📖 Venture Chronicles - October 2025
Overlooked #207
Hi, it’s Alex from 20VC. I’m investing in seed & series A European vertical solutions (vSol) which are industry specific solutions aiming to become industry OS and combining dynamics from SaaS, marketplaces and fintechs. Overlooked is a weekly newsletter about venture capital and vSol. Today, I’m sharing the most insightful tech news of October.
I curated updates and insights around three themes:
Vertical Software
General Venture Capital
Entropy - other news and personal topics of interest
Vertical Software
EvenUp raised a $150m series E at a $2bn valuation led by Bessemer. It’s an AI platform helping personal injury lawyers with document generation as well as with case and negotiation preparation. It’s processing 10k cases per week (2x in 6 months). - Crunchbase, EvenUp, Bessemer
“To date, EvenUp has helped resolve more than 200,000 cases, securing over $10 billion in damages for injury victims. Today, over 2,000 firms—including 20% of the Top 100 U.S. personal injury firms—depend on EvenUp’s platform. With ARR doubling year-over-year, EvenUp is establishing itself as the AI platform of choice for modern PI law.”
“EvenUp’s newest AI products, launched earlier this year, are fueling rapid adoption and now account for nearly 90% of new sales—clear proof that product velocity is driving the company’s growth. These solutions support the entire case lifecycle, from generating any document a firm needs to surfacing insights that help cases settle faster and achieve better outcomes.”
“Building on that momentum, EvenUp today unveiled Mirror Mode, the first-of-its-kind AI tool that allows firms to replicate their best work across all of their document-based workflows. By uploading a winning draft, firms can instantly generate tailored versions that mirror its language, style, and structure—delivering personalization at scale and ensuring every case begins from its strongest foundation.”
“The company began by solving critical pain points in document creation, starting with demand letters that accurately reflect case value, then expanding to medical chronologies and other essential legal documents. […] But the documents were just the beginning. These early products earned the team something invaluable: the trust of law firms and insight into how legal work actually gets done. EvenUp then expanded into a full Claims Intelligence Platform, proactively drafting, reviewing, and strategizing across the entire case lifecycle.”
OpenEvidence raised $200m at a $6bn valuation led by GV with the participation of investors including Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Blackstone, Thrive, and Coatue. It’s a “ChatGPT for doctors.” Trained on medical journals it handles 15m clinical consultations/month across 10k medical centers and monetizes via ads to verified medical professionals. Founded in 2022 by Daniel Nadler and Zachary Ziegler, the company plans to use the funds for more computing/training resources and marketing, targeting $100m in ad revenue next year. - NYT, Coatue
“The company’s tool is free to use for verified medical professionals and is supported by advertising.”
“1/3 of all U.S. doctors at more than 10,000 care centers nationwide are already using OpenEvidence as of June 2025.”
In October, Harvey raised a $150m round led by a16z at a $8bn valuation following (1) a $300m series E done in June at a $5bn valuation co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue and a (2) €50m investment from EQT Growth also in October to accelerate its expansion into Europe and Asia. - Forbes, Winston Weinberg
“Harvey’s cofounder and CEO Winston Weinberg told CNBC in August that the company was generating more than $100m ARR.”
Harvey also disclosed a 98% GRR, 167% NDR and 77% seat utilisation showing strong product market fit.
After 12 years since its founding, Doctolib has become profitable. In 2024, Doctolib reported €438m in ARR growing 22.5% YoY while burning €53.8m. Doctolib also launched a medical assistant tool for parents of young children. - ABC Bourse, BFM
Doctolib is developing a new AI-powered assistant to provide patients with “expertise, autonomy, advice, support, and prevention” on a 24/7 basis. It will be trained on French medical knowledge by French professionals and researchers, explicitly respecting the established French care pathway and the central roles of general practitioners, pharmacists, and nurses. The service will first launch for the 9 million parents using Doctolib, offering features like: (1) tracking the health and development of a child, (2) sharing this data with pediatricians and other caregivers and (3) receiving tailored advice on sleep, nutrition, and neurodevelopment. The assistant will become progressively available to all French patients during 2026. The majority of the AI assistant’s services will be free. Users who want “unlimited” access or specialized programs can opt for a paid subscription, a model compared to ChatGPT.
