The Collaborative Fund DC United deal, announced this week, is the latest sign that venture capital is carving out its own lane in professional sports ownership, one that looks nothing like the private equity model and nothing like a tech billionaire’s vanity purchase. Collaborative Fund, the New York-based generalist venture firm with roughly $1 billion under management and early bets on Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen, and Olipop, is taking a minority stake in D.C. United and its home ground, Audi Field. The deal is still subject to Major League Soccer approval. How Collaborative Fund’s DC United Bet Was Framed In a…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
Amazon’s new Prime Video shopping features are moving from an easily ignored search prompt into something far harder to miss: a dedicated Shop tab inside the X-Ray experience and an auto-launching storefront inside the Amazon Shopping app.The company announced the changes on Thursday, framing them as an extension of last year’s ‘Shop the Show’ launch. That earlier feature required viewers to type ‘shop the show’ into the Amazon Search app while watching, which meant most people never found it.What the Prime Video Shopping Features Actually DoThe new X-Ray Shop tab sits inside the existing X-Ray panel, reachable by pausing a…
The Boring Company Series D has closed at $3 billion, lifting the tunnel start-up’s valuation to $23 billion and marking its largest fundraise since Elon Musk founded the company inside SpaceX in 2017 before spinning it out a year later. The United Arab Emirates led the round. Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Human Capital, Vy Capital, and Valor Equity Partners participated alongside them, as did Temasek, Shamal Holding, and Baron Capital, according to Reuters. Several of those names (Valor, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Temasek, and Baron Capital) previously backed Tesla, SpaceX, and Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter, according to CNBC. The $23…
The Listen Labs Salesforce acquisition has moved from rumour to reality, with Salesforce signing a definitive agreement to buy the voice-AI market research startup for around $2 billion, according to Salesforce’s own newsroom. The deal explains why Listen Labs walked away from a signed term sheet earlier this year, a move that raised eyebrows across the venture community. Listen Labs had agreed terms on a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, with Menlo Ventures set to lead the round. It never closed. Backing away from a signed term sheet is rare and generally frowned upon by venture…
Harvey’s $550M funding round, announced on 9 September 2026, values the San Francisco-based legal AI company at $15.5 billion, according to the Harvey official fundraising announcement. Bloomberg placed the figure marginally higher, at $15.6 billion; the company’s own blog and Reuters both reported $15.5 billion, and that figure is used here. The round was co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Diffusion is a new firm co-founded by Kris Fredrickson, a longtime Harvey backer who previously invested in the company through Coatue Management, Bloomberg reported. New investors Sapphire Ventures and Whale Rock Capital Management joined the round alongside returning names…
Instinct AI email addresses are the startup’s latest move to remove humans from the tedious middle of their own errands. The feature, announced on Tuesday by founder Noah Shinn, gives every user a dedicated address through which the agent can contact restaurants, sign up for services, and chase follow-ups without ever touching the user’s personal inbox. ‘For example, Instinct can use its own email to contact a restaurant about a special request, ask a business about availability, or sign up for a service it needs to complete your task,’ Shinn wrote on X. Users can also forward their own messages…
A Lausanne startup founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers has raised $3.7 million (CHF 3 million) to build the fusion control systems that reactor developers say nobody is currently selling them. Fusionality, which emerged from Venture Kick and EPFL’s Swiss Plasma Center, closed the pre-seed round from Zurich-based Founderful and London’s Playfair Capital. The company’s co-founders, Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli, heard the same complaint repeatedly from fusion developers. ‘We would ideally buy many of the components to make our control system, but there isn’t really anybody providing them,’ Felici said, ‘and especially there isn’t anybody who speaks the…
Data center REIT stocks are finding an unexpected ally in the community resistance that has made life harder for Big Tech: the very protests slowing new construction may be driving up the value of what already exists. A recent NBC News poll found that 69% of respondents oppose AI data centre construction in their area. State legislatures are moving to codify that sentiment, and a moratorium on new data centre development is already in place in New York. The political temperature is set to rise further heading into the midterm elections. The scale of what is at stake makes the…
The Apple iPhone Duo launch was the centrepiece of the company’s ‘Surprise and Shine’ event on 9 September, where Apple finally entered the foldable smartphone market roughly seven years after Samsung first shipped the form factor. The device had been widely rumoured as the ‘iPhone Ultra,’ but it arrived with a different name and a clear statement of intent. The Apple iPhone Duo Launch: What Was Actually Announced The iPhone Duo features a book-style design with a 5.4-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner display, which Apple described as the largest iPhone screen ever made, with a minimal crease, according…
The Duane Arnold nuclear restart cleared a major financial hurdle on 8 September 2026, when the US Department of Energy closed a $1.9 billion loan to NextEra Energy under its Title 17 Energy Financing Programme, administered through the Office of Energy Dominance Financing. The money will fund the refurbishment of a boiling-water reactor in Iowa that has been dark since 2020, when a rainstorm damaged it and cheap natural gas made repairs uneconomical. The loan is the third the federal government has closed for a shuttered nuclear plant in under two years, tracing a consistent line of policy from the…
