How venture firms raise cash, fight rivals and pick their next bet

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The investors behind tech’s hottest startups are rewriting their own rules. They are finding new ways to raise money, taking business fights to Washington and deciding fast which bets to chase and which to walk away from.

At The Information, our reporters are already inside the rooms where these decisions get made. Here are six stories on the investors behind the checks that we’ve reported in recent weeks.

When investors take on Washington

Ramp and Airwallex once talked about working together. After the deal fell apart, some of Ramp’s best-connected investors started urging the U.S. government to investigate the rival. How the Ramp-Airwallex fight escalated shows who is leading the campaign and how Airwallex is hitting back.

Andreessen Horowitz spent years as one of the loudest backers of crypto, in startups and in politics. Now it is dropping “crypto” from the name of its flagship fund, and our reporting looks at who else is changing course.

Hot bets and warning signs

Vinod Khosla is one of the most optimistic investors in robotics. He is also warning that many of the hottest startups in the field will not hold their valuations. Khosla’s robotics warning comes with his own list of startups he passed on because of price.

Video AI is having a moment, and a four-year-old film startup just joined the unicorn club. Utopai’s plan is to make its own movies with AI and put them in theaters while much of Hollywood stays wary.

New ways to raise a venture fund

AI rounds have grown so large that some venture firms’ main funds cannot cover the checks they want to write. How VC firms find cash runs through their own investors and a big bank, and it changes what those investors get in return.

Raising a first fund is hard when much bigger firms are competing for the same founders. The daughter of Palo Alto Networks’ CEO is raising her own AI-focused fund with her father advising, and inside her new fund shows what she is targeting and what she has backed so far.

Behind every big round are investors raising cash, calling in favors and deciding what to back next.

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