The findings from our annual Crunchbase survey of where recently funded founders attended college or university found that alumni of the most selective U.S. schools secure a disproportionately high share of startup funding rounds.

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Elon Musk's planned SpaceX IPO could make him the first trillionaire. Alex Wong/Getty Images Elon Musk will personally review the emails of applicants for new roles at SpaceXAI. Applicants for the jobs don't need AI experience, but must demonstrate "exceptional ability." Amid the tech talent wars, SpaceX's hiring push comes as the company gears up for its historic IPO. Elon Musk is on the hunt for top talent. SpaceX's AI division is hiring engineers and physicists as the company prepares for what could be the biggest IPO in history. Musk said in a post on X on Thursday that he will personally review all applications that pass "reasonable sanity checks." While you don't need any experience in AI to apply, he said, you need to email the company 3 bullet points demonstrating "evidence of exceptional ability." "Smart humans figure it out fast," Musk wrote in the X post. "If you've made a very complex thing do useful work, that's a major plus," he added. Musk merged his rocket company with his AI startup, xAI, in February. Previously, xAI had operated as a stand-alone business. SpaceX is actively hiring world-class engineers/physicists for SpaceXAI, even if you have zero prior experience in AI. Smart humans figure it out fast. Please send an email with ~3 bullet points demonstrating evidence of exceptional ability to ai_eng@spacex.com. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 21, 2026 This is similar in approach to Musk's previous hiring calls: straight to the point and results-focused. In January, when hiring to work on Tesla's AI chip, Musk asked prospective candidates to email three bullet points on the "toughest technical problems" they've solved. SpaceX's latest hiring push is another sign that the tech talent wars are as hot as ever. On Tuesday, Tesla's former AI director and OpenAI founding member, Andrej Karpathy, announced he would be moving to Anthropic, a major win for the AI powerhouse. For xAI, which is now part of SpaceX, Musk said in March that he would be "going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates," following the departure of several cofounders. SpaceX filed its S-1 paperwork on Wednesday. Its official IPO is slated for June. It expects to raise between $75 billion and $85 billion, which would value the company at between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. Read the original article on Business Insider

We’re over a year into the second Trump administration here in the US, and support for climate causes is weak. But climate tech companies are finding ways to survive and even thrive in this new environment, including by focusing on potential benefits outside decarbonization. Suddenly, it feels like every climate tech company has a story…

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AI works in your environment—but not in production. Development teams face security vulnerabilities, dependency conflicts, and compliance risks that stall deployment. Discover how Anaconda’s curated packages embedded in Snowflake accelerate […] The post Enterprise AI Development with Anaconda & Snowflake appeared first on BigDATAwire.

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Ume Habiba is a junior software engineer at Microsoft. Christian Rodriguez for BI Before joining Microsoft as a junior software engineer last year, Ume Habiba, imagined spending most of her time fixing bugs and juggling other mundane tasks. Instead, the University of Maryland graduate was charged with building a new feature for Azure Networking, one of Microsoft's flagship products. Habiba's miscalculation? Not realizing she would get to offload the kind of grunt work that early-career developers have long been saddled with to AI tools such as Microsoft's GitHub Copilot. "It was crazy," said Habiba, who is 24 and lives in New York. "I totally was not expecting to do a feature right off the bat." The Gen Zer's experience shows that what has long been a rite of passage for entry-level office workers — tedious but foundational assignments that teach them the ropes — is increasingly being handled by AI. In turn, Microsoft and other employers are now entrusting junior recruits with more advanced projects than previous young cohorts were given. It's a recalibration that could make starter jobs more appealing, but also create a steeper, less forgiving learning curve. "AI is changing the entry-level experience for an entire generation of white-collar workers," said Peter Cappelli, a management professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "Companies really need to think through how to support these new hires." "I totally was not expecting to do a feature right off the bat," said Habiba. Christian Rodriguez for BI Limited opportunities AI may be reshaping not only what entry-level jobs look like, but also how many companies need. In 2025, job ads for junior positions on Indeed declined 7% from a year earlier, while posts for senior roles rose 4%. