PIN

A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders

Author

Power in Numbers
March 28, 2025

Welcome to PIN’d - our weekly newsletter where we pin (lol, bear with us) the most important tech/startup news of the week for aspiring angels, vc’s, startup investors, founders, etc. Expect a new weekly roundup from us every Friday morning!

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📰 This week’s best news

OpenAI is rolling out a new image generator inside GPT-4o, designed not just for AI art but for real-world creative work like ads, illustrations, and graphic design. It tackles long-standing flaws, like garbled text and misplaced objects, and signals OpenAI’s serious push into Adobe and Canva territory.

Digital banking startup Mercury has raised $300 million in primary and secondary funding at a $3.5 billion post-money valuation. The valuation is more than double the startup’s valuation when it last raised capital — a $120 million Series B round in 2021 that valued the company at $1.62 billion post-money.

Consumer VC Brian O’Malley raising capital for new firm Tactile

Former Forerunner Ventures managing partner Brian O’Malley is betting on the consumer sector with his new venture firm when many venture investors are fixated on AI and enterprise software. O’Malley is raising about $100 million for the initial fund at Tactile, a firm he is setting up to invest in early-stage consumer startups, according to people familiar with the situation.

StubHub is finally going public, filing to list on the NYSE under the ticker “STUB” after years of delays and drama, including a botched Taylor Swift tour rollout. Despite posting losses in 2024, the company moved over 40 million tickets and saw a sharp rise in gross merchandise sales.

AI sales startup 11x, backed by heavyweights like a16z and Benchmark, is under fire for allegedly listing fake customers and inflating its revenue. Multiple companies deny ever signing on, and insiders say high churn, product issues, and a toxic work culture are fueling the controversy.

(However, founder Hasan Sukkar responded, calling the article false and misleading, defending the company’s finances and customer relationships.)

Emergence Capital just locked in a $1 billion fund, its first raise since 2021, to double down on B2B and AI startups. Known for early bets on Zoom, Salesforce, and Gusto, the firm says AI is now the biggest investment opportunity of this generation.

With Klarna gearing up to go public, eyes are now on Stripe, Chime, Circle, and other heavily funded fintechs potentially lining up for IPOs in 2025. While market conditions remain shaky, the pressure’s building for these unicorns to finally hit the public markets.

Yahoo to sell TechCrunch to media investment firm Regent

Yahoo is parting ways with TechCrunch, selling the iconic tech news site to media investor Regent. While the deal amount wasn’t disclosed, it marks another step in Regent’s push to dominate digital media, just days after acquiring the publisher behind PCWorld and Macworld.

💰 Funding announcement highlights

n8n, a startup that offers a workflow automation platform that enables users to connect various applications and APIs to automate tasks and business processes without requiring extensive coding knowledge, has raised a $60 million round Highland Europe was the main lead with HV Capital as well as previous investors Sequoia, Felicis, and Harpoon also joining.

Arcade, a San Francisco startup operating an AI-powered platform that enables users to design custom products such as jewelry and home goods, raised a $25 million Series A. Canaan Partners led the round, with Forerunner Ventures also contributing.

Browser Use, a one-year-old startup building tools that help AI agents understand and interact with websites more easily by converting visual web content into a text-based format, raised a $17 million seed round.  Felicis was the main investor, with A Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, and Paul Graham also pitching in.

Nexthop AI, a startup building cloud infrastructure software that uses AI to optimize how and where large AI models run across different cloud environments, raised $110 million. The Series A round was led by Lightspeed Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, WestBridge Capital, Battery Ventures, and Emergent Ventures also contributing.

Nace.AI, a Palo Alto startup that developed an AI agent designed to assist with audit and compliance tasks by providing real-time insights into risks and compliance violations, raised a $5 million round. General Catalyst was the main investor.

 📚 Interesting reads of the week

From AI-powered solo startups and skyrocketing revenue-per-employee, to Gen Z’s uphill battle for homeownership, this data-packed piece maps out the trends reshaping business, tech, and society.

Tech M&A is heating fast in 2025, with major deals like Google buying Wiz for $32 billion and SoftBank snapping up Ampere for $6.5 billion. As growth slows for many cloud companies, more acquisitions and fewer IPOs as firms shift from building to buying are to be expected.

As the Trump administration purges web pages, this group is rushing to save them

As thousands of U.S. government web pages vanish under Trump’s new term, the Internet Archive is racing to preserve them, capturing over 73,000 pages so far. From climate data to public health resources, the nonprofit is battling digital decay to protect critical information before it’s gone.

Carta’s latest data shows the venture capital landscape is shifting fast: fewer LPs are writing bigger checks, while returns are slipping across older fund vintages. Smaller funds continue to lead on top-tier performance, but most newer funds haven’t returned a dime to investors yet.

Newcomer reveals internal return data for over 50 top VC funds, showing a mixed bag of results. Some, like Greenoaks and Insight Partners, posted solid gains—while others, including Y Combinator and True Ventures, are still deep in the red post-2020.

USV hosted an AI demo night spotlighting 9 buzzy startups, from language-learning companions to Gen Z dating algorithm. Their bet? The next big consumer AI hit won’t come from the Valley; it’s being built in New York. Read more about them in this thread.

💪Tech mafia of the week

Highlights:

💰 Most money raised: Gropyus

🤑 Total money raised by the Zalando Mafia: $872 million

Weekly Tech Mafia Leaderboard

The Zalando alumni has built some amazing companies. This tech mafia group takes the 66th spot on our leaderboard, with 35 companies founded and $872 million raised.

PS: Are you a Zalando alum interested in getting your community together to invest in the community (and earn carry/other benefits along the way)? Or are you a member of another community that you think would make for an amazing startup investment community?

Learn more about us and sign up for the waitlist here.

📌 PIN tweet of the week

💼 Who’s hiring in VC?

Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.

Ensemble VC is looking for a VC Associate.

Manhattan West is looking for an Executive VC Director.

Gold House Ventures is looking for a VC Fellowship.

HICO Ventures is looking for a VC Investor.

Suffolk Ventures is looking for a VC Associate.

📠 Fun fact of the week

The term "computer bug" originated from a real insect! In 1947, computer scientist Grace Hopper discovered a moth causing a malfunction in the Harvard Mark II computer. She documented this incident as the "first actual case of a computer bug," leading to the term "debugging" that we still use today.

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