Dave Kellog published a presentation on the differences between selling work and selling software. - Dave Kellog
Vertical solutions are converging in multiple industries towards single platforms combining SaaS, financial services and AI workflows. - Illuminate
Business Breakdown published a podcast episode on Cadence which is a design software for the semi conductor industry. It does $3bn in annual revenues with a 13% 3-year revenue CAGR, 35% of sales spent in R&D and 30%+ operating margins. - Business Breakdown
Cadence Design Systems operates at the heart of the $550bn semiconductor industry. As one of two dominant players in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) market, Cadence provides the mission-critical software that engineers at companies like Apple, Nvidia, and Google use to design microchips. The EDA market, valued at approximately $10bn, serves as a small but indispensable “tax” on the entire digital economy, which is built upon the continuous advancement of semiconductor technology.
Under the leadership of CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took the helm in 2008, Cadence shifted from a volatile, transactional sales model to a highly predictable, three-year subscription model.
Unlike the broader semiconductor industry, Cadence’s revenue shows minimal cyclicality, as its customers view R&D spending on chip design as the last budget to be cut.
Key growth drivers include the proliferation of “systems companies” (like Amazon and Tesla) designing their own custom silicon, the ever-increasing complexity of chips driven by Moore’s Law, and the expansion into adjacent high-growth areas like design IP and hardware emulation.
Designing a modern chip is akin to creating a blueprint for a house with 60 billion rooms, where each room is one-ten-thousandth the width of a human hair.
Large tech platforms are increasingly designing their own custom silicon to optimize performance. Apple was an early mover, and now 8 of the 10 most valuable companies in the world design their own chips.
The EDA market is a stable duopoly. The market is dominated by Cadence and Synopsys. A third player, Mentor Graphics, was acquired by Siemens in 2015 and is less visible. In the long term, the market can be threatened by China’s companies trying to develop homegrown EDA software to reduce their dependency to the West as well as tech giants open-sourcing certain tools they’ve build to design their chips.
Cadence has effectively zero churn. A customer only stops using the tools if they go out of business.
General Venture
Colossus published a great portrait of Josh Kushner who founded Thrive Capital. - Colossus
“In 2010, Thrive’s first fund was $5 million, and included companies like Kickstarter and GroupMe; by 2023, its eighth fund was $3.3 billion, including a maniacally concentrated $2 billion investment in Stripe at a $50 billion valuation, and a $150 million check to OpenAI at a $29 billion valuation.”
“Along the way, Thrive’s bets on Instagram, Spotify, Warby Parker, Skims, GitHub, Slack, Robinhood and other companies had become conspicuous for being prescient, aesthetic, and exquisitely timed (among its mostly vindicated admirers), or for being absurdly priced, momentum-chasing, and too highly concentrated in dysfunctional businesses with unproven returns (among increasingly sheepish critics).”
“it was a stage-, geography-, and sector-agnostic venture firm that would concentrate all its investments in a very small number of companies; that it was not only an investment firm but also itself a company; that it incubated its own companies as well as invested in others; and that it didn’t just invest and incubate but functioned as a service provider, product creator, and embedded operational commando unit for founders.”
“As a child, I was surrounded by the impossible. Just this group of people who came from the ashes and built a beautiful life.”
“Kushner was a freshman at Harvard when, in the fall of 2004, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out to work full-time on his company, TheFacebook.com. Initially a major in government, Kushner became part of the wave of students who started companies in their dorms. His junior year he started Vostu, a social network for users in Latin America. After graduating, he took a job buying distressed debt at Goldman Sachs, then went back to Harvard for his MBA, all of which confirmed his suspicion that he liked building companies and disliked banking and school.”
“Kushner said that he wanted to start two new companies, Oscar Health and Thrive Capital, and didn’t want to also remain a student just to mail it in. “Anybody who’s crazy enough to think they can start two companies at the same time is already doing one thing too many.””
“I went to the HBS library, and sure enough it was empty except for one person. It was Josh. He was working on Thrive and Oscar, and we connected and chatted about this idea of building as well as investing, which has always been part of our DNA.”
“They discussed how the internet, software, data, and design seemed to be transforming nearly every industry except for healthcare, perhaps the most important sector to consumers from both a human and financial standpoint, and which in any case accounts for nearly a fifth of US GDP.”