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates stood at 5.7% in the first quarter, compared with 4.2% for all workers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The divergence reflects economic uncertainty, combined with AI's automation capabilities, and the cost of AI itself, said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at Indeed. While some employers are bucking this trend, former Cisco CEO John Chambers told Business Insider he expects AI to dent overall entry-level demand in the near term, before eventually creating new categories of work. He compared the AI boom to the rise of the internet, but said AI's transformation will occur far faster and affect more industries. "I'm the optimist on how this turns out," said Chambers, who now leads the venture-capital firm JC2 Ventures. "But there will be a lag." AI's productivity boost For recent college graduates who do land entry-level jobs, some employers say AI is already making them more productive and less dependent on others. At Okta, junior auditors used to spend hours reviewing compliance documents for inconsistencies, said Rebecca Port, the identity-management company's chief people officer. Now, an AI assistant compares those documents against "gold standard" examples and flags anomalies in real time. Port said the change is freeing junior auditors up to focus on higher-level analysis, such as evaluating why something isn't compliant and how it could be improved. "We're leveraging AI to really automate some of the simpler tasks and the more mundane elements of work," she said. Likewise, Microsoft's junior sales reps can now use AI tools to practice sales pitches before meeting with prospective customers, said Katy George, corporate vice president of workforce transformation at the tech giant. Previously, they would need to ask more experienced colleagues to role-play with them. 'A grand experiment' Despite AI's time-saving benefits, some observers warn that automating too much entry-level work could harm junior recruits. For example, Chambers said repetitive tasks help people understand how things work, spot mistakes, and build intuition. "AI cannot replace experience," he said. What's more, it can take years for people to develop the savvy needed to make tough decisions under pressure, navigate office politics, and grasp other nuanced workplace dynamics, said Jennifer Tosti-Kharas, a professor of organizational behavior at Babson College. "We have to remember it's still their first job," Tosti-Kharas said. "AI doesn't make them more mature." Microsoft and other employers are now entrusting junior recruits with more advanced projects than previous young cohorts were given. Christian Rodriguez for BI Another concern she sees is generational friction. Today's youngest workers will now have early-career experiences that their millennial and Gen X superiors can't relate to, Tosti-Kharas said. Older workers may see them as having not paid their dues, "which could breed resentment," she said. Employers are essentially testing a new model for developing young talent that may or may not work, added Tosti-Kharas. "This feels like a grand experiment," she said. Imposter syndrome To circumvent any potential pitfalls, some employers are rethinking how to train and develop early-stage talent. Accounting giants EY and KPMG recently told Business Insider they are experimenting with AI-driven training for entry-level recruits and, in some cases, experienced staffers as well. EY said it plans to use simulated audit scenarios and embedded learning tools as it rolls out AI agents across its assurance business, while KPMG is testing a simulation tool to help junior staffers, in particular, learn the ins and outs of tax prep as AI begins to take over tasks. Still, a big jump in responsibility can be intimidating. Habiba, the Microsoft engineer, said she was thrilled to let AI help her write code, generate unit tests, and automate other parts of the development process. Yet as she tackled more challenging aspects of the assignment, such as network infrastructure and product optimization, "feelings of impostor syndrome definitely were coming up," she said. Ultimately, Habiba got the job done, crediting not just AI but also several of her more experienced colleagues for helping her along the way. It's the kind of mentorship that Microsoft is leaning into through "multi-generational teams" that pair junior and senior employees, said George. Working closely with senior colleagues also reinforced for Habiba that technical ability alone is no longer enough. She said communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills are becoming more important, not less. "Anyone can code now," said Habiba. "What else do you bring to the table? Read the original article on Business Insider

