Nicole Baer

So we're seeing this sort of pull to the top where the largest funds have the most money to kind of, you know, to throw around for the biggest companies and

And so there are fewer deals that are being made there.

So that's, you know, not maybe not not not so great news, I guess.

But we're definitely seeing a recovery in VC and in startup land in general.

It's just been a little bit uneven.

It's really been over the last year.

You know, we were in quite a wobble after the pandemic.

I mean, just everything, you know, you would hear a lot about dry powder investment that would just people were just, you know, VC firms just sitting on money and limited partners started to get who are investing in venture capital and private equity firms were getting very impatient and have been very impatient.

around making investments.

So you're seeing these like mega investments into the most proven sort of bets on the AI side.

But in general, for all AI native startups, it's a pretty good fundraising world out there.

Well, you rightly pointed out a trend around solo founders, which is we've seen in the last round of data that we looked at 10% more solo founders than we had five years ago.

And while that doesn't seem like a huge number-

It's actually like a fairly seismic change, and that is entirely because of AI.

Like it's a one to one connection between those two things because founders can you know, they can build products faster, they can scale, they can do aspects of go to market.

All, you know, with leveraging AI, which means also they're keeping their costs down, which investors like.

They're scaling up faster, which investors also like.

And that's another thing that we're seeing that's a really, I think is a really interesting trend line is, you know, the number of companies that are getting to a billion dollars in revenue, startups in two or three years.

versus that's starting to become more of a norm as opposed to it being seven to 10 years, which just even like the last wave of startups, that was their timeline to get to a billion.

Now that's two to three years.