You just have to immerse yourself in it. You should just constantly be building. That's what's going to give you the best chance of having the relevant skill set that is needed to make a difference in technology.
I am excited to get stuck into my new role in such an innovative and fast-growing media company. Adverty provides unique ad formats, and its potential is huge - despite a challenging trading environment as we start the new year. Adverty is genuinely setting a new standard for generating revenue and we anticipate many high-value deals and strategic long-term partnerships in the pipeline.
AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders. Learn More → Hook - $10M Series A Music & Entertainment Hook, a creative social music app for making and sharing song remixes and mashups, has raised $10M in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. Founded by Gaurav Sharma in 2022, Hook has now raised a total of $16.5M in reported equity funding.
ADIN uses AI to replace the human analysts involved in venture dealmaking. Put in a startup's pitch deck, and out comes a detailed analysis of its business model and founding team, a list of diligence questions and compliance risks, an estimate of the total addressable market, and a suggested valuation. ADIN has about a dozen different agentic investors, each with a distinct persona and investing thesis.
Initial fundraising reports from the first week of Matt Mahan's gubernatorial campaign filed Tuesday reveal the depth of support for the moderate Democrat from Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists. Reports filed with the California Secretary of State show just 21 individuals contributed more than $1.6 million to Matt Mahan for Governor 2026 in the first two days of his campaign.
According to Dealroom's 2024 European Tech report, mentions of "AI" in European startup pitch decks increased by over 200% between 2022 and 2024. VC funding for AI-adjacent startups surged, even as overall funding in Europe contracted. The signal was unmistakable: if you want capital, you need to speak the language of artificial intelligence.
Rain - $250M Series C Rain, an infrastructure platform for stablecoin payments, has raised $250M in Series C funding led by ICONIQ Capital. Founded by Charles Yoo-Naut and Farooq Malik in 2021, Rain has now raised a total of $332.5M in reported equity funding. Proxima - $80M Seed Proxima, an AI-powered drug discovery platform for proximity-based therapeutics, has raised $80M in seed funding led by DCVC. Proxima was founded by Luca Naef and Zachary Carpenter in 2019.
Marketers have spent decades optimising for blue links on a search results page. Now every CMO conversation starts with the same question: 'How do we look in ChatGPT?' People ask an AI assistant and get a short list of recommended options. If your brand isn't in that answer, you're effectively invisible, even if you did everything 'right' in SEO. Kime exists to make that visibility gap measurable and give teams a way to act on it.
Every January, millions take on Dry January , a ritual of restraint and resetting after the holiday season. If that's the benchmark for kicking off the year with moderation, Europe's startup ecosystem clearly didn't get the memo. In the opening weeks of 2026, the region saw five startups join the unicorn club, crossing the $1 billion valuation mark across sectors as varied as cybersecurity, cloud optimisation, defence tech, ESG software, and education technology.
Roll forward to 2025 and it has been far from a good year on the markets for the owner of Talabat (Gulf, North Africa), Glovo (Europe, Africa) and Foodpanda (South-east Asia). Delivery Hero's share price fell to a low of €16.05 ($18.94) in November, from a high of €31.39 ($37.05) nine months earlier, a nearly 50% drop. Competition from the Chinese giant, Meituan, and regulatory fines for poor employment practices in the cutthroat world of moped and cycle delivery weighed on share price performance.
As the race to dominate AI accelerates, Europe's most prominent AI startup is betting that geography - not just technology - can be a competitive advantage in its home market. Arthur Mensch, the CEO and cofounder of French AI company Mistral, said the company's edge in Europe over Silicon Valley rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic isn't about having dramatically smarter models.
Asked point blank by Quick whether high-level AI deals were circular, with the CEO-soothing caveat that "it doesn't look like that's what [Amazon] are involved in," per Quick, Jassy said it's all about both sides seeing an opportunity to make money.
Huang said in an interview on CNBC's "Mad Money" on Tuesday that there was "no drama" between Nvidia and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, pushing back against recent chatter of tension in the relationship between the two companies. "The first deal is on," the Nvidia CEO said, referring to the company's September deal with OpenAI, under which the company said it planned to invest up to $100 billion in the AI startup. "And then there's, of course, an IPO in the future," he added. "We love to be participating in that as well," he added. Huang also described OpenAI as a "once in a generation company" and said Nvidia is "delighted to invest in it."
