💡 Figma’s $19.3B IPO, GitHub hits 20M users, and the Voice-Bot VC revolution
Inside/VC Weekly #28
Good morning!
Welcome to another Inside/VC edition. This issue takes 5 minutes to read.
Only got 20 secs? Here’s what matters most this week:Let’s get into it.
Weekly Spotlight:
$19.3B Figma IPO melts Wall Street (🇺🇸)
On Thursday Figma hit the New York Stock Exchange like a rocket. Priced at 33 dollars, the stock opened at 85 and closed the day at 115. That’s a 250% jump in less than eight hours.
Valuation? Around 68 billion. That’s more than Atlassian, almost as much as Spotify, and miles ahead of what Adobe offered before regulators stepped in and killed the deal.
The IPO was 40 times oversubscribed. Index Ventures turned $100 million into $7.2 billion. That’s 72x. Greylock hit 134x. Kleiner Perkins made 6 billion off a $90 million bet. Sequoia? A casual 3.8 billion on the side.
This was one of the cleanest multi-billion exits the Valley has seen in years. Founder Dylan Field sold shares worth over 800 million. And he’s still holding plenty.
Not bad for a guy whose first product was a multiplayer whiteboard. Figma just became the biggest tech IPO since Rivian. Design is finally cool again. Read more
Inside/VC Shorts
🚀 Startup Shorts:
GitHub Copilot cracks 20 million users (🇺🇸)
GitHub Copilot just crossed 20 million users. That’s five million new devs in the last three months alone. Quietly, it’s become one of Microsoft’s fastest growing products.
No word on daily use, but 90 percent of Fortune 100s have signed on. Revenue? Higher than GitHub’s entire business when Microsoft bought it in 2018.
Cursor is trying to chase (they’re already at 500 million in ARR), but GitHub owns the playground. And now it owns the players. Read more
Shoutout to Synaptic – they helped me pull data on the Indian VCs for the list. If you’re sourcing, tracking, or just curious about who’s deploying capital in Europe, their platform’s worth a look.
Women VCs are rising, slowly but surely (🌏)
In 2018, less than 10 percent of leadership roles in VC were held by women. Today it’s 18.6. Still low, but it doubled in seven years. Progress, but not a parade.
A quarter of female VCs got promoted last year. 75 % of firms say they actively look to back underrepresented founders. Whether that’s action or signaling is still up for debate.
Mega-funds remain mostly boys' clubs. But over 100 women-led firms launched in the last decade, and 180 raised a total of 5.3 billion in 2023 alone. Just last week, Germany’s Auxxo announced the first close of its Female Catalyst Fund II at €26 million.
The best part? More women aren’t waiting around. They’re raising their own funds, picking their own deals and setting new terms. Quietly leading change. Read more
When life gives you memes: Astronomer flips PR disaster into viral win (🇺🇸)
After its CEO got caught on a Coldplay Kiss Cam, wrapped around his HR chief, not his wife, US startup Astronomer went into full meltdown mode.
But instead of going quiet, they went Maximum Effort. Literally. In a pretty cool PR move, Astronomer dropped a promo starring Gwyneth Paltrow (Chris Martin’s ex) pitching their software and next event. The result? 36 million views on X, press coverage galore, and brand awareness money can't buy. Read more
TikTok and Instagram flood your feed with fake videos (🇪🇺)
A new study shows 25% of top videos on TikTok about politics or history are AI-generated. On Instagram, it’s around 5%. Most of them have no label.
Many clips look like real interviews or security footage. They cover wars, elections, global events. They may feel real, but they aren’t.
Platforms say they ask for disclosure. But in half the TikTok videos analyzed, no label was shown. On Instagram, only a quarter were marked.
The result is a feed full of stories you can’t verify. And over time, people stop caring whether anything’s true at all. Might be a good time to finally stop scrolling. Read more
First VC replaces intro calls with a bot (🇩🇪)
Heal Capital just became the first VC to scrap intro calls entirely. No Zoom & calendar Tetris - only a voice bot!
Founders upload their deck, then get ten minutes to pitch to an AI assistant. It asks questions, explains Heal’s investment focus, and sends a summary to the team. If they like what they read, you move on.
Since launch, the bot has handled more pitches than a full-time analyst could in months. It doesn’t small talk. It doesn’t judge your hoodie. But it listens (Which most VCs probably should do more often…).
Other VCs call it cold. Founders call it fast. And Lucas Mittelmeier, the partner behind it, calls it “just the beginning”. Read more
💸 Fundraising Shorts:
Anthropic nears $170B valuation (🇺🇸)
Anthropic is closing a fresh round between $3 and $5 billion, led by Iconiq. The new valuation? $170 billion. That’s nearly triple what they were worth six months ago. Faster than Stripe, hotter than Figma, and still fully private.
Also in the mix: state funds from Singapore and Qatar. Even CEO Dario Amodei isn’t thrilled, but scaling takes some cash. Read more
OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation (🇺🇸)
Dragoneer just led an $8.3 billion round into OpenAI, pushing the company’s valuation to $300 billion. The raise came months ahead of schedule. Demand was off the charts (Even Blackstone jumped in). SoftBank backed off, but enterprise revenue soared. Five million business users now pay monthly. Cash burn? Eight billion this year alone. Read More
CRV pulls in $750M for early-stage bets (🇺🇸)
CRV has raised $750 million for its twentieth fund. That’s half the size of the last one. No growth fund this time, no follow-ons.
The firm returned $275 million to LPs last year and decided to focus on earlier plays where returns still hit. LPs didn’t mind. The fund was raised in just four weeks, with demand far above the cap.
CRV wants the next DoorDash, Mercury, or Vercel. Seed and Series A only. Read More
🧑💻 Career Corner: Hot VC Internships (only US + GER this week)Internships
🇺🇸 Stepstone Group - 2026 Venture Capital Summer Associate (Baltimore) ➤ Job desc.
🇺🇸 Avondale Insurtech Ventures - Venture Capital Intern (Chicago) ➤ Job desc.
🇺🇸 NAVER U.Hub - VC Intern (Redwood City) ➤ Job desc.
🇩🇪 First Momentum Ventures - VC Investment Intern (Munich) ➤ Job desc.
🇩🇪 Mätch VC - DeepTech Visiting Analyst (Stuttgart) ➤ Job desc.
🇩🇪 HTGF - Investment Team Intern (Berlin) ➤ Job desc.
🇩🇪 b2Venture - Venture Capital Intern (Berlin) ➤ Job desc.
🇩🇪 Realyze Venture - VC Intern (Cologne) ➤ Job desc.
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