Investment Insights and Trends

Last week, more than 1,500 investors squeezed into a San Francisco venue for a coveted seat at YC’s invite-only Spring 2025 Demo Day. Over six hours, 144 startups delivered rapid-fire, one-minute pitches, each launching just seconds apart. Investors furiously took notes, sized up founders, and fired off intros. Yet Demo Day has evolved beyond a pure deal-sourcing frenzy. By the time the curtain rises, many YC teams already have term sheets in hand from top firms and are well on their way to sealing seed rounds.

At The Greenwich Economic Forum’s inaugural London gathering, three entrepreneurs sat down to discuss what it really takes to build a company in today’s global landscape. What emerged wasn’t just another panel about startup success stories — it was a candid exploration of the fundamental challenges that define entrepreneurship across different markets, stages, and sectors.

Mundus sine caesaribus — Latin for “a world without emperors” — was boldly printed on Jay Graber’s shirt as she took the stage at South by Southwest this March. It wasn’t just Latin flair, but a pointed parody of Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous motto, “aut Zuck aut nihil” (“either Zuck [Caesar] or nothing”). One shirt imagines a world without emperors. The other suggests total domination.

The venture world has long recognized the outsized influence of alumni networks from breakout companies — none more famous than the PayPal Mafia. But today, we’re seeing the rise of a new and potentially more transformative force: the AI Mafia. At Alumni Ventures, we believe the dense networks forming within companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and others represent one of the most compelling engines of innovation and venture opportunity in a generation. In this piece, we unpack how these “mafias” are forming, why they have structural advantages unlike any previous tech wave, and what this means for the future of startup creation, enterprise adoption, and investment strategy.

Below, we explore nine areas where artificial intelligence will accelerate progress and reshape healthcare by 2035. Along the way, we highlight several Alumni Ventures portfolio companies helping advance these changes. Some ideas may sound like science fiction, but they build on real-world efforts underway across research labs, startups, and industry.

Alumni Ventures’ U.S. Strategic Tech Fund exists to back the builders and technologies shaping America’s future security and competitiveness. Biotechnology is no longer confined to medicine — it’s becoming infrastructure. It’s reshaping national defense, industrial resiliency, and human performance. That’s why we hosted Defying Darwin Night in San Francisco: to gather founders, operators, and national security leaders at the bleeding edge of this transformation.

Sports are often seen as entertainment, but beneath the surface, they are driven by innovation and substantial financial returns. Billions of fans engage with sports, supporting an ecosystem of products, services, and investments that can yield massive rewards. This blog explores key segments of sports investments, highlighting successful ventures and emerging opportunities that are shaping the future of the industry.

“The Zepbound trade” is shorthand for the GLP-1 seismic shift. What started as a targeted diabetes treatment has evolved into a profound therapeutic breakthrough. GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound aren’t just changing waistlines — they’re reshaping healthcare and creating a universe of opportunities for visionary investors.

At Alumni Ventures (AV), we don’t just follow market trends — we strive to anticipate them, helped by our extensive community. Our 2021 investment in Groq perfectly demonstrates this approach: a calculated bet on revolutionary AI hardware that has positioned our investors at the forefront of computing’s next paradigm shift: Inference computing.