NVCA 2026 confirms VC is no longer a VC business. What is it then?

Welcome back Chronicler!

Quick but loaded week. The 2026 NVCA Yearbook dropped and it basically confirms what late-stage VCs have been whispering about for two years: venture is no longer a VC business, it is a capital markets business with a VC wrapper. Amazon bought a satellite company, Sequoia closed a massive new fund, and for the first time a US state actually put a freeze on new data centers.

Plus: A proper walkthrough of options pool, with real numbers, and a fresh look at Harmonic and Hebbia in The Stack.

As always, thank you for subscribing and engaging week-in week out. Still a work in progress, but I appreciate all 1,870 of you.

With Love,
Kev

THIS WEEK IN VC & TECH
What matters this week

LEAD STORY

NVCA 2026 Yearbook shows non-traditional investors now drive 83 percent of US venture dollars

The 2026 Yearbook crystallises a structural shift traditional VCs have been downplaying: hedge funds, sovereign wealth, and corporate strategics now account for roughly 83 percent of invested capital while participating in only 30 percent of deals, meaning pure-play VC firms have been relegated to price-takers at the late stage. Founders should recalibrate: the marginal dollar for any growth-stage AI cheque is now set by Mubadala or Tiger, not by Sand Hill partners, which means term sheet leverage and governance rights will continue to favour scale capital.

For GPs at sub-$2B funds, the strategic response is either to specialise aggressively at the earliest stages or accept a co-investor role on deals they used to lead. Secondary volume rivalling exit proceeds also signals that LPs can no longer wait for IPO cycles to recycle capital, which reframes fund duration assumptions that have held for two decades.

QUICK HITS

Amazon / Globalstar. Amazon agreed to acquire Globalstar at $90 per share in cash or stock, inheriting spectrum, ground infrastructure, and the existing Apple Emergency SOS contract in one stroke. The deal effectively ends the independent LEO connectivity M&A pipeline and forces remaining satellite startups to pick a hyperscaler sponsor or accept that Starlink and Amazon Leo now own the distribution layer.

Sequoia Capital. Sequoia closed roughly $7B for a new flagship vehicle under Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, nearly double its 2022 expansion fund, earmarked primarily for OpenAI, Anthropic, and peer late-stage AI positions. The implicit signal to LPs: even tier-one GPs can no longer treat early stage as the main event when maintaining ownership in a $300B-valued portfolio company means writing nine-figure follow-on cheques.

Maine LD 307. The bill freezes approvals for any data centre over 20 MW until November 2027 and could push AI infrastructure developers to re-underwrite site selection assumptions as at least a dozen other state legislatures consider copycat measures. For infrastructure-focused VCs, compute siting risk just moved from a footnote to a top-of-memo diligence item alongside power and water.

Cerebras Systems. Cerebras refiled publicly for a Nasdaq IPO after CFIUS clearance, disclosing 2025 revenue of $510M, $87.9M in net income, and a $1B loan from OpenAI tied to a $20B-plus supply commitment. If it prices successfully, it opens a public-market exit lane for the second wave of Nvidia challengers, including Groq, SambaNova, and Tenstorrent, that LPs have been quietly writing down.

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MONEY IN MOTION
The largest deals that you should know about

The surprise of the week is Slate Auto, a pre-revenue EV maker pulling a $650M Series C in a market that is supposed to hate hardware. The signal: TWG Global thinks consumer reservation data beats most SaaS ARR charts. And AI is quietly moving past coding into supply chain, estate planning, and Medicare navigation.

Slate Auto  EV / Mobility  •  Series C, $650M  •  Lead: TWG Global  •  April 13, 2026   Link

Loop  Supply Chain AI  •  Series C, $95M  •  Lead: Valor Equity Partners  •  April 17, 2026   Link

Chapter  Healthcare / Medicare AI  •  Series E, $100M  •  Lead: Generation Investment Management  •  April 13, 2026   Link

Factory  Dev Tools / AI Coding  •  Series C, $150M  •  Lead: Khosla Ventures  •  April 16, 2026   Link

Wealth.com  WealthTech / Estate AI  •  Series B, $65M  •  Lead: undisclosed lead  •  April 16, 2026   Link

VENTURE BITE: One Concept in One Minute
Option Pool Shuffle

Founders think the option pool comes out of everyone's shares after the round closes, but it actually comes out of the founders' shares before the round is priced, quietly handing value to new investors.

CONCEPT

When a VC requires an option pool expansion as a condition of investment, the new shares reserved for future employees are created before the pre-money valuation is calculated. This means the fully diluted share count used to set the price per share already includes those new options, so the dilution falls entirely on existing shareholders rather than being spread across all parties including the new investor. The practical effect is that the real pre-money valuation founders receive is lower than the headline number suggests.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Understand how option pool sizing before versus after a financing changes the effective pre-money valuation and founder dilution, so you can evaluate term sheets accurately.

WORKED EXAMPLE

Scenario: A startup is raising a $4M Series A. The VC offers a $16M pre-money valuation and requires a 15% post-financing option pool. The company has 8,000,000 shares outstanding with a 5% pool (400,000 shares) already in place.

WITHOUT the shuffle: Pre-money = 8,000,000 shares. Price per share = $16M / 8M = $2.00. Investor gets $4M / $2.00 = 2,000,000 new shares. Post-financing total = 10,000,000 shares. Founder ownership = 7,600,000 / 10,000,000 = 76%.

WITH the shuffle: The VC requires the 15% post-money pool to be created pre-money. Solving for pre-money share count P where the required new options are added: P = 7,600,000 + 0.1875P, giving P = 9,353,846 shares. Price per share = $16M / 9,353,846 = $1.71. Investor gets $4M / $1.71 = 2,338,596 shares. Post-financing total = 11,692,442. Founder ownership = 7,600,000 / 11,692,442 = 65%.

The option pool shuffle cost founders 11 percentage points of ownership on an identical headline valuation. The effective pre-money for founders is closer to $13M, not $16M.

Quiz (Difficulty: Medium)

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THIS WEEK’S STANDOUT

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🐶 Hebbia Purpose-built to chew through VDRs, credit agreements, and filings, saving PE and VC teams 20-30 hours per deal on diligence.

🌊 Affinity The relationship-graph CRM most private capital firms default to, now with Deal Assist and Notetaker built in for diligence Q&A over your notes and transcripts.

👓 Specter 50M private companies, 500M people, and a predictive layer that watches investor and insider activity to flag likely upcoming rounds before they hit the wire.

🧠 Perplexity The cleanest daily research companion for thesis work, every claim comes with a source, which matters when your IC memo cannot cite an unnamed summary.

FROM X
Our favorite post from this week

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THE BOARD
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That’s it for today, hope you enjoyed this as much as I did curating it, see you next week!
-Kev