Good day. Interest in late-stage venture capital strategies is skyrocketing as investors pursue a narrower set of fast-accelerating artificial intelligence startups in the hopes of exiting them relatively quickly.

U.S.-based growth and late-stage venture funds raised $23.6 billion this year so far—a figure that already exceeds the annual totals for any of the past dozen years, according to research firm PitchBook. Such funds invest in startups that are typically raising their Series C or later rounds, according to the data provider’s definition.

“The allure of getting into obvious, de-risked companies, with a liquidity window that’s sub four years is highly interesting for people today,” said Samir Kaji, chief executive, president and co-founder of Allocate, a platform for private-markets investing. “It's taking some of the wind out of the sails of pure seed-stage funds.”

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, for example, collected $6 billion for its new growth fund in March, on the heels of raising $4.6 billion for its prior growth fund just last year. Since 2025, the firm has made investments in Anthropic, OpenAI, Crusoe Energy and other fast-growing companies.

“Nobody wanted to touch late-stage funds two years ago,” said Ethan Samson, managing principal and director of private markets client and partner strategy at Meketa Investment Group. “They are back to being interesting to look at,” he said, adding that he has noticed strong performance recently from this segment of venture. Meketa advises institutional investors such as pension funds.

Read the rest of the article at this link.

And now on to the news ...

Welcome to bugmageddon. The software bug was capable of crashing an operating system used by firewalls, servers and network appliances. It went undetected for over 27 years. Last month, it was caught by Mythos, the latest AI model from Anthropic that has spooked the White House, banking executives and cybersecurity professionals around the world.

• AI models like Mythos and others are finding bugs in older software at a rate never seen before. While most of the coding issues may be minor, their sheer volume has amplified the risk that smaller software developers will become overwhelmed with reports of bugs such as the one Mythos found. Thanks to AI, hackers will be able to leverage those bugs more quickly than ever before.

Franklin Templeton is betting on target-date funds as the best way to include private assets in 401(k) retirement plans. The private-markets industry has long wanted access to the $12.4 trillion Americans have invested in their 401(k)s. In March, the Trump administration proposed a new rule to make it easier for defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s to offer private equity, private credit and other alternative assets. Such investments have historically been limited to institutional investors.

Funds

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin said it will more than double the capacity of its venture capital fund to $1 billion from $400 million. Since forming in 2007, Lockheed Martin Ventures has invested more than $500 million into over 120 companies, focusing on sectors including AI, quantum computing, autonomy, directed energy, advanced materials and microelectronics.

People

Michael Mignano joined Union Square Ventures as a general partner. He was previously a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Type One Ventures promoted Nina Mahmoudpour to general counsel. She was previously a founding team member at Hungry.

Exits

Juniper Square acquired Sightglass, a platform that automates due diligence questionnaires for private markets.

Sygaldry Technologies, a startup building quantum computers for AI processing, scored $139 million in seed and Series A funding from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Initialized Capital. The company has offices in Ann Arbor, Mich., and San Francisco.

nEye, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based developer of integrated optical circuit switches to accelerate AI data center connectivity, raised $80 million in Series C funding. Sutter Hill Ventures led the round, which included participation from CapitalG, M12 and Socratic Partners. Stefan Dyckerhoff, managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures, will join the company’s board.

Bluefish, a New York-headquartered agentic marketing platform, closed a $43 million Series B round co-led by Threshold Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

Gizmo, a London-headquartered learning platform that transforms notes, documents and web content into personalized, gamified study experiences, landed $22 million in Series A funding. Shine Capital led the round, which included additional support from Ada Ventures, Seek Investments and NFX.

Auctor, a New York-based AI operating system for enterprise software implementations, emerged from stealth with $20 million in funding. Sequoia Capital led the investment, which included contributions from M12, HubSpot Ventures, Workday Ventures and others.

Pillar, a New York-based AI-powered hedging and risk execution platform for commodity-driven businesses, grabbed $20 million in new funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the investment, which included participation from Crucible Capital, Gallery Ventures, Neo and Analog Ventures.

Kelluu, a Finland-based autonomous airship fleet operator, snagged €15 million (almost $18 million) in Series A funding led by the NATO Innovation Fund.

Nava, a New York-based startup building guardrails and verification infrastructure for the agentic economy, emerged from stealth with $8.3 million in seed funding. Polychain Capital and Archetype led the financing, which saw participation from Hack VC, Seed Club Ventures and others.

For the latest Deal Talk, Ron Zalkind, founding general partner at Lama Partners, discusses Capsule Security and the firm's investment in the startup. Here are edited and condensed excerpts:  

WSJ Pro: Give a summary of the deal.

Zalkind: Capsule Security, which is building the “stop button” for AI coding agents, is emerging from stealth with a $7 million seed led by Lama Partners alongside Forgepoint Capital.

WSJ Pro: Why is Capsule different?

Zalkind: Governance and posture tools show how agents are configured. Capsule watches what they actually do and intervenes in real time when they go off track.

The second differentiator is deployment. Most solutions require heavy integration before delivering value. Capsule is agentless, leverages native platform capabilities, and can reach full coverage, including shadow agents, in minutes.

WSJ Pro: Any fun stories from meetings with founders?

Zalkind: At a recent CrowdStrike, AWS and Nvidia accelerator competition (during RSAC 2026), Naor Paz (co-founder and CEO of Capsule) was mid-pitch when Robert Herjavec (“Shark Tank”) interrupted to say it was one of the best presentations he’d seen. Naor’s response: “You’re eating into my pitch time.”

WSJ Pro: What’s a scenario Capsule's tech is trying to prevent?

Zalkind: A routine Friday night cleanup task turns into a silent outage. A senior engineer kicks off a routine infrastructure cleanup before logging off—deprecated services, unused credentials, redundant database tables. The agent begins executing. By midnight, it had made 40 decisions, each one locally reasonable. But around decision 23, it misclassifies a database table as deprecated, due to a naming inconsistency from six months earlier, not visible in the codebase it was analyzing. That table is the reconciliation layer for a real-time payments system. The agent deletes it. Then it continues, because nothing tells it to stop. By 2 a.m., 14 services are impacted, three databases are compromised, and the audit trail looks like standard administrative activity across every log. The blast radius of a single autonomous agent, running unsupervised overnight, can exceed what a skilled human attacker could achieve in weeks. And there is no breach signature because nothing was technically breached.

WSJ Pro: If you were to compare this startup to a movie or show, what would it be?

Zalkind: “Westworld.”

WSJ Pro: What’s a suggestion from the VCs that the founders ignored?

Zalkind: We initially pushed them to target “citizen developers” as a less crowded entry point. They chose to go straight after coding agents used by professional developers. In hindsight, it was the right call—higher urgency, faster adoption and a clearer path to becoming the control layer for agentic development.

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This newsletter was compiled by Yuliya Chernova, Matthew Strozier and Zachary Cole. 

The team: Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova, and Brian Gormley.

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