Inside/VC

Emil is live. Last Monday I joined Antler ONE. Seven days later, Tomer and I are on v3. We've been building and getting on calls. Over 70 conversations with some of the best creators and media companies so far. Those conversations changed the product twice. We started with an intelligence layer, then built a whole newsletter OS. But people kept asking: “Why can't you just run the whole thing for us?” So that's what Emil does. Give us your ad creative and budget. We find the newsletters, book the placements, track performance and report back. I've run Inside/VC for 20 months. Nearly every sponsor asked: “How do I know this will work?” Pretty good question tbh. I'd send screenshots of open rates, clicks and previous campaigns. At Peec AI, I was the one buying placements. I spent weeks digging through beehiiv, Substack, Kit and independent sites, comparing media kits and chasing rates. Once the campaigns finished, I still had to pull the results together (you really don't want to see those excel sheets hahah) That's what we built Emil to fix. Last week alone, our AI analyzed over 61,000 newsletter editions. We look at where your competitors advertise, which newsletters they book again, and how those audiences fit your brand. Repeat bookings are especially interesting. You can't see a competitor's ROI, but you can see where they keep spending. We use that alongside content and audience data to find suitable placements for your budget. Then we handle rates, availability, booking and scheduling. You get one invoice. We also track the campaign and analyze the results, so you know which placements performed best and where we'd recommend spending next. No monthly retainer. Our fee is 3.5% of your ad budget, included in it, not added on top. I wouldn't call us an agency killer. But if your agency bills you thousands to find newsletters, chase bookings and put the results in a deck, we should talk. Buying newsletter ads? Tell me your budget and who you're trying to reach. You get a campaign plan back. Writing a newsletter? Joining is free. Add your channels and we'll match you with sponsors. Week one done. Let's see what week two looks like. -> https://getemil.ai/ PS: The Tomer story is coming this week. I know, I promised.

Rocket Internet still beats Revolut on founder alumni 🇩🇪 Guillermo Flor’s Revolut Mafia post last week got us curious, so we compared European alumni networks with our partners at Evertrace. Rocket came out ahead of Revolut: 529 alumni with active founder signals, including 230 flagged as building in stealth. We weren’t expecting that. That's 43%. Revolut is at 42%. The baseline across all 317,420 founder signals is 26%. Top ten in the image 👆 What we found more interesting than the ranking was how some of these companies showed up: - Two of the largest new companies in the cohort surfaced through company registries, one in Germany and one in the UK. Neither came from a LinkedIn update. We found no launch announcement and no publicly announced round for either. - One of them is being built by a founder who has already built a unicorn. His new company has 94 employees. There is still almost nothing written about it. 167 of the 529 are repeat founders. Roughly one in three. - Rocket handed people in their twenties a company to run, often in a market they had never worked in. Almost nobody was ready. That was sort of the point. They made every expensive mistake once, on someone else's balance sheet, and plenty of them are now on company two or three. Rocket stopped being a startup factory years ago. The alumni network didn't notice. 157 of them are in Berlin. If we were sourcing pre-seed there, we'd want to go through that list. Where you should be sceptical of us: A stealth label can cover someone who is consulting, or between jobs, or still figuring it out. And an internship at Rocket counts as an alumni connection the same way a managing director role does. So we'd treat this as a starting point, not a conclusion. The registry filings give you something concrete to check. The founder's track record gives you a reason to look. Data from our friends at Evertrace — the founder detection engine a few hundred VC funds use to find people before the databases do. You should check them out (links in comments)! Guillermo, thanks for starting this one 💛 #vc #venturecapital #startups #founders #partnership

BREAKING: Profound just raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation... 👇 (barely two years after launching) Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led the Series D, with Lightspeed, Khosla, South Park Commons and others joining. Quick TL;DR of the rocketship timeline: 🔥 Aug 2024: Founded 🔥 Jun 2025: $20M Series A 🔥 Aug 2025: $35M Series B 🔥 Feb 2026: $96M Series C → $1B valuation 🔥 Sep 2026: $180M Series D → $1.8B valuation That’s $335M+ raised and an 80% valuation jump in ~7 months. Customer growth moved just exactly as fast: roughly 500 organizations in Aug 2025 → 700+ enterprises in Feb → 2,500+ brands today, including a third of the Fortune 100. Profound started with AI Search visibility. Now it’s pushing into a broader AI marketing platform with agents, AI Marketer and Context Manager. GEO went from niche SEO experiment to a multi-billion-dollar startup category in like 5 seconds.. Insane! CONGRATS!! 🚀

𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗔 𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘄? We have all heard it: the bar to raise a Series A is higher than ever. Peter Walker’s Carta data has shown the same thing from another angle: companies that raised Seed in 2022+ are graduating to Series A at much lower rates. So Jeff Schwartz and dataroomHQ mapped the firms still actively leading Series A rounds in the US. Every firm on the map led 4+ Series A rounds over the past year, plotted by number of rounds led and median round size. The map splits the market into four groups: Top right: powerhouses - lots of deals at high prices. Think Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed and Menlo Ventures. Top left: high-conviction firms - fewer deals, but larger rounds. Index Ventures, RA Capital, Xora, Paradigm and Redpoint sit closer to that camp. Bottom right: efficient deployers - lots of Series A activity, lower median round sizes. Sequoia, Insight Partners, NEA, General Catalyst and Felicis show up there. Bottom left: selective firms - fewer rounds, smaller median round sizes. For founders, the takeaway goes beyond knowing who “does Series A”. There are thousands of funds that technically do Series A. A multistage platform leading 15 Series A rounds a year is playing a very different game from a specialist leading 5 or 6 concentrated bets. Different ownership targets, different decision speed, different follow-on logic, different portfolio support, different partner attention. So the work is deciding what kind of Series A partner you actually want on your cap table. And obviously, getting any of the top names on this map is already a pretty good problem to have hahah. Full credit to Jeff Schwartz and dataroomHQ for the graphic. Want more VC content? Subscribe to Inside/VC here: https://lnkd.in/dJM9V5dE