Toronto-based YouTuber Steve Antonioni. Courtesy of Steve Antonioni Steve Antonioni coined "Camp FIRE," a mini version of the financial independence movement. It involves saving a 'war chest" to allow yourself flexibility to make a career change or take a break. His money-saving advice is to treat your personal life like a business, viewing savings as profit. Steve Antonioni stumbled into a miniature version of FIRE — financial independence, retire early — the movement he'd been pursuing throughout his early 20s. After building a $90,000 "war chest," he quit his corporate job and started making YouTube videos about financial independence. A few years into that career pivot, he took another break, stepping away from YouTube to focus on his family and start writing a book. The idea of saving aggressively for a few years to fund a career change or a temporary break resonated so much with him that he gave it a name: Camp FIRE. Unlike traditional FIRE, which often requires years or even decades of saving and investing to retire permanently, Antonioni sees Camp FIRE as a shorter-term strategy. The goal isn't necessarily to stop working forever. It's to build enough savings to buy yourself flexibility sooner. "What if you built up this amount of money over a shorter span of time, and then used it to switch your life to be more in alignment with perhaps what you were waiting to do in those 15 years?" he told Business Insider. "Instead, you just kind of did it now. You did it sooner." The savings mindset shift: Think of your personal life as a business Whether you're saving for FIRE, Camp FIRE, or simply trying to increase your savings rate, Antonioni says one mindset shift can help: Think about your personal finances like a business. "I think having the right attitude around savings is very, very important," he said, adding that "even the word 'saving' kind of messes you up from the first place." Antonioni's money advice is to treat your personal finances like a business. Courtesy of Steve Antonioni People use different language to describe corporate finances and personal finances. For example, businesses have "revenue" and "profit," whereas individuals have "income" and "savings." He finds it helpful to draw a direct comparison between the two. "A business is trying to earn a profit, right? It's the exact same thing for you — your savings are your profit," he said, adding: "You want to run your life in such a way that you're earning a profit, because that profit is yours. That goes directly to you." For Antonioni, increasing that "profit" has meant living well below his means and approaching his spending systematically. When he was pursuing financial independence, he said he ate the same two or three meals nearly every day and designed much of his life around routines that kept costs low. That level of routine happened to fit his personality. Antonioni said he tends to thrive with structure and discipline, but he knows the same approach won't work for everyone. "I hesitate to give advice for the general person, because I tend to be a bit more of an extreme person myself when I'm in pursuit of a target," he said. He also pointed out that his circumstances made aggressive saving easier. At the time, he was young, single, and living alone. Now that he has a family, he said, maintaining the same level of simplicity would be harder. Plus, saving aggressively is more difficult in 2026 than it was when he was building his first financial cushion. "The cost of groceries has literally doubled in many cases," he said. "For people who are looking to get into the housing market, it's a pretty dramatic picture." The broader lesson, he said, isn't that everyone should eat the same meals every day or live as frugally as possible. It's that savings can be more powerful than leftover money. Treated like "profit," it can become a tool for making a major life change, whether that means trying a new career, pursuing a creative project, or simply taking time away from work. Read the original article on Business Insider

Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir. Legora Legora, a Swedish startup that builds software for lawyers, has hired Atlassian's CMO. Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir's mandate is to help Legora win over lawyers in a competitive field. Legora goes toe-to-toe with Silicon Valley rival Harvey on product and, increasingly, brand. Lawyers are not an easy crowd for an AI pitch. They are cautious, busy, and paid to find the hole in every argument. Legora just hired someone to make the case anyway. The Swedish legal software startup told Business Insider it has hired Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir as its first chief marketing officer. Her job is to help Legora win over lawyers and turn it into a household name as it competes with larger Silicon Valley rival Harvey. "I talked to all the lawyers that I had worked with in the past," Inanoglu Ozdemir said on a call during her second day at the Stockholm office. They told her: Law is changing, and Legora has a chance to shape its future. She also noted the dozens of new recruits who joined her orientation — typical for Legora as it scales its global workforce. Last year, it grew from 40 to 400 employees. Until recently, Inanoglu Ozdemir oversaw a 450-person marketing team at Atlassian, the publicly traded software company behind Jira and Trello. Her move comes as Atlassian is reshaping itself around artificial intelligence, a push that has included layoffs and a string of executive departures. At Legora, Inanoglu Ozdemir is stepping into a much smaller company with, potentially, a bigger upside. The company is chasing a multibillion-dollar opportunity to sell the software that lawyers use to get work done, like contract drafting and legal research. It's added elite law firms like Cleary Gottlieb and HSF Kramer as customers. Investors like Accel and General Catalyst, meanwhile, have rallied around Legora's hard-charging founder, Max Junestrand. The company has raised more than $850 million in capital, pushing its valuation to $5.6 