Crunchbase

Amid fierce competition for an edge in the AI race, well-funded startups commonly find it’s simply faster to buy another company than try to build out certain technologies themselves.

The traditional VC model funds a risky search for product-market fit, argues guest author Richard de Silva of Lateral Investment Management, while bootstrapped founders typically start with known customer problems, prioritize profitability and grow steadily from revenue rather than outside capital.

The market for private-company shares has become a much bigger part of the startup ecosystem. In this Crunchbase News Q&A, EquityZen co-founder Phil Haslett discusses why startups are offering employees and investors liquidity earlier, and why secondary prices can be more revealing than headline valuations.

In the past two years, venture investors have poured more than $7 billion into legal and legal tech startups, most with an AI focus. Funding to the space hit a record level last year, with $4.6 billion invested, per Crunchbase data. So far this year, legal tech startups have pulled in more than $2.2 billion.

In the fourth of a series of articles about non-tech founders getting venture funding, we talk to Craft CEO Ilya Levtov, a Julliard-trained cellist who says he was able to launch his supply chain intelligence software company despite having never written a single line of code.

Identity verification and fraud prevention company Socure announced Thursday that it raised $156 million in a strategic growth investment valuing it at $5.2 billion. The Incline Village, Nevada-based company also says it is acquiring agentic AI startup Fravity, which will be incorporated into its RiskOS platform as RiskOS_Agents.

So far this year, a record $20.3 billion in global seed- through growth-stage funding has gone to companies in space- and satellite-related sectors, per Crunchbase data. That's already by far the highest annual tally on record, and we've still got four months left in 2026.

Most of this week’s largest funding recipients were AI-focused startups, with Instinct, a developer of AI assistants, pulling in the biggest round.

While the AI boom has disrupted funding patterns across the startup sphere, biotech has remained a rare steady sector for investment.

But startup investors haven't abandoned the sector, either, Crunchbase data shows. Instead, they're being more selective about their bets and putting more money into companies using AI and other technology to make construction, property operations and real estate transactions faster and less expensive.