Venture capital in 2025

It's f*ck yeah or no - in VC, too

The earlier the stage, the more influence the founder has (following is my IMO assessment):

However…

As NFX are concisely putting it (backed by their experience & everything which I love):

• One has to be compelling and show grit (the ability to “roll with the blows”)

  🤩

  When most VCs find someone compelling, they mean: I have to invest in this person – it’s a hard feeling to describe, but we know it when we see and feel it.

• The dreaded and ached for ‘the founder has to do it’ (basically a suite of OCD/bipolar tendencies, but…). Not a ‘founder-market fit’, which is more of a skill/network/state match, but a need to solve problem X

• The founder is obsessed with the problem and cares about it. Be it a biotech solving cancer research (to cure a relative) or an ADHD-friendly task planner etc.

This is actually your first step towards building a defensible company. If you care more than others, you’ll beat them.

• Being a “quarterback”, e.g. skilled and seeing the big picture and leading and that ‘ugh’ feel. May that boil down to the feeling of “okay, this one will move with or without us, and we’d better fuel them up to get on the train”.

P.S. IMO the big secret behind the last intangible is being able to tell it from Adderall/Ritalin manic semi-euphoria 😌

KPMG Venture Pulse 2024

TLDR: Everything’s coming up, roses 🌹

Global outlook

• ⬆️ $108.6B in 7022 deals, 80% top deals in the US → avg. check size in US at $26M

• AI AI AI AI is at $32B of total, god bless uncle Sam + 37% of the VC funding and 17% of the deal activity was to AI startups (from Citi Agentic AI Report)

  

• A record year for Defense Tech

• Average deal-wise, US is too far in the skies at $26M with Europe at $8.4M and Asia at $6.5M:

  

• Top deals:

  

Upcoming trends

• More funding and acquisitions by CVC funds

• AI-enabled verticals picking up pace (robotics, pharma, biotech, miltech, health tech, cybersec, spacetech & space services)

• Agentic AI. Agents, able to act autonomously at levels 4 or 5 of automation, are the main hope blablabla I’ve written this myself - take that, binary steel killers

  

Also remembering the other post, Going off the schedule, we can weed (hehehe, hohoho) out more sectors from deep tech, aforequoting (I just love making up words):

1. AI weather prediction, e.g. DeepMind’s NeuralGCM and GenCast

2. Ultra-deep drilling (or not-so-deep, e.g. Borobotics’ Grabowski for installing heat pumps) → mostly for geothermal energy

3. Advanced nuclear propulsion

4. Biocomputing, e.g. neuromorphic chips and wetware computing like FinalSpark

5. Brain manipulation tech. Transformers had just been used to predict the next 5 seconds (!!!) of brainwave patterns, so…

6. Quantum-optimized portfolios (look at QAQA and Qiskit-based solutions)

P.S. IMO some tech that’s gotta help us evade the dead internet is on the way to receive investor attention:

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