billion. Harvey was last valued at $11 billion. Leaving Atlassian for Legora means trading the scale of a public company for the higher risk (but higher reward) of a startup. It also offers a closer seat to the technology shift jolting the way we work. Over the past year, Inanoglu Ozdemir said, she became obsessed with the idea that AI agents — software that can carry out multistep tasks with little human direction — would transform professional services, including industries like legal that have worked much the same way for decades. "You can either take your experiences and go from one big company to another — you take the blue pill, right?" Inanoglu Ozdemir said. "Or you take the red pill and you go, 'Something's going to get disrupted here, and I want to be on the frontline of that story.'" Legora and Harvey compete on product and features. They're also fighting on another plane: brand. In a market where law firms are being asked to trust artificial intelligence with sensitive client work, awareness and credibility become a kind of wedge. "Brand is becoming almost a moat," Inanoglu Ozdemir said. That helps explain why Legora has been spending like a company wanting to be remembered. Earlier this year, it booked the actor Jude Law for a glossy ad campaign. It has also moved into sports sponsorships, signing a Swedish professional golfer, to make Legora feel less like a niche software vendor and more like a category leader. Inanoglu Ozdemir said Legora told her during the interview process that when customers pilot its software against competitors, pilots convert into long-term contracts 78% of the time. She said she believes that once Legora gets a seat at the table, the product can win. Her job is to make sure more law firms know enough about Legora to invite it in. Read the original article on Business Insider

SpaceX's IPO filing includes several key timelines, including Starship's first payload delivery to orbit by the second half of 2026. Gabriel V. Cardenas/AFP via Getty Images SpaceX's IPO filing on Wednesday contains several important milestones the company expects to reach. It showed timelines for Starship's first payload delivery and space data centers. Elon Musk is notorious for putting out ambitious deadlines for his companies. It wouldn't be a Musk production without some ambitious deadlines. SpaceX filed for its blockbuster IPO on Wednesday, and it's already proving to be one of the most unconventional public-offering documents in recent memory, with its grandiose, sci-fi language and a CEO pay package partly tied to life on Mars. Then there are the aggressive deadlines Elon Musk is famous for. The filing reveals some due dates around the more critical lines of SpaceX's business, including Starship, Starlink satellites, and space data centers. SpaceX's grand ambitions of orbital AI data centers and deep-space missions depend on the success of Starship, a reusable rocket and launch platform. Starlink, on the other hand, remains SpaceX's main financial engine, bringing in the most revenue for the company at the moment as it pours billions into AI compute. The IPO filing also details a few key deal and debt deadlines that show how Musk plans to support his massive AI buildout through his rocket company. As with any Musk Inc. company, aggressive timelines are not guaranteed. "Punctuality is not my strong suit, but I always come through in the end," he said in 2020. Here are some important dates the filing showed. Starship's first payload: Second half of 2026 Starship is SpaceX's reusable rocket and spacecraft. The company said in its filing that it'll be the platform capable of launching its next-generation Starlink satellites and making orbital data centers economically viable. Currently, Starship remains in the test flight stage, with the next launch scheduled for Thursday. The company said that it expects "Starship to commence payload delivery to orbit in the second half of 2026." Starlink V3 deployment: Second half of 2026 SpaceX's next-generation broadband satellites, V3, are expected to provide one terabit per second of downlink capacity per satellite, the company said in its filing. Downlink refers to "the maximum rate at which data can be transmitted from a satellite to users over a network or communication link in a given period of time," according to the filing. The company said it expects to begin deploying V3 satellites on Starship in the second half of 2026. The filing said that one Starship launch can carry 60 V3 satellites into low Earth orbit. SpaceX acquisition of Cursor: End of October 2026 Musk's rocket company announced in April that it secured the right to buy Cursor, an AI coding startup, for $60 billion. SpaceX could also walk away and pay Cursor a fee of about $10 billion. The filing showed more concrete deadlines for when SpaceX would have to decide to acquire Cursor. SpaceX would have a 30-day window to purchase Cursor, starting after whichever of the following two events comes first: seven days after SpaceX begins trading on public markets or after September 30, 2026. Starlink Mobile V2 launch: 2027 Starlink Mobile aims to provide internet connectivity for smartphones. The company said in the filing that it expects to deploy V2 satellites on Starship in 2027. Bringing broadband connectivity to people's phones with V2 satellites still hinges on several other factors, including