PIN

A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders

Author

Power in Numbers
October 31, 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

Sequoia Capital is doubling down on early-stage innovation with two new vehicles: a $750M growth fund and a $200M seed fund. After setbacks like its FTX loss and Asia split, the firm’s early bets on startups such as Clay, Harvey, and Reflection AI are already paying off as the AI boom accelerates.

OpenAI has officially transitioned into a for-profit structure, creating a new corporate entity called OpenAI Group under the OpenAI Foundation. The move, long resisted by Elon Musk, allows the company to raise funds and acquire startups more freely. Microsoft now holds about 27% of the for-profit arm, extending its IP rights to OpenAI models through 2032.

AI startup Mercor now valued at $10 billion with new $350 million funding round

AI hiring startup Mercor has reached a $10 billion valuation after raising $350 million in a round led by Felicis. Once focused on recruiting, the company now hires experts to train AI models, tapping into the booming demand for data labeling. The pivot followed Meta’s $14.3 billion stake in Scale AI. Today, Mercor manages more than 30,000 contractors and pays out over $1.5 million a day to people teaching AI how to think more like humans.

Anthropic, the AI company backed by Amazon and Google, is quietly charting a different path than OpenAI. Instead of chasing the mass market, it’s doubling down on corporate clients. As OpenAI spends billions building data centers, Anthropic’s focus on steady enterprise demand may give it a long-term edge.

Apple and Microsoft just crossed a new milestone, each now valued at over $4 trillion. It’s Apple’s first time hitting that mark, fueled by strong iPhone 17 sales. Microsoft regained its $4T spot thanks to booming demand for Azure and its deep ties with OpenAI. Alphabet is next in line, sitting at a market cap of $3.25 trillion and climbing fast.

While the IPO market is frozen during the government shutdown, Discord is poised for an initial public offering that would break a multiyear drought in gaming and interactive entertainment stocks to stand as the largest IPO in the sector since Roblox went public in 2021.

💰 Funding announcement highlights

Ava, a five-year-old San Francisco startup that uses AI to analyze consumer credit data and automate refinancing and loan recommendations, raised a $15 million seed. The round was led by Greylock, with Transform VC, Firebolt, Twine Ventures, Sure Ventures, Defy.vc, and Burst Capital also joining.

Cartesia, a San Francisco startup building state space model–based voice AI for real-time multilingual conversation, raised $100 million. Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, and Nvidia were part of the investors.

Mem0, a one-year-old startup building a memory layer enabling AI applications to retain context across models and platforms, raised a $20 million Series A. Basis Set Ventures was the main investor, with Peak XV Partners, GitHub Fund, Y Combinator and Kindred Ventures also showing up.

Forum AI, a newly founded startup evaluating how major AI systems handle subjective and high-stakes topics using human expert judgment, raised a $3 million seed. Lerer Hippeau was the main investor, with Perplexity AI’s also contributing.

Tempo Labs, a startup providing an AI-powered design and code collaboration tool for product teams, raised a $5 million seed round. Y Combinator, Golden Ventures, Box Group, Webflow Ventures, iNovia, and General Catalyst were part of the investors.

📚 Interesting reads of the week

Uber said that the San Francisco Bay Area will be the first market for its specially built autonomous taxi, which is expected to launch in late 2026. The San Francisco ride-hailing company said in July it was developing a robotaxi with the electric car company Lucid and the self-driving technology company Nuro Inc. The vehicle is exclusive to Uber but is based on the Lucid Gravity SUV.

While AI hype has investors talking about another bubble, Crunchbase argues this cycle isn’t a carbon copy of 2021. Funding today is hyper-concentrated in AI giants like OpenAI, while sectors such as biotech and cleantech are lagging. IPO activity is muted, and megarounds dominate as investors back fewer companies with bigger checks. The zero-interest-rate era is over, but the script feels familiar: valuations climb, skepticism rises — and yet, the market keeps rolling toward another peak.

David Booth, co-founder of On Deck and former AngelList exec, is joining Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as Partner and Head of Ecosystem. Moving back to San Francisco, he’ll lead efforts to strengthen the firm’s talent and founder networks alongside Erik Torenberg. Booth shared a6z’s “network-effect business” model, and how they are building an ecosystem where founders, operators, and investors compound value together.

Elon Musk’s xAI has launched Grokipedia, an encyclopedia strikingly similar to Wikipedia, right down to its design and even some word-for-word pages. While Musk calls it a “massive improvement,” critics point out that Grokipedia’s AI “fact-checks” could spread inaccuracies. With 885,000 articles already live, the project blurs the line between human knowledge and AI replication.

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Sequoia’s Roelof Botha challenged a long-held belief in finance: that venture capital is an asset class. He argued that simply pouring more money into Silicon Valley doesn’t create better companies but dilutes the ecosystem. Botha noted that while there are now 3,000 VC firms in the U.S., only a handful of startups truly move the needle. His message to investors: quality, not quantity, drives meaningful innovation.

America’s largest university endowments just posted higher returns for FY 2025, defying federal cuts and new taxes. Powered by a rebound in public markets, schools like Harvard, Stanford, and Yale saw double-digit gains after years of slower growth. Harvard’s $56.9B fund logged its best year since 2021, distributing $2.5B to support tuition and research. PitchBook’s new tracker reveals how these endowments are outperforming peers and staying resilient under pressure.

📌 PinPoint - Weekly Startup Job Opportunities

LangChain is hiring an Education Engineer.

Sesame is hiring a Product Designer.

Flow Engineering is hiring a Founding Recruiter.

DualEntry is hiring a Fractional Controller (Remote).

Base Power Company is hiring a Global Supply Manager.

You can earn thousands of dollars for referring candidates to top companies. Sign up to PinPoint.

📌 PIN tweet of the week

💼 Who’s hiring in VC?

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

AMEX Ventures is looking for a VC Manager.

FTV Capital is looking for an IR Associate.

Unity Growth is looking for a VC Partner.

Wellington Management is looking for a VC Associate.

M13 is looking for a VC Analyst.

📠 Fun fact of the week

WordPress powers 35% of all websites in the world.