in many other fields, venture capitalists donβt traditionally move around very much β especially those who reach the partner or general partner level. VC funds have [β¦]
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Venture funding into Europe is heading for a flat year, but this may obfuscate the fact that European AI startups are thriving. According to VC firm Balderton Capital and Dealroom, 25% of VC funding into the region β approximately $13.7 billion β went to AI startups this year, compared to 15% four years ago, resulting [β¦]
Β© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The first Juniper fund is $10.6 million and is oversubscribed.
Β© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
zentilia/Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI
After three years of tense reductions, the skies are clearing over Silicon Valley, and startup investors seem broadly optimistic about a resurgence in tech dealmaking.
We asked venture capitalists at 35 firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, IVP, and Sapphire Ventures, to tell us what's hot and what's not in tech next year, how potential regulatory changes could rouse a sleepy exit market, and where artificial intelligence goes from here.
In 2025, venture capitalists expect a loosening of antitrust regulations under the new presidential administration. This could reignite acquisition activity by strategic buyers, which would allow funds to distribute proceeds from those deals to their own investors, or limited partners, and raise new funds to invest in the next generation of startups, said Brian Garrett, managing director at Crosscut Ventures.
In recent years, startups weren't the only ones facing a cash crunch. Established funds raised the lion's share of funding dollars, while many newish and boutique funds struggled to raise. A torrent of dealmaking, combined with Trump's return to the White House and an end to the political uncertainty, could mobilize investors in these funds who had been sitting on the sidelines to whip out their checkbooks, said Ivan Nikkhoo, a managing partner at Navigate Ventures.
"Uncertainty breeds defense, optimism breeds offense," said Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures and early Anthropic investor. "We're going into a cycle where acquirers are feeling they need to play offense and startups feel like it's time to invest in leadership. And the IPO market is open for best-in-class assets."
From IPOs to robotaxis, these are the tech trends to watch in 2025, according to venture capitalists.
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Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures: "A larger number of 'application layer' companies will have a breakout year with several crossing $100 million in revenues. I predict 50 companies will cross $50 million ARR while still growing 60%+, and at least 10 will hit $100 million ARR. A lot of these companies will be prosumer companies, but there will be several business application companies as well."
Ben Lerer, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau: "When you get the cost of compute going down as quickly as it has, and the number of options in terms of foundational models growing as it has, you end up with a really interesting time for the application layer to thrive. If you're a startup, you can go with the flavor of the month β not just a ChatGPT wrapper, or a Claude wrapper, or a Gemini wrapper, or you name it β but some combination of all of them to optimize functionality, results, and the cost of those results."
Uwe Krejci/Getty Images
Sofia Dolfe, partner at Index Ventures: "2025 is the year we will see the IPO market opening back up. There are already signs that this is on the horizon: we're seeing gradual recovery, rates have started to come down, and there are many later-stage companies with the financial profiles to go public."
Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "Two kinds of companies will go public as the IPO window opens back up next year. First, the truly great businesses that are really scaled and have forecastable growth and would've gone public earlier if the IPO market was more favorable, and second, companies that entered into structured financings with dirtier terms that need to go public for timing reasons."
Nima Wedlake, managing director at Thomvest Ventures: "The IPO market will remain closed for most tech companies, with a high bar for entry β $300 million-plus ARR, fast growth, and cash-flow breakeven or better."
Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Nihal Mehta, general partner at Eniac: "Guidance on what the regulations could be for crypto and AI would encourage founders to build productively within those areas."
Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures: "The new administration is crypto-friendly, bringing with it an expected acceleration of crypto-based business models (especially those using stablecoins). I predict we'll have another crypto mania in 2025."
AP Photo/Felix Marquez
Wesley Chan, cofounder and managing partner at FPV Ventures: "In 2025, I predict a lot of contraction for VCs, except for top funds. We're still in a downturn. Some firms shut down, a lot of firms are not doing new deals, and you will see a lot of junior-mid level employees leave."
iStock, BI
Molly Alter, partner at Northzone: "The 'sexiest' deals will continue to raise at sky-high valuations, but for the rest of the pack, companies will need to show very specific metrics to command a strong valuation. There will be a great bifurcation into the 'haves' and the 'have-nots.'"