securing rights to wireless airwaves, obtaining regulatory approval, and ensuring Starship is ready for launch. EchoStar deal closing: November 2027 EchoStar, a US-based telecommunications firm, and SpaceX announced last year that they would enter into a commercial agreement that provides Musk's company access to EchoStar's wireless airwaves. The deal would give SpaceX's Starlink satellites the ability to provide broadband connectivity to people's smartphones. The Federal Communications Commission approved the deal in May. The company said in the filing that it expects to close the deal on November 30, 2027. SpaceX's bridge loan due: September 2027 The SpaceX filing showed that the company borrowed $20 billion to pay off loans tied to X and xAI. SpaceX merged with xAI earlier this year. The loan matures in September 2027, with the option to extend the deadline to March 2028. Space data centers launched: 'as early as 2028' One of SpaceX's more ambitious goals is to launch orbital data centers powered by the sun. The company said in the filing that it could start deployment "as early as 2028." To scale space AI compute into a viable business, however, hinges on the success of Starship. "AI compute satellites at scale need full Starship reusability to be economically compelling," the filing said. Read the original article on Business Insider

Danny Stewart. Courtesy of Danny Stewart Danny Stewart paid off $10,000 in credit card debt by moving back in with his parents. With strategic budgeting and help from a friend, he regained control of his finances and moved out. His financial goals now include buying a house and repaying his student loans within seven years. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Danny Stewart, a 28-year-old public relations professional who paid down $10,000 in credit card debt. The following has been edited for length and clarity. After graduating in 2019, I moved into my parents' basement while working different jobs in the communications industry to save money. When I was 25, I got my first apartment in Chicago. I was working full-time as a PR associate, trying to manage all my expenses while also paying $1,500 in rent. I had never had a credit card before. With rent being such a large expense, I decided to get a credit card so I could defer some costs and avoid draining the little savings I had. It didn't take long after opening that first card to open a second, and within a few months, I started racking up debt. I spiraled, and by 26, I had close to $10,000 in credit card debt. Here are the lifestyle changes I made to pay it off. I had control over my money before I got a credit card I took out student loans for college, but I had two jobs, so I had enough cash to pay the rest of my expenses. I didn't save very much money, but without a credit card, I had no choice but to live within my means, and I did. I had my mom's credit card for emergencies, but I never used it and returned it to her when I graduated. I still felt like a college kid playing an adult and waited to take the steps toward bigger purchases and greater responsibilities. Graduating a little less than a year before the COVID-19 shutdowns made it easier to crash at my parents' house and not take those steps. I got my first credit card and bought my first car in 2021. I didn't do a lot of research I picked a credit card recommended by a credit score website based on my credit score. I decided to use it only for emergencies. When I opened my second credit card in 2023, it wasn't because I wanted to buy anything extreme. I wanted to pay my rent, split some of my expenses, and have a decent social life. My salary was stretched thin, and after paying rent with my usual expenses, I didn't have a lot of extra cash left for fun. After opening that second credit card, I was incentivized to spend $1,000 in the first three months to get bonus miles. I started using it for more than gas and a few takeout dinners. That same year, I had to attend six weddings that required travel, accommodation, and gifts. After spending to hit that bonus promotion on the card, it made it easier to keep spending. I started putting everything on my credit card, from groceries and Uber rides to baseball games, music festivals, and theme parks. I stopped carefully checking my checking account balance and started spending more recklessly. My debt started to climb into the thousands. It got even harder to keep up with my monthly payments Once the balance on my cards started to increase, the minimum payments grew, too. I was only able to make the minimum payments each month, and interest was compounding at such a rapid rate. Everything got out of control. All of a sudden, I was almost $10,000 in credit card debt, most of it due to interest. I just kept knocking off the minimum each month while the interest climbed. My heart would drop every time I got a credit card statement in the mail. I kept telling myself that eventually I'd get a big promotion or find a second job and be able to pay off the debt fast, but months would pass, and that wasn't happening. In January 2024, I realized that if I didn't do something about my debt, it would only get worse. Even though I loved living in the city and having my own apartment, I knew that I had to give it up if I wanted to fix my situation. I moved back to my parents' basement when my lease ended It was