Venture Kick has recorded 1,976 investments, more than any other European program in our dataset, yet PitchBook records an exit for only one in five. Paris & Co has fewer, 1,109, but 67.5% of them did. Size and results are not the same thing, so this guide ranks 95 European incubators and accelerators on both. …
What happens to a company nobody ever funded when a buyer finally writes the cheque? In September 2021, Intuit agreed to pay $12 billion for Mailchimp, a company that, according to Axios, never took outside funding. In January 2025, Everstone agreed to buy a majority of Wingify, the Delhi company behind VWO, in a deal …
Finding promising startups is only the first step in making an investment decision. Investors also need reliable information about funding history, founders, market opportunities, competitors, and company performance before deciding which opportunities deserve further attention. Startup databases bring a huge amount of this data into searchable platforms, which in turn help investors to find companies, …
How much of a biotech startup do the founders end up with after a number of funding rounds? It’s not simply a matter of how much money you’ve raised. Investor ownership, employee stock options, top ups to the option pool and convertible securities all play a part in how the equity is split as you …
The ten best-funded AI companies in the US have raised $751 billion between them, and the top five account for $582 billion of that, or about 77.5%. OpenAI alone has raised $201.1 billion. The company ranked 100th, Klaviyo, has raised $1.35 billion. Across the full list, the same investors appear again and again: NVIDIA, Sequoia …
Bombas pitched for $200,000 and now reports $1.3 billion in lifetime sales. ZipZ Wine landed the biggest check in the show’s history, $2.5 million, and the company later faded from the market. The gap between those two outcomes shows what a Shark Tank deal really is: a pricing decision that changes who owns the company. …
Which were the biggest rounds Accel backed in 2026, and what can founders learn from them? The largest were in AI, defense and security companies that were already growing fast. Anthropic’s $30 billion Series G was the biggest by far. But the rounds Accel led, such as Legora, Armadin, Basis and Fractile, show more about …
Imagine two companies. For every $1 of short-term bills, a biotech firm holds $5.13 in cash and quick assets. A discount store holds just 32 cents. Why such a big gap? The answer is how each business earns money. Biotech firms sit on cash raised from investors, while discount stores collect cash at the register …
AI’s dominance in venture capital has been nothing short of remarkable. In Q1 2023, AI accounted for 21.05% of global VC funding. By Q1 2026, that figure had surged to 80.61%, meaning that for every dollar deployed by venture capitalists globally, roughly 80 cents is flowing into AI. It stands to reason that, if capital …
A 12% ROE beats the 9.4% earned by restaurants, but trails the 14.1% earned in engineering and construction. Same number, two different verdicts. This guide uses October 2026 data on 128 U.S. industries to show which sectors earn the most on shareholder equity, which earn the least, and how to benchmark your own company against …
US companies spent more money on deals in 2026 than in any recent year on record. The numbers are striking: SpaceX bought xAI at a combined valuation of $1.25 trillion, two of the largest apartment landlords in the country merged into one company, and a handful of pharmaceutical companies spent over $67 billion acquiring drug …
Private equity has an ESG commitment problem, but not where you might think. PE firms are putting more money, teams, and targets behind ESG, yet those commitments are still struggling to reach the portfolio companies that have to deliver them. In 2026, the real question isn’t whether private equity takes ESG seriously. It’s whether those …
Where is the smartest money in startups going in 2026? A good way to find out is to look at Sequoia and a16z. Between them, they joined OpenAI’s $122 billion round, Anthropic’s $65 billion round, Waymo’s $16 billion round and Anduril’s $5 billion round. But the headlines only show big numbers. They don’t tell you …
Series C funding is a milestone in the development of a company. The company has pushed past early uncertainties and has demonstrated that its product works in the market. Now it’s ready to scale, whether that’s moving into new areas, making acquisitions or preparing for an IPO (the first time a company sells shares to …
Successful pitch decks do not try to say everything. They focus on a painful problem, a clear market opportunity, and the few numbers that matter most.In recent investor materials and classic startup decks alike, the strongest pitch stories are the ones that turn a business into a clear, credible narrative. Figma’s public S-1, filed with …
The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is a federal law that requires certain businesses to report beneficial ownership information (BOI) to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Its primary objective was to improve transparency around company ownership and help law enforcement identify individuals who use corporate entities to facilitate illicit financial activity. The Corporate Transparency Act …
Why do certain companies make more money than others? A construction company makes about 10 cents on every dollar it owns. A biotechnology company currently loses about 46 cents each dollar. That disparity isn’t about effective management vs. poor management. It’s about how these enterprises are built. Certain sectors require mines, factories, or distribution networks …
Why is equity management such a big topic in 2026? Equity compensation has quietly become one of the most consequential and most complicated parts of running a company. More employers are granting it, employees still don’t fully understand it, and the private companies issuing it are staying private for far longer than they used to. …
How many unicorns exist in the world right now? There are already more than 1,680 unicorns in the world, with a collective value of $8.6 trillion as of Q1 2026. That’s the headline statistic but ask a different tracker and you’ll get a different response, ranging from approximately 1,250 “true” venture-backed unicorns to nearly 4,000 …
How long does it take for a startup to exit? Startup exits are taking longer across the board but the gap between sectors has never been wider. In 2026, an AI-hardware company might be sold within five years of founding; a late-stage, venture-backed business is more likely looking at 15 or more. Payments and consumer …
