Devi Jha

ICYMI: ~80% of Trustible's $4.6M Seed Series fundraising round includes VCs and angel investors based in the #WashingtonDC area. The D.C. area is the nation’s third-best city for tech (https://lnkd.in/gbSUKNZw) – with 1,000+ startups and a 24 % rise in tech jobs since 2019—all supported by some of the highest average tech salaries in the world. It also boasts the nation’s deepest cybersecurity talent pool—roughly 3.5× the U.S. average— the densest concentration of federally funded R&D, and nearly a dozen top-ranked universities. Our region’s strengths translate directly into an opportunity for Trustible: we can build at the intersection of policy and tech, proving that the next generation of responsible AI leaders will come from a place that understands that governance and innovation are two sides of the same coin. Being headquartered in the DMV area means we can be at the center of emerging policy and innovation, and take advantage of the enormous talent pool with deep technical expertise and commitment to public benefit grown across the region. Our sincere thank you to to Technical.ly for the Exclusive and for sharing our story about our commitment to building locally in the DMV! 📰 Read More: https://lnkd.in/eSyF4di3

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Building a DevTool? These 40+ VCs actively invest in the space-- who are we missing? If you are building developer infrastructure, tooling, platforms, or workflows, these funds have deep technical DNA and consistent interest in dev-first products. A strong place to start. 🚀 Foundational Infrastructure Investors Andreessen Horowitz 1752vc (Formerly Pegasus) CRV Accel Menlo Ventures SignalFire Point Nine SIERRA Ventures 🧠 Early-Stage, Pre-Seed & Founder-Led Funds Afore Capital Precursor Ventures Hustle Fund Founder Collective Bling Capital Great Oaks Venture Capital Flybridge 🧱 Infrastructure, Data & Systems-Focused Initialized Capital Tribe Capital Khosla Ventures Insight Partners General Catalyst Energy Impact Partners 🌍 Platform, Network & Global Funds BoxGroup Global Founders Capital FJ Labs Crosslink Capital Merus Capital Presence Capital 🎮 Vertical & Thematic Specialists (Dev, Security, Gaming, Tooling) 8-Bit Capital BITKRAFT Ventures Konvoy Ballistic Ventures Elementum Ventures ⚡ Accelerators & Hybrid Platforms Techstars Eniac Ventures 645 Ventures Recursive Ventures Uncork Capital Streamlined Devtools win when distribution, community, and product-led growth align. These firms understand that motion. Bookmark this if you are building for developers 👇 #venturecapital #VC

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Real World Assets (RWA) are rapidly being tokenized, opening doors for average investors. Soon, fractional shares of major assets will be accessible, breaking down barriers. Imagine buying shares in large-scale projects like data centers. Innovative platforms like Pendle and Ondo Finance are central to this transformation. Tokenization streamlines processes via the blockchain, eliminating ambiguities in property ownership and probate disputes. A new era of accessible investment is on the horizon. #RWA #Tokenization #Blockchain #DeFi #RealEstate

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We first backed Kavitta Ghai and the Nectir team at seed in 2024. They raised $1.4M from VCs on our show, and then deployed across the California Community College system (2.1M students, 116 colleges). Today they announced a $12.5M Series A led by Rethink Impact. We followed on. If you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in AI and education, this is worth your attention. Nectir is the FERPA compliant AI infrastructure layer purpose-built for schools. The results from peer-reviewed research: 20% increase in GPA. 13% rise in final scores. 36% boost in intrinsic motivation to learn. Students are also staying enrolled and finishing their degrees. This isn't ChatGPT for homework. It's a personalized learning partner that knows your textbooks, assignments, and lectures. Plus it gives schools safe AI infrastructure for everything from FAFSA advising to career coaching. The vision is all 50 states. Every institution in the US is going to need safe AI infrastructure. Nectir is building it. Proud to be backing Kavitta and the team twice.