humbling to move back to my parents' basement. I was angry and embarrassed, but grateful that my parents let me move home so I could figure things out. Without paying $1,500 in rent every month, I was able to put most of that money toward whatever payments I could afford. Once I started paying off those huge chunks of debt, the interest began to decline. I moved back home in June 2024. Right around Christmas that year, I got that debt down to under $1,000. I also reached out to my best friend, who is a financial advisor It was hard for me to push aside the embarrassment of being in debt, but it helped make the situation feel real. One of my best friends is a financial advisor. I confessed my situation to him, and he helped me see a clear path toward getting out of this debt. He suggested I open a second checking account. I allotted $750 to the second checking account and put the rest of my paycheck in my original checking account, which was only for bills. The $750 was considered my fun money. I'm willing to cut back so I can stay out of debt and be strategic with my money I cut back on going out to bars and dinners because those things really add up. In one weekend, I was spending over $200 on average. I also stopped reaching for my credit card if my checking account wasn't in a place I was happy with. I didn't want my social life to go on hold because I was trying to be careful with money, so I started suggesting cheaper alternatives to my friends. Instead of a ballgame, it was a movie. Instead of a night out at the bars, it was a dinner and an earlier night. Doing all of this helped me pay off my credit card debt by my 28th birthday Now that my credit card debt is paid off and I'm back in my own apartment after almost a year of living with my parents, I'm still carrying over a lot of those lifestyle changes. I only go out to bars if a large group is going, and I'll get dinner once or twice a month. I say no to a lot more things now, like weekend trips and happy hours after work, because it's more important to take care of my finances. I want to buy a house and pay off my student loan debt next My two big financial goals in the next seven years are to buy a house and pay off most, if not all, of my student loans. My financial advisor friend helped me put together a plan to make all of this happen. If I have to stay home and watch a basketball game rather than spend money at a bar, or say no to taking a vacation with friends, it's worth it to me now that I have concrete money goals I'm working toward. I'm not anti-credit cards. I just changed the way I use mine. I don't have the same type of anxiety using my credit card that I did in the past. I used to panic when I'd check my statement once a month and kept digging myself into that hole. Right now, I have about $700 in credit card debt, but I plan to pay it off with my next paycheck. Things come up, from emergencies to friends getting married, and I don't want to live life afraid to use my credit card. I know how to get out of debt and stay out of it. I'm more strategic. Getting into credit card debt at 25 was a blessing in disguise Getting into debt was the first time I felt like my life was off track. I didn't learn how to handle my money in college, so it was a rude awakening when I was a few years postgrad. I view this as a blessing because if I didn't learn this lesson now, I don't know if I ever would have. I wish other people struggling with debt would realize that it's not the end of the world, and it's not going to affect your life forever. Even if it feels hard to do, reach out for help because you don't have to handle this alone. Read the original article on Business Insider

Carolyn Fong for BI Oana Olteanu left an established venture firm to start her own shop — a risk in a tight market. Her track record includes bets on Poolside and MaintainX, which have both achieved unicorn status. Olteanu took the No. 12 spot on Business Insider's 2026 Seed 40 list. Oana Olteanu turned down a job at artificial intelligence lab Poolside. She took the upside instead. Then a partner at early-stage venture firm SignalFire, Olteanu had impressed Poolside founder Eiso Kant as someone who understood machine learning and could get exceptional engineers on the phone. Kant asked her to leave venture and help him build a tech team. Olteanu declined. She wanted to keep investing. So Kant offered her a different way in: a chance to invest personally. Olteanu wrote a small personal check to Poolside, which is now valued at $12 billion. That bet is helping power her next move: launching her own seed firm, Motive Force. The firms backs early-stage startups, mainly at the pre-seed and seed rounds, in areas including artificial intelligence, enterprise software, and robotics. Its mission is to find technical outsiders and overlooked founders before the rest of Silicon Valley catches on. Carolyn Fong for BI The timing could hardly be tougher. First-time funds are a difficult sell in any market. In this one, Olteanu says, fewer rounds are getting done, and capital is clustering into mega-rounds led by giant firms. Smaller funds cannot match the biggest checks or always get into the rounds everyone wants. The institutions that fund venture firms, meanwhile, put more dollars behind the firms they believe still have access to hot deals. When I spoke to Olteanu this month, she did