Markets
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Exclusive: Vanta hits $300 million ARR as ‘shadow AI’ explodes across corporate America
Most corporate employees in America have likely signed up for ChatGPT. And Claude. And possibly Cursor. Their employer’s security team has no idea—or even if they do, they can’t keep up. This paradox is why Vanta is having a blockbuster year. The San Francisco-based security and compliance company has crossed $300 million in annual recurring
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How a Spanish startup pivoted to video AI and built a $230 million ARR business with no VC funding
Greetings, Tech Editor Alexei Oreskovic guest-writing your Term Sheet today. Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as the center of the tech universe, and San Francisco’s heavy concentration of AI companies is only reinforcing that habit. But innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurial acumen aren’t restricted by borders, as I was reminded when talking to Joaquín
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How a chance encounter in Texas sparked a $1 billion Kleiner Perkins-backed AI startup
Tyson Chen and Apurva Shrivastava were chasing restaurants when they found an HVAC company. The two engineers had first met at MIT poker night and built an AI system to handle missed calls—originally, they thought this made sense for restaurants, specifically. But, as Chen and Shrivastava wandered a Texas restaurant conference, a Dallas heating and
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Upfront’s Aditi Maliwal makes 3 bets a year and ignores the hype cycle
Aditi Maliwal doesn’t want to be “another checkbook.” “Ideas are a dime a dozen,” she told Fortune. “What I’m backing, especially at the earliest stages, is a person.” That thesis is part of why she does only two to three deals a year. Maliwal is a general partner at Upfront Ventures, a 30-year-old Los Angeles
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Exclusive: Omni raises $120 million to fix one of AI’s biggest enterprise data problems
For years, companies have poured money into data warehouses, dashboards, and business intelligence tools, only to discover the real problem wasn’t storage or visualization—it was translation. That disconnect is exactly what Omni was built to bridge, and investors are now betting big that the company has the formula. The company just raised a $120 million
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The Godmother of Silicon Valley and her former student want to fix how healthcare gets built
Mary Minno first met Esther Wojcicki when she was 15. Walking into Wojcicki’s journalism class at Palo Alto High School, she was new to Silicon Valley. About 20 years later, Minno’s still in the area—and after nearly a decade in Big Tech, most recently at Google, she’s teaming up with her former teacher. Wojcicki—often called
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Exclusive: Startup Humble debuts cabless autonomous truck targeting $900 billion U.S. freight industry
The autonomous vehicle wave has its newest entrant. Humble, a San Francisco-based startup, emerged from stealth today with a $24 million seed round and a fully electric autonomous freight vehicle called the Humble Hauler, Fortune learned exclusively. Eclipse led the round, with Energy Impact Partners also participating. The Hauler has no cab (essentially a self-driving
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Private markets have soared to $10 trillion in AUM. But why have they underperformed public markets?
I have a riddle for you. Or a contradiction, perhaps: The U.S. private markets are bigger than ever, and the source of trillions in company value creation. And, at the same time, for the last several years, the private markets as a whole have underperformed the public markets. I was thinking about this late last
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The startup Blackstone just backed to turn any exec’s data question into instant answers
Ethan Ding sees the last decade of SaaS as a historical glitch. “In 30 years, we’re going to look back and say ‘oh, remember that period of time where those crazy software companies were selling seats for 90 to 95% margins?’” he said. “We’ll look back on that the same way we look back on
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Exclusive: Hyfix raises $15 million to build a U.S. alternative to DJI’s drone dominance
U.S. tech VCs are backing a new play to rebuild the drone stack from the silicon up. Hyfix Spatial Intelligence just raised a $15 million seed round to create an American-made “brain” for drones and robots, Fortune learned exclusively. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup is developing a single autonomous-systems chip that folds flight control, high-precision