“Kushner, with no prior experience in health insurance, built a company that by 2025 had 1.8 million members and $12 billion in revenue.”
“Part of the answer can be found in Thrive, which Kushner started at the same time as Oscar, when he was 24.”
“Josh was told he’d need to convince Joel Cutler, the startup’s main backer at venture firm General Catalyst. After meeting Kushner, Cutler gave him $1 million to seed Thrive.”
“Kushner pitched him on his seemingly unwieldy idea for Thrive: an opportunistic vehicle agnostic to stage, sector, or geography, which viewed itself as an enabling technology for the world it wished to see, and which had the capacity to not just invest in companies but to build them.”
“The idea of having a fund that could build companies, invest in companies, invest in them early or late, and inside or outside the US, it was just deeply unconventional.”
“He decides to seed Thrive with $10 million, and then another $30 million shows up, and before you know it we have $40 million for our first institutional fund.”
“Between Kushner’s initial vision in 2010 and Thrive’s ninth fund, which closed in August 2024, the firm made good on its promise of making very large, very infrequent investments in a very small number of companies—a portfolio featuring a dizzying ratio of misses to hits, the latter including Instagram, Twitch, Stripe, GitHub, Slack, Robinhood, Hims, Skims, Anduril, OpenAI, Wiz, A24, Databricks, Cursor, and Isomorphic Labs, with Thrive partners on the boards of many. By 2024, the firm reportedly managed $25 billion in assets.”
“Many of Thrive’s earliest victories bear Kushner’s distinct imprint, such as its early $12 million investment in a growth round of Instagram, 72 hours before Facebook acquired the company for double its $500 million valuation—a ruthlessly competitive allocation the nascent Thrive only won as a result of Instagram founder Kevin Systrom’s belief that Kushner was harder working and more independently minded than other, much larger VCs fighting to get in.”
“There was the 2012, $6 million investment in a growth round of the Stockholm-based Spotify out of a $150 million fund, an allocation Kushner had regarded as a favor until learning, nearly a decade later, that Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, was in need of exactly $6 million to close the round.”
“Many spoke of their recruitment, a nine-month courtship that ended with them suddenly working at Thrive without quite knowing when it had become official.”
“They make investment and most other decisions as a team, and that no individual name gets attributed to any deal.”
“Grimshaw became Thrive’s best “bottom-up” thinker—the one who likes scraping company websites, court documents, and obscure historical investment memos in his free time—helping build up, among other things, its portfolio of developer tools.”
“In early 2015, when Grimshaw was 23, he saw GitHub as a potential crown jewel in the portfolio, and began pushing it at an 11pm investment meeting.”
“By mid-year, they’d decided to invest 7% of Thrive’s $400 million fund into the company. Shortly after they wired the money, Chris Wanstrath, GitHub’s founder and CEO, fired the CFO, head of product, and head of marketing in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal. The immediate consensus in Silicon Valley was that the company was not just a slow grower but a dysfunctional dumpster fire and not going to make it. Thrive’s phones were ringing off the hook with LPs asking if 7% of the fund was going to zero.”
“Thrive immediately dispatched Mallick to GitHub, which no longer had a CFO, head of product, or head of marketing, but still needed to finalize its budget, set up analytics, and operationalize its go-to-market strategy. During his first nine months at Thrive, Mallick flew back and forth between New Jersey and San Francisco and effectively served as GitHub’s interim CFO.”
“In the process of setting up its analytics and finalizing its budget, Mallick had more of a front-row seat to GitHub’s business than anyone, and concluded that despite its recent troubles, the company wasn’t just growing but that the growth rate was accelerating. Less than a year prior, Thrive had bought shares of GitHub at a $2 billion valuation; after Mallick’s time embedded with the company, they invested another $120 million across two tranches at a 25% discount.”
“We’d already been investors in Stripe since 2014, we knew the business really well. But that was how the largest check we’d ever written started. It was nearly $2 billion, and we helped them raise another $5 billion”
“Zaki helped realize Thrive’s early aspiration to be sector- and geography-agnostic, demonstrated by investments like Nubank and Robinhood, and the three unicorns he co-founded and incubated at the firm: Cadence, Rightway, and Cedar.”
“The idea that you could make money backing a new brokerage, bank, credit card company, or health insurance company was a foreign concept. We were early to the idea that tech wasn’t this sector isolated from commerce and services.”
