Crafting the perfect venture capital pitch is so simple that there’s an industry of consultants to help founders get their decks in order.
TechCrunch has a long-running series of Pitch Deck Teardowns to help founders, and you can find an infinite number of Twitter threads on the subject.
Enter Wing Venture Capital’s Sara Choi, who will give a talk at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 this April and take audience questions on how to pitch.
After all, when venture capital is harder to raise than it has been in years, nailing the pitch is critical for today’s early-stage founders.
Early Stage 2024 is just around the corner, so book your pass here before March 29 and save $200.
Giant Ventures in January closed two new funds totaling $250 million that it will invest in startups on both sides of the Atlantic, and today, TechCrunch has learned exclusively that Frontline Ventures has also raised $200 million across two funds, named Frontline Growth and Frontline Seed.
Frontline has historically invested in both Europe and North America, and its new funds will continue to follow that strategy, betting on B2B software companies.
The new seed fund will favor European ventures, while the growth fund will focus on U.S. startups.
Expansion roadmapO’Donnell told TechCrunch that when it helps portfolio companies navigate expansion to another market, Frontline focuses on four aspects: timing, go-to-market strategy, talent, and organizational design and location.
That’s by order of importance, and a company’s location should be a derivative of the previous three aspects, O’Donnell said.
Sameer Brij Verma, a high-profile investor at the Indian venture firm Nexus, will be leaving the fund later this year, he confirmed to TechCrunch.
Verma plans to launch his own venture firm, with the inaugural fund expected to have a corpus of at least $150 million, a source familiar with the matter said.
The timing of his departure is also peculiar as Nexus raised a $700 million fund, its largest, just last year.
Verma has been working with his portfolio startups to hand over board seats to other partners at Nexus for several months, the source said, requesting anonymity.
Verma plans to launch his own fund by the end of the year where he plans to adopt a strategy that sets him apart from other investment firms in India.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday show, focused on startup and venture capital news that matters.
Today we have a grip of startup stories, and a venture capital item that isn’t as bad of news as it seems at first blush.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Here’s the rundown:
One path, which is particularly well trodden, is to start a venture fund.
Instead of launching a VC fund, they’re starting with an incubator called Montauk Climate, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Montauk Climate is one of the latter.
Montauk Climate will remain shareholders in its spinout companies and have seats on their boards.
As the number of incubated companies expands, Montauk Climate expects to raise its own venture fund to help support them.
Yi and Shin started Ethos Fund two years ago to bridge opportunities and startup communities between Vietnam and the United States.
They are also investing smaller checks into third culture founders there who fall into categories, including returned Vietnamese diaspora, Vietnamese Americans and expats residing in Vietnam, and subsequently doubling-down with larger checks into validated startups.
“Ethos is called Ethos because we focus on the ethos of the founders,” Yi said.
One of the things Yi noticed about his startups was that they weren’t growing past a certain stage.
Now the pair wants to help startup founders figure those lessons out early.
LACERA decreases venture capital allocation range, but experts say it doesn’t signal a trend Analysts say this is likely more of a one-off than a sign that LP interest in venture is waning.
The Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association (LACERA) voted to decrease its allocation range to venture capital at a March 13 meeting.
The board of investments voted to decrease its allocation range to venture capital and growth equity from between 15% and 30% of the pension system’s private equity portfolio, to between 5% and 25%.
LACERA’s venture portfolio is currently 10.8% of the PE portfolio.
“They aren’t going to cut their venture allocation.
Raising capital sounds simple: You hand over shares, investors hand over cash, and everyone then gets back to work.
She’s coming to TechCrunch’s Early Stage event next month on April 25 to not only present on early-stage fundraising topics, but also to answer your questions.
Early Stage is one of our most popular events, so don’t delay — I’ll see you in April, pen in hand, listening to Whiting.
Early Stage 2024 prices go up March 31.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024?
Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency, Bloomberg reported.
DarwinAI had raised over $15 million in funding across various rounds from investors including BDC Capital’s Deep Tech Venture Fund, Honeywell Ventures, Obvious Ventures, and Inovia Capital.
BDC Capital and Obvious Venture didn’t comment on the story at the time of writing.
As Bloomberg noted in its report, apart from helping with manufacturing efficiency, DarwinAI uses techniques to make AI models smaller and faster.
This could be useful for on-device generative AI features Apple hopes to introduce in iOS 18 this year.
There is perhaps no bigger jump for a startup to make than from the incubatory seed stage to its Series A round.
Enter Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Alex Kayyal, who is coming to TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 to discuss how startups can avoid common pitfalls on the path to raising their own Series A.
Not that raising an A round was ever easy — how many times have we discussed a Series A crunch at TechCrunch over the years?
And, of course, as with all TechCrunch Early Stage events, he’ll answer questions directly.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024?