Don Butler, managing director at Thomvest Ventures: "Startup shutdowns will increase, particularly at the seed stage, as companies run out of cash. This will influence valuations, with investors likely focusing on startups that have shown resilience or achieved meaningful milestones."
Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures: "Valuations will rise as growth rates and market multiples recover, but many companies still might not grow back into their ZIRP valuations. People are over that and won't let it get in the way of pursuing opportunity. Valuations for GenAI companies will continue to be outliers based on any historical metrics."
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Brian Walsh, head of Wind Ventures: "2025 will be the year that we enter the age of 'robo taxis' with, first, Waymo now well along its adoption S-curve in San Francisco and expanding quickly, and, second, Tesla favorably positioned with quickly maturing best-in-class autonomy technology (no human in the loop) and an existing large fleet to scale it."
Kasper Sage, managing partner at BMW i Ventures: "Autonomous fleet deployments will gain traction in controlled, high-density environments such as for applications like campus environments and logistics for heavy industries."
David Zalubowski/ AP Images
Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "With the change of administration, I expect the return of mega M&A deals. We are going to see a 'WhatsApp' like $20 billion-plus M&A outcome for a leading AI company."
Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "Big Tech will be back at the M&A table with a new administration and regulatory regime in place. They've been quieter in recent times but should be chomping at the bit to capitalize on what is still a buyer's market."
Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images
Sasha McKenzie and Van Jones, both deal leads at Wellington Access Ventures at Wellington Management: "The concept of letter rounds in VC is becoming more amorphous. We're seeing $30 million and $100 million seed rounds, raising questions about what seed even means anymore. The model is shifting towards evaluating how quickly founders can run and how disciplined they are with results, rather than hitting historically stated milestones (e.g., $1 million in revenue to raise a Series A). There will be more nuance in how VCs evaluate progress, focusing more on the operator and their ability to balance vision with execution, based on the capital they have."
iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "Chatbots are overhyped. Agents are under-hyped. Enterprises will move beyond the low-hanging fruit of 'GPT-wrappers' to deploy digital workers that can reason and take action to make a real business impact."
Praveen Akkiraju, managing director at Insight Partners: "If 2024 was the year of LLMs, we believe 2025 will be the year of agentic AI β where highly capable state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs are combined with orchestration frameworks like memory, tool calling, and user-in-the-loop processes to build AI agents that can address progressively complex business workflows."
Seema Amble, partner at Andreessen Horowitz: "In the short term, human workers will be the reviewer in the loop; in the future, as trust is established over time, I expect many data-derived actions will shift toward being entirely a set of narrowly defined task-driven agents."
S. Somasegar, managing director at Madrona: "The world where we each have a digital assistant that works with a collection of AI agents is probably five to ten years out. But having AI agents that can do specific tasks really, really well is happening sooner and I think we will see a ton of progress on this in 2025."
Saul Martinez/Getty Images
Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner at NewView Capital: "The venture secondaries market will continue to be an important source of liquidity β a trend we think is here to stay due to structural dynamics of the venture asset class."
Simon Wu, partner at Cathay Innovation: "The size of tender offers has grown from millions to billions as the desire to own top-performing names by mutual funds and VCs increases, thus allowing some of the best names to stay private longer. Tenders are likely to get bigger to a selective group of companies in tandem with a more active IPO market next year."
Paige Taylor White/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Molly Alter, partner at Northzone: "Vertical SaaS will become more highly valued than ever, due to the increasing difficulty of differentiating a product in horizontal categories."
Cathy Gao, partner at Sapphire Ventures: "Vertical software will evolve rapidly as AI moves to the agentic phase, enabling end-to-end automation of complex, industry-specific workflows that were once beyond the reach of software. By pairing deep domain expertise with intelligent automation, vertical AI will unlock new use cases, deliver outsized ROI, and become table stakes for staying competitive."
blackred/Getty, PM Images/Getty, Tyler Le/BI
Alexa von Tobel, managing partner at Inspired Capital:Β "Given the new political climate, we, of course, expect to see less regulation across the board. I think we'll see acceleration in a few core categories, including fintech."
