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This Year’s Exit Comeback Has Yet to Materialize
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By Marc Vartabedian, WSJ Pro
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Good day. The great exit revival of 2025 is off to a slow start, at least so far. Many in the venture-capital industry predicted this would be the year the exit market revved back from its multiyear slump to give liquidity-starved investors a payday. While that may still happen, the market’s performance appears roughly on par with its performance during the same period last year.
There have been 241 exits of global venture-backed companies since the start of the year through Monday, just shy of the 247 venture-backed exits in the year-earlier period, according to analytics provider CB Insights. So far this year there have been 14 venture-backed initial public offerings versus 11 during the 2024 window.
CB Insights notes exits could increase over time this year as more companies publicly announce deals that occurred between Jan. 1 and Feb. 10. The figures don’t include companies if they’ve only received investment from crossover investors such as asset managers, corporations or corporate venture divisions.
The startup industry’s dearth of exits—the primary way venture investors cash out of their investments—has left investors and early employees that hold shares eagerly waiting for a turnaround. Firms have turned to the secondary market to sell stakes and employees have sold shares in tender offers.
IPO analytics firm Renaissance Capital listed seven companies expected to hold IPOs this week, several of which have traditional venture capital backing.
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And now on to the news...
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Elon Musk is in a battle with Sam Altman over the company behind ChatGPT. PHOTO: SAMUEL CORUM/GETTY IMAGES
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OpenAI bid. A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, raising the stakes in his battle with Sam Altman over the company behind ChatGPT, The Wall Street Journal reports.
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Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted a bid for all the nonprofit’s assets to OpenAI’s board of directors Monday. The unsolicited offer adds a complication to Altman’s carefully laid plans for OpenAI’s future, including converting it to a for-profit company and spending up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate. He and Musk are already fighting in court over the direction of OpenAI.
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Altman quickly rejected the offer on X. He wrote, “No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” using the previous name for the Musk-owned social-media platform and moving the decimal point in the billionaire’s bid for OpenAI one space to the left.
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$100 Billion
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French President Emmanuel Macron said that France has attracted over $100 billion in future investments for AI projects by French and international investors.
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Turns Out AI Is More Empathetic Than Allstate’s Insurance Reps
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Allstate is discovering soul-less generative AI models, made up of entirely data and code, are more empathetic than a lot of its human representatives, WSJ reports. The insurer said that during the often frustrating back and forth between customers and claims reps after a claim is filed, nearly all of the Allstate emails are now generated by AI—and that as a result they are less accusatory and jargony and more empathetic. Allstate is using OpenAI’s GPT models and grounding them in company-specific terminology. “When these emails used to go out, even though we had standards and so on, they would include a lot of insurance jargon. They weren’t very
empathetic…Claims agents would get frustrated, and so it wasn’t necessarily great communication” said Allstate Chief Information Officer Zulfi Jeevanjee.
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Is AI Revolutionary or Hype? What If it is Both?
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Silicon Valley investors remain optimistic that artificial intelligence can deliver trillions of dollars in business value, even as they agree that the technology has continued to feed a now yearslong hype cycle, WSJ reports. “We are definitely in a hype cycle, especially for generative AI,” said Konstantine Buhler, a partner at Sequoia Capital, speaking on a panel at The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Network Summit on Monday. The questions remain: Will AI’s hype cycle turn into meaningful value for enterprises, and if so, when? In the timeline for generative AI’s value to be fully realized, “We are not even in the beginning,” Buhler said.
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Pharma Companies' Use of AI to Speed Up Drug Development Hits Hurdles
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When Genentech licensed experimental drug vixarelimab from Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals, its scientists thought they had a future lung medicine in their hands. Artificial intelligence came up with another plan, WSJ reports. It was an AI platform that led Genentech—a U.S.-based biotechnology unit of Switzerland’s Roche—to discover that the drug candidate it had licensed for its potential to target a lung condition could also work to treat inflammatory bowel disease. “It’s like, in some way, searching for a needle in a haystack,” said Aviv Regev, Genentech’s executive vice president for research and early development. “We
did it based on data and algorithms. We didn’t do it based on ‘now we go back to the lab and we do large-scale experiments and we use these experiments in order to understand the biology.’”
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Funds
Thomson Reuters launched its second corporate venture-capital fund, valued at $150 million, to continue making early-stage investments across sectors including legal technology; tax and accounting; fintech; risk, fraud and compliance; and news and media. The firm raised $100 million for its first venture fund in 2021.
People
Cancer immunotherapeutics startup Epitopea appointed Klaus Edvardsen as chief medical officer. He was previously chief development officer at Nykode Therapeutics.
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ANA, a Henderson, Nev.-based manufacturer of mobile power and air compression systems, scored a $50 million strategic investment from S2G Investments.
Akamas, an Italy-based AI-driven platform for cloud and application optimization, picked up a $10 million investment led by United Ventures.
Nirmata, a San Jose, Calif.-based security and operations automation provider, landed a $9.6 million investment led by Peak XV's Surge.
Edacious, a Marlborough, Mass.-based nutritional transparency provider, closed an $8.1 million seed round led by Tin Shed Ventures.
ACT-ion Battery Technologies, a Dallas-based lithium battery cathode active material technology startup, closed a $7.5 million pre-Series A round led by BASF Venture Capital.
Datalign Advisory, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that matches consumers with financial advisers, added $5 million in seed funding from Link Ventures, bringing the round total to $9 million.
Future AGI, a San Francisco-based AI application evaluation and optimization platform, raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding co-led by Powerhouse Ventures and Snow Leopard Ventures.
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DeepSeek shot to fame in January, with its low-cost AI models rivaling American ones. PHOTO: LISELOTTE SABROE/ZUMA PRESS
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New York State bans DeepSeek from government devices
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The Musk deputy running DOGE’s huge cost-cutting drive
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Intel’s AI chief to leave chip maker in wake of CEO exit
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Super Bowl ad results: AI can’t compete with sentimental stories
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What Forerunner Ventures looks for in consumer startups: vision, magnetism, and unfair advantages (Inc.)
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AI startup raises one of the biggest Series A rounds ever for Middle Eastern company (Forbes)
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