“By 2023, Stripe’s earliest employee options were approaching expiration; if the company didn’t raise several billion dollars or go public, its employees would face a tax bill to the tune of $2–3 billion in ordinary income taxes on $5 billion worth of shares.”
“Over dinner in Paris, Kushner and Hankes asked Collison to lay out his conundrum. When he explained the quantum of capital Stripe needed in order to avoid going public—something approaching $7 billion—Kushner and Hankes said they’d anchor the round with nearly $2 billion from Thrive and its LPs, then help raise the rest. Shortly after, Kushner and Zaki flew to Patrick Collison’s home with the term sheet, which Hankes referred to as one of Thrive’s “formative investments.””
“We’re never out there talking our own book,” Hankes said of also having to raise the extra $5 billion. “We do our own work, we get to know the team really well, we have our own conviction, and we invest and do our own thing. But this time, we had to go pitch all these investors to raise several billions of capital.”
“John Collison’s response was decisive: he took over as CFO, and within 12 months brought Stripe from break-even to nearly 20% margins. “John in that period was founder mode before founder mode.””
“Thrive’s bet paid off quickly. After burning cash and growing slowly throughout 2022, Stripe cut costs and grew over 25% in 2023; secondary shares that were trading at $50 billion started trading at $65 billion. By September 2025, Stripe was valued at $107 billion.”
“After quickly deciding they wanted to invest [in Wiz], Kushner and Clark flew to Israel 48 hours later. Due to active hostilities in the country, including ballistic missile attacks on Tel Aviv, the country’s airspace was closed, which required them to fly to Paris, then Cyprus, then take a puddle hopper to Tel Aviv. Arriving at 7pm, they went directly to a four-hour meeting with Rappaport and his co-founder, where they agreed on a deal.”
“There were no other venture investors in Tel Aviv at the time, because why would you go to a war zone?” Clark remembered. “But our viewpoint was if our founders are there, we should be there, so that’s where we’re going. Josh always had a line to me when I joined Thrive, which is that the people who win deals are the ones who want to win them most. The deal resulted in a $1 billion stake for Thrive after leading Wiz’s final two rounds—one at a $12 billion valuation, the other at $16 billion in an employee tender—before the company was acquired by Google, a year later, for $32 billion.”
Coatue released a presentation outlining its public market views. - Coatue
Dan Gray at Equidam wrote a great post arguing that early stage venture investors should build much more diversified portfolio (50+ investments) than what they usually do (20-30 investments). - Dan Gray
“Diversified fund beats the concentrated fund on all outcomes except the 95th-percentile. Importantly, it’s significantly more likely to deliver >2x and >3x, which means the GPs are able to raise a successor fund — offering the chance to learn and refine. There is no room for error with a more concentrated fund. Failure is a hard landing.”
“I looked at our top 20 funds by TVPI. What’s the common theme amongst the 3x net funds in our portfolio? 85% of them had at least one company that could return the fund. If we verge towards generous and assume a 2% hit rate (you don’t necessarily need a unicorn to return a smaller fund), the conclusion should be that seed managers should probably target at least 50 investments, to optimise for at least one unicorn. However, the ‘rule of thumb’ (surprising lack of data here) for a right-sized seed portfolio seems to be 25-30 investments per fund.”
“A strategy of picking makes sense in PE, where there’s a ~60% chance of success from an individual investment. It does not make sense in venture capital, unless you are able to repeatedly and reliably demonstrate an ability to exceed the usual hit rate.”
“A larger portfolio, with less concentration, might make it less likely that you land a top 5% fund outcome, but it makes it much more likely that you’ll do well enough to survive and raise again.”
Momentum is not a moat. As an early stage company, you don’t have moats but you have momentum creating opportunities to build long term moats. - Alex Immerman
“Momentum is the Boat, not the moat. It is what gets you to the island where you can build a fortress. At the earliest stages, there are no moats. Momentum earns you the ability to build moats.”
“The classics have not changed in the ChatGPT era. Switching costs, network effects, economies of scale, brand, and proprietary data were sources of defensibility before and they remain so now.”
“The classics have not changed in the ChatGPT era. Switching costs, network effects, economies of scale, brand, and proprietary data were sources of defensibility before and they remain so now.”
