🌐Fewer Small and Midsize Venture Funds Closing This Year Amid Sluggish Fundraising Environment
In 2024, only 118 U.S. venture funds under $500 million have closed, the lowest in years, as economic headwinds and a slowdown in tech IPOs and exits impact fundraising efforts. Despite fewer funds, some standout funds in sectors like cleantech and cybersecurity have successfully raised capital.
🌐Fewer Small and Midsize Venture Funds Closing This Year Amid Sluggish Fundraising Environment
In 2024, only 118 U.S. venture funds under $500 million have closed, the lowest in years, as economic headwinds and a slowdown in tech IPOs and exits impact fundraising efforts. Despite fewer funds, some standout funds in sectors like cleantech and cybersecurity have successfully raised capital.
The War on Fakes channel has repeatedly attempted to push conspiracies that footage from Ukraine is somehow being falsified. One post on the channel from February 24 claimed without evidence that a widely viewed photo of a Ukrainian woman injured in an airstrike in the city of Chuhuiv was doctored and that the woman was seen in a different photo days later without injuries. The post, which has over 600,000 views, also baselessly claimed that the woman's blood was actually makeup or grape juice. The gold standard of encryption, known as end-to-end encryption, where only the sender and person who receives the message are able to see it, is available on Telegram only when the Secret Chat function is enabled. Voice and video calls are also completely encrypted. As a result, the pandemic saw many newcomers to Telegram, including prominent anti-vaccine activists who used the app's hands-off approach to share false information on shots, a study from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows. This ability to mix the public and the private, as well as the ability to use bots to engage with users has proved to be problematic. In early 2021, a database selling phone numbers pulled from Facebook was selling numbers for $20 per lookup. Similarly, security researchers found a network of deepfake bots on the platform that were generating images of people submitted by users to create non-consensual imagery, some of which involved children. Andrey, a Russian entrepreneur living in Brazil who, fearing retaliation, asked that NPR not use his last name, said Telegram has become one of the few places Russians can access independent news about the war.
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