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YC used to attract misfits and outsiders. Now it attracts the most credentialed founders in the country. Younger, smarter, more Bay Area–concentrated than ever. New YC data: • Founder age: 30 → 26 • Bay Area HQ: 40% → 83% • Founders from top 20 schools: 50%+ • Prior YC experience: 7.6% → ~20% Startup culture is changing—fast. 🔗 Link in the comment section

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Alphabet Inc. just agreed to acquire Intersect for $4.75B. I spoke with CEO Sheldon Kimber last month about America's power grid and why AI is exposing years of underinvestment. "The grid was drained already. We in this country have not invested in infrastructure for way too long… All AI has done is sort of hasten and bear out the problems that were already there." Congrats to the Intersect team!

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Software needs California. Hardware not so much. The US is a large, diverse place and there are so many great places to build factories. You can start a hardware company in California, but don't plan on scaling it there. https://lnkd.in/gEkHc-BM

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More great insights from Montauk Capital and Evan Caron on the extraordinary risks, and opportunities, at the intersection of energy and the real estate industry.

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Hot take: war doesn’t kill VC. It just changes what gets funded. Here's my POV as a space founder on this conflict + how to navigate funding if you're raising soon. With US–Iran tensions spiking right now, markets do the same thing every time: they price oil first. Because the Strait of Hormuz isn’t just a headline -- it’s the choke point. ~20% of the world’s oil flows through it. Oil risk → inflation fear → markets go risk-off. And when markets go risk-off, funding doesn’t disappear. It narrows. Fewer: - “this could be huge someday” - “trust me bro” decks - idea-stage hype rounds More: - revenue - customers - contracts - proof TL;DR: the bar moves from potential → necessity. Now the plot twist: Space + defense don’t behave like normal tech in a war cycle. Because war creates urgent buyers. Governments don’t fund “nice ideas.” They fund mission-market fit. Receipts: - Defense-tech deal value hit $49.1B in 2025 (up from $27.2B in 2024) - Space investing stayed huge: $55.3B tracked in 2025 (Space Capital) - Space Force is going “commercial by default” and 2026 commercial services budget got quadrupled (per Aviation Week) The party doesn't end. The party just moves. From hype → procurement. In space, funding tends to concentrate around: 1. imaging + intel (see what’s happening, where) 2. secure comms + navigation (hard-to-jam links + GPS) 3. tracking + warning (early alerts for rockets/objects) 4. in-orbit logistics/infrastructure (move/serve/return stuff in space) And it could move away from: - Moon hotels, asteroid mining -- cool, but years from a real buyer - Futuristic tech with no budget line and no clear customer So if you're thinking of raising in this war market. Here's the play: - Show a real customer. Show urgency. Show a procurement path. - Dual-use > pure commercial. Efficient burn > growth at all costs. Because VC will still open. Just not for optionals.

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Here's a counterintuitive truth: if you get sued for patent infringement, you should consider yourself lucky. It means you've built something valuable enough that competitors are worried. Most founders swing between two extremes: IP naive (ignoring patents completely) or IP obsessed (building patent fortresses instead of businesses). Both kill startups. After 20+ years in IP strategy, investing in deep tech startups, and now building a deep tech startup accelerator, I've seen the pattern repeatedly. The founders who succeed understand patents as competitive intelligence tools and business enablers—not substitutes for finding customers. New post breaks down the IP strategy spectrum and why the sweet spot matters more than most founders realize. 👉 https://lnkd.in/g2x5ssyJ

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Today is the due date of California’s Fair Investment Practices' first annual demographic report, and my team at Fabric VC is proud to report on our 100% diverse-led portfolio. 🎉 We look forward to seeing other funds like ours changing the paradigm in VC, and will be calling out those whose numbers look far different than ours to start making intentional choices to create a more diverse VC system. #FIPVCC

