Lovable has announced that CapitalG and Menlo Ventures, with participation from several others, are leading the company’s $330 million Series B round.
A very impressive fundraising to close of a very impressive year.
Lovable is raising capital at $6.6 billion valuation, according to CNBC. Not yet announced, but are in the same neighborhood as rumors earlier in the fall.
Jack Altman interviews Sequoia’s new co-stewards Pat Grady and Alfred Lin. A very good episode on Sequoia (including decision making), venture investing and company building.
Also on Spotify.
Forbes ha published its annual ranking of European venture capitalists. The only Nordic-based investor in the top 25 is Johan Brenner at Creandum.
A VC: Reserves, Recycling, Returns. “You cannot produce a top decile fund with just reserves and recycling. You need to be working with great founders and teams who are building breakout companies. Just like a poker player needs to get dealt some great hands. But how you play those hands when you are dealt them is also critically important.”
Good read as so often by Fred Wilson (and yes, it’s a year-old post).
Colossus: The Last Human Edge. Profile of Henry Ellenbogen who, successfully, has invested and invests in both in public and private companies.
Carta Fund Economics Report 2025. “Leveraging data from some 2,000 private funds that rely on Carta for fund administration, this report offers a look under the hood at many of the key financial and operational details that are critical to raising, managing, and investing in private funds.”
Atomico: State of European Tech 25. The annual report on technology startups and financing in Europe.
Dagens Industri: AI-miljardärens om rekordaffären: “Jag blev faktiskt lite förvånad.” Dagens Industri interviews Sana founder and CEO Joel Hellermark. (in Swedish)
Bloomberg: Meta’s Zuckerberg Plans Deep Cuts for Metaverse Efforts. “Executives are considering potential budget cuts as high as 30% for the metaverse group next year, which includes the virtual worlds product Meta Horizon Worlds and its Quest virtual reality unit, according to people familiar with the talks, who asked not to be named while discussing private company plans.”
Economist: Stockholm is Europe’s new capital of capital. “Yet for companies that want fresh capital without venturing across the Atlantic, Stockholm is the place to be. Bosses of unlisted businesses might visit the headquarters of eqt, the sole European private-equity firm to hold a candle to America’s giants. In the five years to the end of 2024 it raised funds worth $113bn, an amount beaten only by kkr in America. Companies looking to tap public markets, meanwhile, can head to the shiny new offices of Europe’s hottest stock exchange. Initial public offerings on Nasdaq Stockholm have so far this year raised over €6bn ($6.8bn), multiples of the equivalent figures for other bourses.”
Benedict Evans has made annual tech presentations for many years and presented the latest one at Slush. There are many interesting data points, but to me it reiterated just how enormous the capital investment in AI (data centers, power etc is) and how fast it has grown to more than $400 billion per year.
A billion here and a billion there, and soon we are talking about real money as the (alleged) quote goes.
Great top 10 takeaways list from Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Vercel COO, formerly Chief Business Officer of Stripe) on Lenny’s Podcast (full interview).
Three takeaways:
Some links to the, mostly, Swedish political/policy debate on economic growth, productivity, and financing of innovation.
There are no easy answers to higher economic growth, but I think there are many things Sweden and the Swedish public sector can do independently of the timing of EU initiatives like the capital markets union.
One thing I believe is that long-term Swedish capital, like pension funds, should invest more in Swedish startups to drive significantly higher GDP growth (with the same or higher direct financial returns to reteriees as today plus the value from higher GDP growth in other investment areas like bonds).
Dagens Industri: Innovation och konkurrenskraft ger ett starkare Europa by Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Finland’s Prime Minister Petteri Orpo.
Dagens Industri: Replik: Utse en Teknikminister by Professor Sylvia Schwaag Serger, CEO IVA.
Dagens Industri: Nya superfonden som sätter fart på Sveriges tillväxt by Annika Winsth, Carl Bennet and Björn Rosengren.
DI Digital: Techsektorn står för 8 procent av BNP: “Bärande roll”
McKinsey: The paradoxes of Sweden’s success and struggles – and the path forward
European Commission: The Draghi report on EU competitiveness
A16Z Speedrun: Make ARR Useful Again. There’s a lot of aggressiveness in calculating ARR numbers in the current market.
A16Z writes about how to approach calculating MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and ARR (annual recurring revenue), the most common ARR sins and difference between annual recurring revenue and annual run rate.
On building up ARR from MRR
“MRR, by contrast, is a management metric. This is a point-in-time monthly value of recurring revenue you expect to keep happening. It’s tempting to say “ARR = 12 × MRR” and stop there. But that identity is only useful if “recurring” really means recurring—meaning you exclude one-offs (implementation, training, hardware) and you’re disciplined about usage. The clean approach is simple to state and powerful in practice. You should treat subscription and contracted minimums as MRR. Truly variable usage is its own line item and only when it proves stable or becomes contractually committed you can graduate it into MRR and ARR.”
MRR and ARR specifically for AI companies
“AI inference takes every MRR bad habit and amplifies them. Demand is often bursty (launch weeks, seasonal spikes), units are tiny (per 1,000 tokens, per request), and capacity can be either provisioned or opportunistic. That means you need an MRR policy that respects how the infrastructure is priced.
A founder-practical way to handle this without twelve sub-metrics is to:
Keep MRR for the part of your AI product that is contracted with items like fixed subscription fees, platform access, support tiers, and committed throughput minimums. If a customer signs for a model unit per month or a token floor, that is MRR.
Track Measured Usage separately for everything else: pay-as-you-go tokens, burst capacity, overages. Report it every month with a trailing average. If usage stabilizes for, say, six months, you can promote it into MRR with a straight face.