On Monday, while tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sat on stage for President Donald Trump’s inauguration, dozens of founders were at parties all across DC, trying to get an audience with the new president’s inner circle.
To hear them tell it, it wasn’t all that hard. Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor spent the weekend party hopping, rubbing shoulders with Sean Spicer or conservative podcaster Jordan Peterson. Taylor’s company wants to use nuclear power to generate synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. He even scored three separate invites to Mar-A-Lago in the last month by sending a two-page document on changes he’d like to see to nuclear regulations to anyone he knew with DC connections. “People are like, ‘please tell me, how do we fix this? We need to build things again,’” he said of the administration.
His story was surprisingly common. All throughout America’s capital, founders enjoyed the fruits of their industry’s political jockeying. They watched Snoop Dogg at David Sacks’ Crypto Ball, attended a wee-hours crypto rave sponsored by the Milady NFT group, and dressed up for a “Coronation Ball” hosted by a publishing company associated with Curtis Yarvin, the controversial thought leader cited by both Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
Tyler Sweatt, CEO of defense tech startup Second Front Systems, said a huge frustration he’s had with the federal government has been bureaucratic opacity. Founders often can’t even figure out who to contact in the government, much less secure a huge contract.
But Sweatt left events like the vice presidential dinner and Trump’s pre-inauguration candlelight dinner feeling like the country might be entering a rare moment where the federal government, big tech and the startup ecosystem are aligned — and where the shroud surrounding the government’s inner workings might be lifted. “Apolitically, that’s pretty freaking interesting for what could we do as a country,” he said.
At a watch party hosted by conservative organization American Moment, the congressional staffers wore suits with red ties and tech workers wore sneakers. Jacob Martin, general partner of crypto fund 2 Punks Capital and co-founder of gaming guild Ready Player DAO kept watching for news that Trump had immediately pardoned Silk Road’s infamous founder Ross Ulbricht, currently serving life in prison. He did not, despite having promised to do so at a Libertarian convention in May.
Martin also lamented missing his chance to buy the Trump meme coin when it launched at Sacks’ Crypto Ball, a time when top crypto donors were away from their computers. Trading on the coin soon soared. “I could have bought. But I didn’t, because it was clearly a scam, right?” Martin laughed. “There were people who made hundreds of millions on it.”
He hopes the Trump administration can make it so “people are able to utilize blockchain technology to make better things, launch tokens when necessary, and not have to worry about jail time.”
Several founders felt Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will open the floodgates for startups to pitch the government on their products in order to fulfill its promise of making the government more efficient. James Layfield, chief sales officer of Samplify.ai, which helps companies identify redundant software, created a website called “DogeProof.com.’ The concept, he said, is to offer up Samplify.ai’s products to government agencies for free, so they can rid themselves of extraneous subscriptions before Musk comes along to slash their costs.
Layfield pitched it to Florida Representative Byron Donalds at an inauguration ball, and said he seemed intrigued. “The whole experience has been incredibly rewarding to just see how open people are to this possibility,” he said.
Meanwhile, Rabi Alam, founder of Counter Health, hopes that DOGE might support his company’s mission to streamline the healthcare system while keeping the quality of care high. First, though, like everyone in the country, he’s got to figure out what exactly DOGE is. Luckily, Alam scored an invite to the Inauguration Ball, where he intended to scout some DOGE employees. “I’d like to get some of what I’ll call finer granularity and more color on what the approach is,” he said.
If this weekend shows anything, it’s that the hardest challenge founders will face, between balls and Mar-A-Lago trips, might just be staying focused on their day job. “There’s people who are trying to be in the right room,” Taylor said. “And there are people trying to get the work done.”
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French AI lab, Mistral, is working toward an initial public offering, co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Mistral is “not for sale,” Mensch said, adding that the company plans to open an office in Singapore to focus on the Asia-Pacific region and is growing in Europe and the U.S. “Of course, [an IPO is] the plan.”
Mistral, which Mensch launched in 2023 alongside former researchers from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, is often described as Europe’s answer to U.S. incumbents like OpenAI. The lab releases AI models and services that compete with offerings from OpenAI and others, including a ChatGPT-like platform called Le Chat.
