Good day. Washington, D.C.-based trade group National Venture Capital Association juiced its lobbying capabilities in March, naming Capitol Hill veteran Diem-Mi Lu as vice president of government affairs.

Lu spoke with WSJ Pro about her new role and how she will focus her efforts. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WSJ Pro: What is at the top of your priority list as you get up and running in your new role?

Lu: I was brought in to lead capital markets policy and advocacy work. Capital formation is a big one and is something Congress has been interested in. The initial public offering market remains anemic and so there’s bipartisan interest in helping to facilitate capital formation.

WSJ Pro: What are the bottlenecks?

Lu: There’s a lot of rules that startups have to follow to ensure that they’re complying with regulations when they’re raising money, and a lot of it comes from a good place to make sure we’re protecting investors. But it’s important to get the balance right so we’re not unnecessarily restricting VCs and startups from getting the money they need. Over the years, we’ve added more and more rules that companies have to comply with when they’re public and it really adds a lot of money in terms of legal, compliance and accounting fees. That might be appropriate for Fortune 500 companies. There are lots of smaller companies that want to go public to tap the public markets and retail investors, but they have to have regulations that are the right size for them because they don’t have the resources that the biggest companies do.

Read the full interview and details of Lu's background here.

And now on to the news...

Climate tech. Startup company Remora recently bought a 4,400-horsepower locomotive that is about to be delivered this week to its parking lot in the Detroit suburbs via a new rail spur.

• The company plans to use the 1994 General Electric unit to test its mobile carbon-capture technology for rail use, said Paul Gross, Remora’s 28-year-old chief executive and co-founder. 
   
• Remora’s technology is designed to extract CO2 from the exhaust of diesel freight train locomotives and semi trucks, then purify and liquefy the greenhouse gas on board. It plans to sell the CO2, sharing the revenue with its transportation partners.
   
• The interest from Remora’s rail and trucking partners shows that demand for sustainable transportation technologies remains, despite the Trump administration’s move to reverse climate-change rules.

Read the full story from WSJ Pro here.

AI adoption among companies is stunningly high, but most of them are struggling to put it to good use. They intuit that AI is essential to their future. Yet intuition alone won’t unlock the promise of AI, and it isn’t clear to them which key will do the trick. As of last year, 78% of companies said they used artificial intelligence in at least one function, up from 55% in 2023, according to global management consulting firm McKinsey’s State of AI survey, released in March. From these efforts, companies claimed to find cost savings of less than 10% and revenue increases of less than 5%.

Read the full article here.

Investors in private-credit funds expect to increase their target allocations to the asset class, despite recent geopolitical turmoil and U.S. tariff actions that have raised worries about the economy and markets, according to industry executives and a recent investor survey, WSJ Pro reports. Uncertainty has stalled some private-credit deal activity, but institutions that participate in new funds have largely been unstirred by changing trade policies. These big investors have found credit funds appealing as other asset classes like private equity and venture capital have struggled to return capital to investors by exiting from holdings.

Funds

San Francisco-based Fluent Ventures raised $40 million for its inaugural fund to invest across sectors including fintech, health and commerce.

People

Drug development startup Creyon Bio appointed DCVC Bio Operating Partner Serge Messerlian as chief executive officer.

Gaming communications platform Discord appointed Humam Sakhnini as chief executive officer. He most recently served as vice chairman at Activision Blizzard.

Deals

Flex, a startup providing financial management technology for business owners, acquired Maza, a business formation and payments platform.

Nous Research, an open source AI lab, has raised $65 million in funding, including $50 million led by Paradigm.  

Alpaca, a San Mateo, Calif.-headquartered broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure API, landed $52 million in Series C funding from investors including Unbound and Portage Ventures.

Minimus, a Baton Rouge, La.-based application security startup helping to reduce cloud software vulnerabilities, launched from stealth with $51 million in seed funding from investors including YL Ventures and Mayfield.

Reducto, a San Francisco-based startup whose technology helps enterprises unlock unstructured data, raised $24.5 million in Series A funding led by Benchmark.

LayerX, a New York-based enterprise browser security platform, added $11 million in Series A funding led by Jump Capital, bringing the round total to $37 million.

Deferred, a Los Angeles-based startup that streamlines the 1031 exchange process for real estate investors, was seeded with a $3.6 million investment led by B Capital and Fika Ventures.

• IBM is back. Now it must prove its mettle in AI.
   
• Looking for a job in tech is more confusing than ever
   
• Newcomer SQ Capital bulks up secondary deals and fundraising teams
   
• Big tech braces for tariff-induced advertising slowdown
   
• Trump 2.0 era brings flurry of crypto deals

This newsletter was compiled by Marc Vartabedian and Zachary Cole.

WSJ Pro Venture Capital is a premium service of The Wall Street Journal. We cover venture capital and the global startup ecosystem. Share your tips, comments and questions: vcnews@wsj.com

The Team: Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova, Brian Gormley, Angus Loten and Marc Vartabedian.

Follow us on X: @wsjvc