“It’s becoming gospel that speed is all that matters and the meme of the week was whether or not momentum is a moat (hint: it’s obviously not).”
“Most of the time when people talk about momentum what they really mean is velocity (raw speed or distance covered per time). The difference between momentum and speed is mass. You can move really quickly but without mass/without doing something important, you only have velocity. True momentum requires heavy work on an important story. Speed alone doesn’t matter”
Nathan Benaich at Airstreet published its annual State of AI Report. - Nathan Benaich
Forerunner shared a report on prosumer companies. It highlights the emergence of a new wave of prosumer applications including ChatGPT and Cursor that are AI native and that have a usage based model. - Forerunner
Amazon’s cloud unit AWS, long the industry leader, is showing strain as rivals like Microsoft and Google gain ground in AI. - Bloomberg
“Three years into an AI boom spawned by OpenAI’s revolutionary ChatGPT, AWS is widely perceived as trailing its tech peers in AI. While AWS remains the cloud market leader, Microsoft Corp. is now growing its backlog of corporate sales faster than Amazon, a trend that recently favored AWS. Last year, according to a Gartner Inc. estimate, Amazon’s cloud division captured 38% of corporate spending on cloud infrastructure services. That sounds hefty until you consider that Amazon’s cloud division held almost half of that market as recently as 2018.”
“It’s creating some new competitive pressure that they didn’t have before.”
“AWS employees also have raised the alarm that Amazon is losing its status as the default place for software startups to build their products, according to two people familiar with the company’s deliberations.”
The Economist published a study showing that AI is beginning to affect employment among junior workers. - The Economist
“Research by Yale University’s Budget Lab, published in October, finds no large shift in the kinds of jobs people do since the debut of ChatGPT, a popular chatbot, in late 2022.”
“While junior roles fell across the board after 2023, the decline over the next six quarters was 7.7% steeper at AI adopter firms. No such gap appeared in senior hiring”
Aleksandr Yampolskiy shared his learnings from scaling SecurityScorecard to hundreds of millions in ARR. SecurityScorecard is a security rating company used by 3k enterprise customers including 70% of Fortune 100 customers. - Aleksandr Yampolskiy
“Great systems beat great people. […] What truly scales is systems and playbooks. Documented wikis, checklists, even short videos that let a B+ team deliver A+ results.”
“When in doubt, go see a customer. […] Learn from your best customers (why they renew year after year) and use those insights to turn average customers into great ones.”
“Market matters most. You can have an A+ team, enough capital, and a great product. But if you’re in a stagnant market, growth will be painfully slow. In a fast-growing market, even mediocre teams and products can build big companies. So if your market isn’t moving fast enough, pivot to an adjacent one that is.”
BoxGroup raised $550m across two new funds. The two funds consist of a core seed vehicle (the firm’s 7th) and an opportunity fund (the firm’s 4th) each roughly $275m. - Fortune
“The secret has been to serve as the Switzerland of VC. Many of the industry’s top outfits gain their reputations from leading monster deals or jockeying for board seats at Silicon Valley’s hottest startups. But BoxGroup’s lane has long been to join a dizzying number of early-stage rounds, allowing the firm to take smaller positions while working hand-in-hand with other firms. The approach has created an enviable portfolio consisting of a murderers’ row of companies from the past decade-plus: Ramp, Stripe, Plaid, Cursor, Airtable, Oscar, and the list goes on.”
“The fresh $550 million is split across two funds: an early-stage vehicle, BoxGroup Seven, and an opportunity fund for follow-on investments called BoxGroup Leaven.”
“Tisch expects to make between 120 and 180 deals out of its newest core fund, and between 20 and 40 out of its opportunity fund.”
Figma acquired Weave for over $200m. Weave is a Israël-based startup founded in 2024 that built a platform leveraging generative AI (image & video) in a visual and node-based workspace to generate marketing and creative assets. Weavy had a very small team (around 20 employees) and had raised only $4m in seed funding from Entrée Capital before the exit. With this acquisition, Figma keeps expanding its platform beyond UX/UI product design adding AI-based media generation. - Figma, C-Tech
“Figma has acquired Weavy, a platform that brings generative AI and professional editing tools into the open canvas. As Figma Weave, the company will help build out image, video, animation, motion design, and VFX media generation and editing capability on the Figma platform.”