not sound especially worried. Her pitch is that the market's obsession with a chosen few creates an opening for a smaller, nimbler investor able to find founders "early when it's not obvious" and often "before they even think of raising" a formal round of capital. Olteanu declined to share details about her fund, citing rules that prohibit investors from marketing a fundraise. So far, she has some early signs of success. Poolside is the splashiest example. Her track record also includes spotting Inngest, whose tools help software teams ensure multi-step software tasks finish reliably, before it raised funding from Altimeter Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. She also backed MaintainX, a software startup for industrial teams that helps them monitor and maintain equipment, which is now valued at $2.5 billion. 'I joined VC for a green card' Olteanu relates to the outliers she backs. She grew up in rural Romania in a home with no computer. At 18, she entered a NASA contest to design a space station and won the grand prize. The award led to her first-ever plane ride, a trip that took her to the NASA Ames Research Center in the heart of the Bay Area. She spent the following years in Germany, putting herself through a computer science degree by working three jobs. She was so strapped for cash that she petitioned the German government for a special waiver to work more hours than the legal student limit. Eventually, a full-time offer from enterprise giant SAP gave her the visa she needed to return to California. Carolyn Fong for BI Her introduction to the local elite was entirely accidental. Knowing nothing about Bay Area neighborhoods, in 2015 she rented a room on Craigslist that happened to be in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Los Altos Hills. Her landlord was an early engineer at Atari, and her neighbor was Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Olteanu, meanwhile, drove a beat-down Kia Rio. While she felt like an outsider in her neighborhood, she was becoming an insider in the burgeoning artificial intelligence scene. She spent her nights at machine-learning meetups alongside engineers who would go on to lead Anthropic and OpenAI. By day, as a 22-year-old in the office of the SAP CEO, she was co-developing chatbots with customers like Slack. Olteanu's path into venture began as a favor. Scale Venture Partners was considering an investment in BigID, a company that partnered with SAP and that Olteanu knew well. She helped the firm understand what BigID had actually built. Her technical know-how caught the eye of a partner who realized the firm needed her expertise to vet the coming wave of machine-learning startups. Scale offered her a job, and with it, a path to permanent residency. "Honestly," she said, "that was the magic word. I joined VC for a green card." Building a fund for the outliers After stints at Scale and SignalFire, Olteanu is now building a firm around the kind of drive that has defined her career. Carolyn Fong for BI The name Motive Force comes from physics. It's the push or pull that causes something to move. Olteanu uses the phrase to describe founders who start building before they have permission, before anyone gives them money, and before they receive the status or applause of the market. Jemima Meyer is one example. A South African dietitian, she taught herself to code so she could build software to screen patients for malnutrition. Olteanu met her through a women-in-tech community she runs, before Meyer had launched a formal fundraise. On one early call, Meyer told Olteanu she was pitching her company, HealthLeap, to a Los Angeles hospital and "was not leaving until they tried the product." That drive eventually caught the attention of the broader market. Meyer landed customers like Cedars-Sinai and Penn Medicine. This is exactly the type of founder Olteanu believes the venture ecosystem is currently failing. "I believe founders deserve a fund to exist like the one I'm designing," she said. Olteanu is not dismissive of the classic founder credentials. A Stanford degree, she said, can be useful. But to her, pedigree is only "a station a train passes through," not proof of where the train is going. Read the original article on Business Insider

Since its earliest days back in office, the Trump administration has been going after researchers who study and try to counter hate speech, harassment, propaganda, and disinformation online.  Now, some of those researchers are fighting back. Last week their lawsuit—which could have global repercussions for online safety and free speech—made its first appearance in court. …

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Norwegian imaging technologycompany Muybridge has closed an oversubscribed $16 million Series A fundinground led by Investinor, Fairpoint, Idekapital and RunwayFBU, withparticipation from several Nord...

The Nvidia Vera chip is rarely the headline when earnings beat estimates, but it should be. When Nvidia reported Q1 revenue of US$81.62 billion on Wednesday, beating analyst estimates of US$78.86 billion, and guided Q2 at US$91 billion–well above Wall Street’s US$86.84 billion forecast–the numbers did what Nvidia numbers always do: dominate the room.  But […] The post Nvidia’s Vera chip is the US$200 billion bet Jensen Huang doesn’t want you to overlook appeared first on AI News.