Mistral has raised around $1.14 billion in capital to date from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company was reportedly last valued at around $6 billion.
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French startup Karmen has secured a small funding round so that it can improve its instant financing products. The company offers short-term loans to small companies facing a working capital crunch.
It’s a €9 million equity-and-debt round ($9.4 million at today’s exchange rates) with Seventure Partners buying a stake in the small startup. Financière Arbevel and Bpifrance are complementing the round with some debt.
The startup isn’t the only company operating in this space that could be described as instant financing for SMEs. French competitors include Silvr, Defacto, Unlimitd and Hero.
The reason revenue-based financing has become a hot vertical is because banks and traditional financial institutions struggle to address SMEs at scale. It’s a highly fragmented market with small margins. That’s why tech startups are trying to fill that financing gap with a data-driven approach.
Today’s news comes just a few months after Karmen secured a €100 million debt vehicle that serves as the basis for the company’s short-term loans. Six months later, it seems like quite a few companies are now relying on Karmen to fix their cashflow issues.
Around 600 companies have used Karmen to buy inventory, pay suppliers, finance paid acquisition campaigns and more. Loans range from €20,000 to €3 million, from 2 months to 24 months.
On average, the typical Karmen client borrows €200,000 with a six-month term. But as you can see, there’s a wide diversity of financing options. Similarly, the smallest customers generate only €300,000 in annual turnover (those are most likely one-person businesses), while Karmen’s largest customer generates €160 million in revenue per year.
More importantly, Karmen has attracted some loyal customers, as 80% of the startup’s customers contact Karmen several times per year to unlock a new debt line. Clients include Maison Kitsuné, Balibaris, Les Raffineurs and Almé.
While most companies contact Karmen directly, the startup has a hybrid distribution strategy. It partners with other fintech companies so that they can offer Karmen financing products to their own clients. Some ERPs, e-commerce marketplaces and business banks like Qonto already integrate with Karmen.
This embedded financing strategy represents 40% of Karmen’s clients right now. But the company says that it hopes it can raise that metric to 75% of new clients by the end of 2025.
While most companies repay their loans without any issue, companies can sometimes struggle to repay what they owe.
“This is part of our job as a lender. But we limit these risks through our data-driven approach, which allows us to have very granular visibility into the financial and operational performance of our clients,” Karmen co-founder and CEO Gabriel Thierry said.
“In addition, we are investing heavily in our risk assessment technology tool (thanks to AI) to strengthen this approach,” he added. Hence, today’s funding round.
Karmen currently uses around 60 different financial metrics to score loan applications in near real-time. Its embedded strategy can also be leveraged to make smarter decisions — bank accounts, accounting software, ERPs and invoicing tools hold valuable data on a company’s overall performance.
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Friend, a startup creating a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be treated as a digital companion, has delayed its first batch of shipments until Q3.
Friend had planned to ship devices to pre-order customers in Q1. But according to co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s no longer feasible.
“As much as I would liked to have shipped in Q1 of this year, I still have refinements to do, and unfortunately you can only start manufacturing electronics when you are 95% done with your design,” Schiffman said in an email to customers. “I estimate that by the end of February, when our prototype is complete, that we will begin our final sprint.”
An email I sent out to all Friend preorder customers: pic.twitter.com/wUPR0OhpI4
— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) January 20, 2025
Friend, which has an eight-person engineering staff and $8.5 million in capital from investors including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, raised eyebrows when it spent $1.8 million on the domain name Friend.com. This fall, as part of what Schiffman called an “experiment,” Friend debuted a web platform on Friend.com that allowed people to talk to random examples of AI characters.
Reception was mixed. TechRadar’s Eric Schwartz noted that Friend’s chatbots often inexplicably kicked off conversations with anecdotes of traumas, including muggings and firings. Indeed, when this reporter visited Friend.com Monday afternoon, a chatbot named Donald shared that the “ghosts of [his] past” were “freaking him the f— out.”
In the above-mentioned email, Schiffman also said that Friend would be winding down its chatbot experience.