JUST IN: Apple has unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first-ever foldable iPhone 🚨 The passport-sized device combines a 5.5-inch outer screen with a 7.6-inch foldable display. Quick specs: 🍎 A20 Pro chip 🍎 48MP main camera 🍎 Up to 24 hours of battery life 🍎 Apple Pencil support 🍎 50% charge in 20 minutes Apple is officially entering the foldable market! LETS GO! (Great news for all boomer VCs) PS: It starts at $2000.

Harvey just raised a $550M Series XYZ at a $15.5 BILLION valuation 👇 (And it has now crossed $400M ARR.) - 3,000+ customers - 80% of the top 100 law firms - 20% of the Fortune 500 & 50% of the Fortune 10 Diffusion and Lightspeed co-led the round, joined by Sequoia, a16z, Kleiner Perkins, Coatue, Goldman Sachs Alternatives and a long list of other "small" VCs. For perspective: Harvey was valued at $3B in February 2025 - It’s at $15.5B today. It also went from roughly $100M to more than $400M ARR in about a year. Oh, and Harvey also bought Guardrails AI this week -> its fourth acquisition of 2026. PS: Meanwhile, competitor Legora says net new ARR grew 36% MoM in August, in-house ARR is up 15x YoY, and September alone should add more ARR than the company did in all of Q1.

The Netherlands has Europe’s densest AI talent pool 🇳🇱 It has 10.9 AI professionals per 10,000 residents, compared with a European average of 3.8. The country is home to 8% of Europe’s AI talent despite accounting for only 2.8% of its population. On 23 September, our friends at Accel are coming to Amsterdam to bring more of these builders together. AI Innovate Amsterdam combines a one-day hackathon at Prosus AI House with an off-the-record evening featuring Lovable co-founder Fabian Hedin and Granola co-founder Christopher Pedregal. The hackathon is organized with Nebius, Tavily, Lovable, AISO and AI House Amsterdam. FYI: You obv. don’t need an existing startup, funding or a co-founder to apply. AI Innovate starts one week earlier in Stockholm with Lovable, Polar and KTH AI Society, before continuing to London, Paris and Berlin. Applications for Stockholm and Amsterdam are now open. Apply here👇 https://lnkd.in/ebTNwnJr

Clay just raised $115M at a $7.1 BILLION valuation 🦧 Wellington Management led the round, joined by Sequoia, a16z Perennial, DST Global and CapitalG. Wellington approached Clay directly, and the deal reportedly closed within days. The asset manager often starts investing in companies two to five years before an IPO -> Could be a good sign! Clay’s current numbers: → ~$200M in annualized revenue this quarter → ~$240M expected by the end of the fiscal year → Revenue expected to double again next year → Briefly profitable this year → Very little cash burned → Customers include Anthropic, Airbnb and DoorDash Co-founder Kareem Amin says an IPO isn’t directly planned yet. He and Varun Anand are already running the company as if it were public. At its current run rate, the round values Clay at roughly 35x annualized revenue.

BREAKING: Mistral just raised €3 BILLION at a €21B+ valuation. Nearly double what it was worth a year ago 🧡 Samsung Electronics led the Series D, with Scaleup Europe Fund (EQT) and PSG co-leading. ASML, NVIDIA, a16z, BlackRock and others also joined. Three years after launch, Mistral: → is Europe's second-most valuable private tech company, behind only Revolut → operates in 20 countries → serves 125+ large enterprises → is targeting $1B ARR by year-end Oh, and one "small" detail: €3B is the largest equity raise ever completed by a European tech company. LETS GO EUROPE! Link in the comments.

BREAKING: Google-backed Pixxel has raised a $100M Series C (the largest funding round ever by an Indian spacetech company!) 👇 The round was co-led by Temasek and Seraphim, with participation from 360 ONE Asset, IMM Investment, Radical Ventures and growX Ventures, bringing total funding to $195M. Pixxel builds hyperspectral Earth-observation satellites and AI-powered intelligence software for governments and enterprises. Quick TL;DR: 🫵 $100M Series C (->$195M total raised) 🫵 6 Firefly satellites already deployed 🫵 Contracts with NASA + the NRO 🫵 Selected to lead India’s new 12-satellite public-private Earth observation constellation The new funding will expand Pixxel beyond hyperspectral imaging into SAR, ultra-high-resolution optical satellites, sovereign systems and satellite manufacturing. This is India’s biggest spacetech round to date! Congrats! Funny timing btw with Isar Aerospace just pulling off Europe’s first successful commercial orbital launch from continental Europe 2 days ago. 🚀