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Scott Nolan started his career as employee 30 at SpaceX. He left to join Founders Fund after Peter Thiel recruited him personally in 2011, and spent the next 12 years backing companies like SpaceX, Anduril, Radiant, and Crusoe Energy. The through line across all of it, and the worldview Thiel built Founders Fund around, was finding important problems that incumbents have no incentive to solve. Scott's version of that thesis was physical-world companies in a decade when venture capital had largely decided not to fund them. Before starting General Matter, Scott met nearly every advanced reactor company in America. They all were constrained by the same problem - no one was enriching uranium domestically at scale. He spent 2023 looking to invest in a company solving it and found none. The US once led the world in enrichment. But it let its enrichment plants calcify and shut down its last domestically owned facility in 2013. Today Russia supplies about 25% of the enriched uranium that fuels 20% of the country's electricity. Congress has already passed a ban on those imports that takes full effect in 2028. So Scott started General Matter, the first private American uranium enrichment company, built on DOE land in Kentucky where the country's last enrichment plant once operated. In January, the DOE awarded it a $900 million contract. Thiel sits on almost no boards but he joined General Matter's. Enjoy this great conversation with Scott Nolan. https://lnkd.in/eP-a8inT

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NEW: Vibe coding startup Lovable's latest funding round values it at $6.6 billion, sources say --- Vibe coding startup Lovable’s latest funding round includes U.S. VC firm Accel and is at a valuation of $6.6 billion, sources with knowledge of the deal have told CNBC. That figure is more than triple the $1.8 billion valuation the Swedish AI company achieved after closing its most recent funding round in July. It’s Lovable’s third in 2025 and follows a breakneck year of growth that’s seen it become one of Europe’s most valuable startups. Both sources asked to remain anonymous while discussing private information. Forbes previously reported in November that the round would value the company at “around” $6 billion. Accel was participating in the round, both sources said, which has not been previously reported. Accel participated in Lovable’s previous round and has emerged as a key backer in the wave of new AI startups. It’s participated in billion-dollar rounds for vibe coding startup Cursor and former OpenAI executive Mira Murati’s AI company Thinking Machines. U.S. investor Khosla Ventures is also participating in the latest round, one of the sources told CNBC. Lovable, Accel and Khosla Ventures have been approached for comment by CNBC, but had not responded as this article went live. Full story: https://lnkd.in/eg478k9q

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Check out the latest funding news from across the Techstars portfolio. → Zipline (Techstars 2011), a drone delivery and logistics startup, raises more than $600M in new funding, boosting its valuation to $7.6B, as it expands commercial deployments. → Language learning startup Preply (Techstars 2015) raises $150M and becomes the 23rd known unicorn from Techstars accelerators. → Hydrosat (Techstars 2019) raises $60M in Series B funding → Tive (Techstars 2017) receives a $20M investment, valuing the shipment-tracking systems developer at slightly more than $500M. → Parambil (Techstars 2023) raises an additional $6M in seed funding ($8M to date). → Seasats (Techstars 2021) receives $24M in Department of War APFIT funding to accelerate the fielding of its autonomous surface vessels. → Hawaiian Airlines’ newly announced $600M Kahuʻewai Hawai‘i Investment Plan features a strategic investment in Ampaire (Techstars 2018) to support hybrid-electric aviation in the islands. → Fintalo (Techstars 2025) secures $500K+ in oversubscribed Pre-Seed funding. → PraxisPro (Techstars 2024) closes an oversubscribed $6M seed round. → Samara Aerospace (Techstars 2024) closes $10M seed round to help bring more stability to sats in orbit. → MyARC (Techstars 2022), a platform that enables fitness creators to train their communities at scale, secures £1.5M investment. Massive congratulations to these incredible portfolio companies!   🔗  Read more at https://lnkd.in/dxtCTvrg 