Marlon Nichols, managing partner at MaC Venture Capital: "Fintech is an area I'm excited to invest in, particularly fintech startups leveraging AI to create transformative personal finance tools."
Sydney Thomas, general partner at Symphonic Capital: "We are watching the regulatory environment towards fintech ease which has enabled massive speculation on what asset class will win. β¦ This also means, many startups will be required to regulate themselves, which isn't always an easy thing to do."
Tesla
Claire Yun, investor at Piva Capital: "Generative AI will continue to accelerate and supercharge robotics; simultaneously, we will see a choke point in human labor as an aging domestic workforce and protectionist policies create a sharp supply and demand imbalance. The result will be a colorful Cambrian explosion of robots as they step in to fill this gap."
Bob Ma, partner at Wind Ventures: "Urban areas will have fleets of robots on sidewalks, while drones will manage suburban and rural deliveries. Enhanced speed, cost-efficiency, and sustainability will redefine retail and e-commerce, with regulations supporting wider adoption and innovation."
Yuri Lee, partner at IVP: "As AI advances enable robots to move from structured, repetitive tasks to more complex and dynamic real-world applications, we'll see rapid progress in robotic perception, manipulation, and decision-making capabilities."
Microsoft
Tasneem Dohadwala, partner at Excelestar Ventures: "Small language domain-specific models are starting to show more value. Instead of using vast swaths of the internet to train large models, these smaller models can be trained on specific datasets, such as medical journals, newspapers, or email collections. As a result, they are highly tailored and more accurate in reflecting a user's particular constraints and voice.
Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "If 2024 was the year of the LLMs, 2025 will be the year of small language models (SLMs) and proprietary data sets spawning the next generation of enterprise SaaS applications. Companies have realized that data in their midst can be harnessed in new and better ways than the 'structured workflow apps' of old and by leveraging targeted SLMs, they can do work differently, more efficiently."
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Brad Bernstein, managing partner at FTB Capital: "Despite the IPO market showing better performance in Q3'24 with proceeds already surpassing 2023 totals, structural issues like regulatory burdens and governance challenges still pose obstacles for small and mid-cap companies. Private equity markets are stepping in to fill the gap, with growth equity deals comprising a larger share of activity and providing opportunities for startups in high-growth sectors like insurtech and healthcare tech."
Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Partners: "With the new administration, I predict we will see an uptick in exits, and much more tech M&A activity. We'll also see PE firms buying up a lot of companies once boards and management teams realize these businesses won't be able to grow at 30% at scale and ultimately, IPO."
Michael M. Santiago/Getty, Nordin Catic/Getty, Tyler Le/BI
Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "Open-source foundation models will close the gap with the leading proprietary models. On top of this we will see a significant shift away from pre-training models from scratch to fine tuning OSS models and distilling them to smaller models for faster performance."
Mo Jomaa, partner at CapitalG: "I predict that in 2025 we will continue to see open source technologies consume the infrastructure layer in software. We have seen this trend play out in several categories already, including data and analytics (which led to our investment in Databricks) and observability (which drove our investment in Grafana). Enterprises will continue to adopt open source because it helps them save money, avoid vendor lock-in, and shape the product roadmaps of the technologies that they procure."
Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Andrew Schoen, partner at NEA: "We will see a surge of investment into technologies critical to restarting the US industrial base and enhancing national security. A record number of deals and dollars will go into AI, automation, cybersecurity, and frontier technology serving manufacturing, supply chain, and defense markets."
Jake Seid, general partner at Ballistic Ventures: "Over the next 18 months, we're going to see a lot more cybersecurity exits. While this may include an uptick in M&A activity, I expect we'll see cybersecurity companies go public in 2025 and in the first half of 2026 given how large the market for cyber products has become."
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Samir Kumar, general partner at Touring Capital: "We should expect a lot less regulatory headwinds in 2025 for AI given David Sacks will be the AI and crypto czar for the new administration. This is likely to even result in the repeal of President Biden's executive order on AI."
Francesco Ricciuti, associate at Runa Capital: "In the US, Trump is bringing prominent people from the startup and VC world in the government, and I wouldn't be surprised if the regulatory landscape will evolve towards entrepreneurship and technology."