“Weavy brings the world’s leading AI models together with professional editing tools on a single, browser-based canvas. With Weavy, you can choose the model you want for a task (e.g. Seedance, Sora, and Veo for cinematic video; Flux and Ideogram for realism; and Nano-Banana or Seedream for precision) and compose powerful primitives using generative AI outputs and hands-on edits (e.g. adjusting lighting, masking an object, color grading a shot).”
“This node-based approach brings a new level of craft and control to AI generation. Outputs can be branched, remixed, and refined, combining creative exploration with precision and craft.”
“Weavy’s technology is expected to strengthen Figma’s AI capabilities. The startup has developed and is already selling a platform that integrates access to video models with advanced video editing tools.”
“Weavy began selling its product just four months ago and, according to Avi Eyal, founding partner at Entrée Capital, has already reached several million dollars in revenue.”
Fivetran and dbt Labs are merging in an all stock deal. Fivetran was known for its data ingestion capabilities while dbt was focused on data transformation. The combined entity is generating close to $600m in annual revenues. Fivetran’s CEO will become CEO of the combined entity. - Tom Tunguz
“Fivetran was last publicly valued at $5.6 billion in September 2021, while dbt Labs was valued at $4.2 billion in a Series D round in February 2022. The companies share some investors, including Andreessen Horowitz.”
“The transaction, which unites two highly valued venture-backed startups, marks significant consolidation in the data tooling market as enterprises race to adapt infrastructure for artificial intelligence applications, which require organized access to internal data.”
“Fraser estimated that 80% to 90% of Fivetran’s customers use dbt’s tools.”
“The beauty of the modern data stack was the explosion in choice. As the cloud exploded onto the scene, the legacy data warehouse was replaced by a collection of fast-moving platforms. In that era, specialization won. The pendulum is now swinging back towards consolidation. Why? The answer lies in compute economics & revenue scale asymmetry.”
“Compute represents 72% of the overall market ($7.6B of $10.6B for compute + transformation + ingestion).” “Ingestion: Informatica ($1.64B FY2024), Fivetran ($300M est.), Talend ($350M), others ($200M est.). Transformation: dbt Labs ($300M est.), others ($200M est.). Compute: Snowflake ($3.6B FY2025), Databricks ($4.0B ARR Aug 2025).”
“The Fivetran-dbt merger is an inevitable evolution of a maturing market. Two unicorns must partner to compete against two decacorns. They solve two of the three customer problems. But not yet compute.”
Deel raised a $300m series E at a $17.3bn valuation led by Ribbit, a16z and Coatue. - Deel, Techcrunch
“Earlier this year, we surpassed $1bn in ARR [only six years after inception]. In September, we marked three consecutive years of profitability and a major milestone - our first $100m revenue month.”
“Deel processes $22 billion in payroll annually, and serves 35,000+ customers and 1.5+ million workers in 150+ countries. With our Series E, we’ll double down on expanding our infrastructure, advancing AI-powered payroll and HR products, and laying the foundation to serve 100 million employees worldwide.”
“Start with the hardest problem. No HR company was built with a truly global mindset. Most begin in one country, then expand using a patchwork of third parties. We built Deel to be global from the onset and as we grew, we invested in owning our infrastructure. That decision became a unique competitive advantage and a powerful growth accelerator.”
“We’re building the world’s first global payroll processing engine which is live in 55+ countries, including the US, Canada, Singapore, South Africa, and Brazil. We own 250+ legal entities, hold financial licenses in the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU, and are on track to reach real-time native payroll processing in 100+ countries by 2029.”
“We’ve seen a 480% increase in customers using three or more products and a 1,200% increase in those using four or more.”
Entropy
Running app Strava is planning to go public. It raised its previous round at a $2.2bn valuation in May 2025. - FT
“Strava plans to launch an initial public offering in the US as the leading exercise-tracking app seeks to raise capital for more acquisitions amid a surge in the number of people taking up long distance running on both sides of the Atlantic.”
“Strava, which launched in 2009, has grown rapidly since the pandemic, when it exploded in popularity by combining social networking with fitness. Users can record and share their workouts, give “kudos” to friends — similar to hitting Facebook’s “like” button — and compare their performance with both peers and elite athletes.”
