🚀 Already at 14x for the year and breaking the $100M revenue mark, congrats to @DeepInfra on executing at this pace 🔥 globenewswire.com/news-relea…

We asked 25 top VCs: If you could invest in any venture fund started in the last 5 years, what would it be? There was one resounding answer @conviction

We just hit 100M ARR within 10 months of starting deployments. We are in factory lines. On construction sites. In kitchens. In data centers. Cleaning. Welding. Building. Cooking. Deploying.

Bending Spoons acquires Miro for ~$1.79b. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇 *This is 89.8% below the last round, and <3x EV/ARR* 📉 Yet, investors are making $370m of profits on a company that was once valued at $17.5b! Not a glorious outcome but a 1.78x blended multiple on $473m invested. 👀 There are mainly three parties doing well here: (1) founders & team, (2) @altairvc, and (3) @Accel. Most of the capital came in at the top, and the preference sheltered investors nicely from a 90% haircut... Not a great return after 5 years of equity cost of capital, but "better 1.0x than 0.1x". So let's dive in: *1) Founders, Team and Common shareholders will be sharing nearly $1b* 🥳 While I am sure they expected much better in 2021 at the height of the bubble, this is an acceptable outcome. Miro can thank its frugality for this outcome: (1) the acquisition press release implies it still has $435m on balance sheet at closing, and (2) the company only ever raised $473m! The cash added back to the $1.355b enterprise value effectively paid by Bending Spoons really helps (<3x ARR), and only the Series C claims pref. *2) Accel is getting the most $ back, but not without regrets* 🫠 They are making c.9x from the Series A. But they will have mixed feelings today, and will regret following on in the Series B and C which will return ~1.9x and 1.0x respectively. Both of which are obviously not great for six and five years of equity risk, respectively. *3) AltaIR likely still returns >100x ‼️*: investing at pre-seed can pay off, even when growth investors do not make money. *4) Disappointing outcome for growth investors. But the pref worked as intended.* 😮‍💨 The acquisition is a 90% haircut to the Series C price of $17.5b. However, the Series C investors will still make 1.0x back thanks to liq pref. ICONIQ, Salesforce, Atlassian, Dragoneer, TCV, DST and @codorniou can all thank this mechanism, without which there would have been a few very awkward LP calls!

The 2026 Intelligent Applications 40 is here. Now in its sixth year, the IA40 recognizes the top private companies shaping the future of applied AI, from foundational infrastructure to full-stack intelligent applications. This year's list reflects a market maturing fast: → 450+ companies nominated and voted on by 72 investors across 54 leading firms → $410B raised by this year's 45 winners since founding — more than 25x what the inaugural 2021 class had raised at the same point → 23 repeat winners and 22 new entrants, a 49% turnover rate, down from 68% last year, as some of 2025's breakout companies start to entrench The big pattern this year is how companies are “Harnessing the Value of AI.” As frontier models become more capable and commoditized, the winners are increasingly the companies proving they can turn AI capability into real ROI, whether they're building the application, aggregating the models, or supplying the infrastructure underneath. Databricks remains the only company to appear on every IA40 list since we launched it in 2021. Congratulations to all the 2026 IA40 winners. Your work is defining what's possible in this new era of intelligent applications. Explore all 45 winners and our analysis of the companies, categories, and funding patterns defining this year’s list → ordnl.link/RAFgnA7 Thank you to our great partners: @AWSstartups, @GoogleStartups, @Microsoft, @NYSE, @Delta, and @McKinsey.

Nvidia acquires Hugging Face for ~$12.9bn. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇 *Investors are sharing ~$7.3bn of profits on <$400m invested. A cool ~20x blended.* *1) The single biggest winner here? Lux Capital.* 👑 Lux is taking the crown for the most $ returned in this transaction. The two rounds they led (Series A & Series C) generated ~$2.6bn combined. They also participated in the Series B. Congrats to @wolfejosh and team. The $15.0m Series A alone will return ~132.5x the capital invested, or ~$2.0bn. The most lucrative round in absolute $ returned. *2) Backing an exceptional team paid off with a >1,000x return for Betaworks and the angels* 📈 The story few people know: Hugging Face started life as a chatbot for lonely teenagers... You sent it a selfie and a sad emoji, it told you it understood. Quite far from where it landed! That is why backing an exceptional team in @ClementDelangue, @Thom_Wolf and @julien_c is always the right thing to do. It paid over 1,000x for Betaworks, Kevin Durant and Thibaud Elziere. *3) Founders and team are crushing it: not taking too much dilution along the way paid off* 👏 I estimate they will share ~$5bn in proceeds, assuming no secondary was taken along the way. A life changing outcome for them and many employees. Taking a 15% attributed option pool at exit, this would mean ~$2bn for the team and >$3bn to share for the three co-founders. Legendary! *4) Salesforce Ventures is cementing its reputation as one of the very best corporate VCs.* 🥇 Salesforce is adding Hugging Face to its long list of successful exits: Snowflake, Zoom, DocuSign, nCino, Auth0... Very few investors can claim as many successes, let alone corporates. The $235m round they led returned $675m in just three short years. Meanwhile, Salesforce's own stock has been flat for the period. Capital well invested! *5) This is a little bit of a heartbreak: but I wanted to congratulate @joinstationf here:* Hugging Face walked into StationF as a 4-person team on day one, June 2017. Back when it was a chatbot for teenagers. They went through multiple corporate programs (Microsoft, Ubisoft, then Naver). Unfortunately they were not investing or taking equity at the time - but they contributed to making it possible. And so for that: hats off. And of course, congratulations to all others involved: Addition, Sequoia, Coatue and many others. No one will be left out!