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🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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40%+ of Seed and Series A funding in 2026 is flowing into $100M+ rounds, as Zachary DeWitt recently highlighted. The market is making a big bet on mega rounds. I'm taking the under on their performance--I'd bet heavily on an index of regular-sized seeds vs the megas.   Here's what I think is happening. Ambitious founders surrounded by AI hype see Anthropic's and OpenAI's returns and think they need to do something similar. In their minds, this means raising huge rounds to fund NBA-level salaries for the most legible AI talent at Meta, Google, other AI labs, etc.   The problem is that this approach is fundamentally derivative. This is not how Anthropic, OpenAI, or any of the other most disruptive AI companies started. Disruption requires doing something that experts dismiss. If a startup requires raising mountains of cash to hire legions of expensive experts, it might have some degree of success, but it will not be disruptive.   Look, this is tricky. Anthropic raised giant early rounds and seems very mission-oriented, so I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here. That said, Anthropic's $124m Series A in 2021 was actually very unconventional in many respects, even in the context of a frothy 2021.   Besides being derivative (and thus not disruptive), this approach also selects for mercenary over missionary culture. And all things being equal, companies with missionary culture outperform. Because if you really care about solving a problem, you're willing to make sacrifices and do non-consensus things—not just copy what worked for the last wave.   So, why does this pattern persist despite these concerns?   The most economically dominant point is that the investors doing the big rounds make a lot of money on management fees. When partners at funds enjoy massive compensation from management fees, investment performance becomes a "nice-to-have."   To be fair, many of these partners are post-economic and are arguably more interested in hiring huge teams and building "platforms." The fees justified by mega rounds align nicely with the expense structure of empire-building. On the other hand, the smaller rounds are done by firms where the principals are making much less on management fees and have much more incentive to see a return on the capital via carry.   The mega firms would surely retort that many of the smaller rounds are done by firms that are here today, gone tomorrow. And there's truth to that. Mega firms with billions of assets are inherently more stable. At the same time, those firms are fundamentally targeting much lower returns. It's trade-offs all the way down.   So when I look at that 40%+ number, I see capital flowing into a pattern that selects for derivative thinking and mercenary culture, with an underlying incentive structure that ensures it keeps happening.   And that's why I'm taking the under on the performance of that 40%.

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Thanks to Elon, the hype around data centers in space is everywhere. my investing partner Josh Albrecht — who has actually set up clusters at Imbue — on why it makes zero sense at scale anytime soon.  V1 of a new video series we're testing: unfiltered takes on the week's news, and the trends getting funded that fall apart the moment you ask someone who's actually built the thing. Some favorite 🌶️ quotes: "It makes sense to put data centers in space if you're Elon and you want your IPO to go well. You need a good story that connects space and AI somehow. Besides reselling all your GPUs to Anthropic." "It's hard to put s*** in space. Servers are heavy. I've physically lifted and installed them. It's a two-person thing to rack one server with eight GPUs. You're going to put hundreds of thousands of GPUs up there? That's an insane amount of stuff to lift." "People say, 'oh, you don't have to worry about cooling.' No, you certainly do. All the new cards are water cooled, and water is heavy, so you have to put water up there too. Space doesn't work like it's cold, it doesn't have a lot of thermal density." "We're going to end up with a megawatt of GPUs in space in 2028 or '29. Who the f*** cares? We're talking about gigawatts today."

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This is WILD. Starpath (an Indicator Ventures portfolio company) needs a massive amount of solar power to build gas stations on the Moon and Mars. Suppliers quoted $100/W with 14-month lead times, so Saurav Shroff and team built their own space-rated panels, 90% cheaper, and automated the production line. By next year, they can outproduce the rest of the world’s supply of space solar combined, enough to power every satellite made on Earth. https://lnkd.in/eDXuvS-h

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Thrilled to share the launch of Criticality, a $65M fund built to back founders solving hard, high-leverage problems at the intersection of technical complexity and real-world urgency. Criticality builds on the foundation we’ve laid at Antler - applying our conviction-driven approach to companies at Seed & Series A. The fund is sector-flexible but applies a deep tech lens to each opportunity, targeting non-obvious, high-leverage problems from the earliest stages of company formation. Grateful to the New Mexico State Investment Council for their support in anchoring Criticality. More to come soon from Cash Allred & I.

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