“The exercise tracker had an average of 50m monthly active users in 2025, close to double that of its closest rival, Garmin Connect, according to market intelligence group Sensor Tower. Downloads in the year to September were up around 80 per cent on the same period in 2024.”
“More than 1.1m people applied to run the 2026 London Marathon, a 31% on last year, and the organisers of the New York City Marathon said in March that applications had grown by 22 per cent to more than 200,000.”
“In the year to September, consumers spent more than $180m on Strava Premium, which costs $11.99 a month or $79.99 per year. Strava declined to provide figures but said the amount was “far greater” than the estimate. The company also makes money through sponsored challenges and brand partnerships.”
“Strava has acquired rivals to add features to its app. This year it bought Runna, a UK-based coaching app, and cycling training platform called The Breakaway — two purchases that “resolved a big weakness for Strava, which was its lack of personalised training plans.””
“Garmin had threatened to cut off access to its software from the beginning of next month unless Strava complies with new developer guidelines. These require it to display Garmin’s logo on activities recorded using its devices.”
“Strava is now almost as important to running as shoes.”
Amazon wants to replace over 500k jobs in the US with robots by 2033. Long term, it targets automation of 75% of its warehouse operations. - NYT
“Amazon’s plans could have profound impact on blue-collar jobs throughout the country and serve as a model for other companies like Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, and UPS. The company transformed the U.S. work force as it created a booming demand for warehousing and delivery jobs. But now, as it leads the way for automation, those roles could become more technical, higher paid and more scarce.”
“If the plans pan out, one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.”
“Amazon opened its most advanced warehouse, a facility in Shreveport, La., last year as a template for future robotic fulfillment centers. Once an item there is in a package, a human barely touches it again. The company uses a thousand robots in Shreveport, allowing it to employ a quarter fewer workers last year than it would have without automation, documents show. Next year, as more robots are introduced, it expects to employ about half as many workers there as it would without automation. […] Amazon plans to copy the Shreveport design in about 40 facilities by the end of 2027.”
Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, over 230 European defence start-ups have emerged and captured $1.5bn in VC funding in 2025. Investors now warn of a defence-tech “hype cycle,” especially in drones, with inflated valuations and limited battlefield readiness. - FT
“More than 230 defence tech start-ups have been founded in Europe since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, including 52 this year.” “Venture capital investment in European defence tech has similarly jumped, reaching $1.5bn in the most active year yet.”
“Investors said a shake-out was inevitable, especially in the crowded area of drones where some estimates put the number of start-ups at more than 500. Valuations, too, have been driven up as investors have piled into financing rounds, despite many companies still being years away from delivering battle-ready capabilities.”
“Torsten Reil, co-founder and co-chief executive of start-up Helsing, said when the company started, “there was a lot of ‘intellectual laziness’ among European VCs who had the attitude that we do not want to touch defence. Now everyone wants to get into defence and we have the same level of intellectual laziness.””
“Khaled Helioui, a partner at VC firm Plural and an early investor in Helsing, said “you will have people waking up to poor returns — but that is OK, venture has always worked this way”. As long as “there are one, two, three, four or five [companies] that become category defining . . . this industry will not have any shortage of capital coming to it”, he added.”
Bessemer published a deep-dive on the European defense sector. - Bessemer
“European NATO members have consistently under-invested in defence, falling short of the 2% GDP target that is now racing toward 3.5% by 2030—representing a €970bn annual commitment by European nations.”
“Defence technology represents the single largest growth opportunity in Europe today—and is on track to become Europe’s largest sector, fueled by an estimated 3.4x increase in spending over the next six years.”
“European governments are accelerating defence procurement from mission-oriented founders, validating companies that combine deep military expertise with scalable AI- and software-driven solutions.”
“Five core investment domains will define future resilience:
physical autonomy,
aerial defence,
command and control,
space sovereignty,
and advanced industrial manufacturing, including additive and autonomous production and critical materials independence.”
“The opportunity lies in AI-powered command & control systems that unify the battlespace. By automatically correlating data from diverse sources, applying historical threat patterns and geographic context, and generating real-time risk assessments, these systems can present commanders with intelligent, prioritized recommendations—whether deploying reconnaissance drones, repositioning defensive assets, or initiating countermeasures.”
Thanks to Julia for the feedback! 🦒 Thanks for reading! See you next week for another issue! 👋
Love this!