“We’re glad that millions got to play around with what I believe to be the most realistic chatbot out there,” Schiffman wrote. “This has really proven our internal ability to manage traffic, and has really taught us a lot about digital companionship … [But] I want us to stay focused on solely the hardware, and I have realized that digital chatbots and embodied companions don’t mix well.”
AI-powered companions have become a hot-button topic. Character.AI, a chatbot platform backed by Google, has been accused in two separate lawsuits of inflicting psychological harm on children. Some experts have expressed concerns that AI companions could worsen isolation by replacing human relationships with artificial ones, and generate harmful content that can trigger mental health conditions.
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At a recent investor meeting, early-stage African investor Oui Capital informed limited partners that it had returned its $4 million debut fund following the sale of some shares in the business banking platform Moniepoint.
The African fintech unicorn has so far proven to be a standout investment for five-year-old Oui Capital. When it launched its first fund, it invested $150,000 in the Nigeria-based company, an early bet that has since generated an $8 million return—enough to pay back the fund.
Specifically, last October, when Moniepoint raised $110 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation in a Series C round led by Development Partners International, Oui Capital sold some of its shares into the deal; now, with its fund repaid, any future returns will be pure profit for its investors.
It’s a rare feat for a young VC firm—many globally fail to return their first fund—and even rarer in Africa’s venture ecosystem. Still, it underscores how lucrative some early-stage bets, especially in fintech, can be on the continent. Oui Capital joins other pan-African investors like CRE VC and 4DX Ventures that have returned their first funds after backing other unicorns, such as Andela and Flutterwave, according to two people familiar with investor dealings on the continent.
TechCrunch contacted Oui Capital for comment, and the firm confirmed the news.
Moniepoint, previously known as TeamApt, wasn’t a household name in 2019 when Oui Capital first considered it. At the time, the company primarily built financial products and software for itself and banks.
Oui Capital, founded by Olu Oyinsan and Francesco Andreoli, was among its earliest investors and also one of the few to support the outfit’s pivot to Moniepoint, a business banking and payments platform that has since become Nigeria’s largest merchant acquirer.
“They have been with us through the stages, from seeking product-market fit to getting to production,” Tosin Enioluwadara, Moniepoint co-founder and CEO, said of Oui Capital in a 2021 video. “Olu [managing partner at Oui Capital] has been helpful in advisory; we talk through strategy, governance, and key matters that affect the company. They have also been helpful in our investment campaigns, from introducing potential investors to sometimes just thinking around our narrative and positioning…”
Exits in Africa’s tech scene remain rare, with only 143 out of 2,971 venture deals since 2019 leading to exits, according to The Big Deal. Most startups are still in their early or growth stages — far from the maturity needed for significant exits. Unlike developed markets with robust M&A and IPO options, Africa’s tech ecosystem is still growing, leaving fewer startups in an exit-ready position.
On the other hand, venture investments typically take 5–10 years to mature, so many African-focused VC firms still await returns. For Oui Capital, that wait took five years. When the firm joined Moniepoint’s seed round, the company was valued at a $12.5 million valuation, as revealed in an investor report seen by TechCrunch.
Anecdotally, smaller funds are easier to return due to their size. Data from Cambridge Associates, which builds and manages investment portfolios for institutional investors, bucks up this trend.
But more importantly, Oyinsan credits his fund’s portfolio construction for the firm’s traction to date. “It’s not just about fund size—it’s about what you invest in, your entry price, how much equity you own, how much you invest, and when you decide to exit,” he tells TechCrunch.
Other startups in Oui Capital’s portfolio include Duplo, which digitizes payment flows for African B2B enterprises; Maad, a B2B e-commerce platform for fast-moving consumer goods; and Matta, a B2B marketplace for chemicals, from its first fund, Mentors Fund 1.
The investor, with 22 startups across two funds, writes checks of up to $400,000 for seed-stage startups across Africa.
In 2022, Oui Capital launched a second fund, Mentors Fund 2. While the early-stage firm initially targeted $30 million, it closed at $12 million, according to Oyinsan. He also shared that while the fund has no plans to rush into fundraising due to its strong position, it might raise a third fund later this year.
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