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A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders
Power in Numbers
March 27, 2026
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
Delve, a YC-backed compliance automation startup, is facing allegations from an anonymous whistleblower that it fabricated evidence of board meetings, tests, and processes that never happened, then presented that fake evidence to customers seeking SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR certifications. Insight Partners, which led a $32 million round, quietly removed its investment thesis post shortly after the accusations surfaced.
OpenAI is offering PE firms preferred equity stakes with a guaranteed 17.5% minimum return, early model access, and downside protection to win joint venture partners over Anthropic, which made no such offer.
The Antwerp-founded, London-based firm, Hummingbird, oversubscribed its latest round in under a week, bringing total AUM to nearly $2 billion. The raise includes a first-ever $600 million growth fund, plus $200 million for early-stage bets. Known for early wins in Kraken and Lovable, Hummingbird is doubling down on founders it describes as "almost unemployable" in traditional settings, and wants to address the persistent late-stage funding gap in Europe.
Kleiner Perkins is back with $3.5 billion across two new funds: a $1 billion early-stage vehicle and $2.5 billion for growth-stage bets on category-defining companies. The firm is leaning hard into the AI supercycle, with focus areas including professional services, healthcare, autonomy, security, and the physical economy. After 54 years, they say the core thesis hasn't changed, but the pace certainly has.
In a newly released podcast interview, DoD senior tech official Emil Michael said he will "never forget, nor forgive" the Uber investors who forced him and Travis Kalanick out in 2017, arguing they killed what could have been a trillion-dollar autonomous driving business to protect short-term returns.
Two early Kalshi employees are raising a $35 million fund called 5c(c) Capital to back prediction market startups, and somehow convinced both competing CEOs to write checks. Marc Andreessen, Ribbit Capital's Micky Malka, and former Multicoin Capital managing partner Kyle Samani are also in. The fund plans to back around 20 companies over two years, all while Kalshi faces 20 federal lawsuits and fresh criminal charges from Arizona's attorney general.
Brinc, a Seattle-based public safety drone startup founded by Blake Resnick, launched Guardian, a 9-11 response drone with 62-minute flight time, thermal and 4K cameras, a loudspeaker, and automated battery swapping.
💰 Funding announcement highlights
Cloaked, a consumer-focused privacy platform offering tools like email masking and secure phone numbers, raised $375 million in Series B and growth funding from General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Liberty City Ventures, Human Capital, Marquee Ventures, DuckDuckGo, LG Technology Ventures, and others.
Halter, a New Zealand-based agtech company building virtual fencing and GPS collar technology for livestock management, raised $220 million in Series E funding from Founders Fund, Bond, Bessemer Venture Partners, Blackbird, DCVC, NewView, Ubiquity, Promus, and Icehouse Ventures.
Deeptune, a startup developing reinforcement learning-based “training gyms” to improve AI agent performance, raised $43 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, 776, Abstract Ventures, and Inspired Capital.
Harvey, an AI-powered legal platform for law firms and enterprises, raised $200 million in growth funding from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Conviction, Elad Gil, Kleiner Perkins, GIC, and Evantic.
Granola, an AI meeting intelligence platform that automatically captures and organizes meeting notes, raised $125 million in Series C funding from Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and NFDG.
📚 Interesting reads of the week
Redbud VC raised a $25M Fund II in Fall 2025, during what Brett Calhoun calls the worst fundraising stretch for emerging managers in modern VC history. Their edge: skipping the usual LP pool of endowments and funds of funds, going straight to Missouri operators in steel, construction, and healthcare instead.
Cursor went from MIT side project to $2 billion in annualized revenue in four years, used today by 67% of the Fortune 500. Then Claude Code showed up and rewrote the narrative. The core tension: Cursor helps developers write code faster, while agentic tools like Claude Code just write it for them. Now Cursor is building its own model to cut its dependency on Anthropic, losing key engineers, and racing to prove the IDE era isn't over before its window closes.
Database companies post gross margins above 80%, yet most barely break even. This article breaks down why.
a16z's David George is done with the comfortable middle: software companies must either accelerate revenue growth by 10+ percentage points through genuinely new AI-native products, or rebuild to 40%+ true operating margins (including stock-based compensation) within 12 to 24 months. Anything in between is no-man's land.
Jensen Huang sat down with Lex Fridman for a wide-ranging conversation on NVIDIA's rise, AI scaling laws, and where it all goes next.
Surprise, surprise - 85% of YC's Winter 2026 batch is AI-first, and 56 out of 198 companies are building fully autonomous agents, not copilots. The pattern is clear: every knowledge worker role between $50k and $150k is getting an AI agent pointed at it.
Every tech cycle eventually hits a wall, and investor Kyle Harrison argues AI is no exception. The hype is real, but so are the cracks.
📌 Tweet of the week
💼 Who’s hiring in VC?
Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.
Right Side Capital is looking for a VC Principal
Temasek is looking for a Senior VC Associate
Capital One is looking for a VC Manager
Toyota Ventures is looking for a VC Associate
UBS is looking for a VC Investor
