March 12, 2026

Runaway runway

Hi there,

Here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: Secondary rounds

Secondary rounds are 5x more common among private companies than a decade ago.

Among private companies leveraging secondaries, nearly 1 in 3 run multiple secondary rounds, giving founders, employees, and early investors liquidity before a traditional exit.

This shift enables more value creation to stay in private markets: OpenAI, now valued at $840B, has completed 4 secondary rounds to date.

See how else private markets are evolving in our recent State of Venture report.

Not: Zero runway

70% of startups that shut down since 2023 cite running out of capital as a cause of death. 

In fact, the hundreds of startups whose failures we analyzed raised a combined $17.5B before going under.

But the more telling causes, like poor product-market fit and wrong market timing, reveal why the capital dried up in the first place:

See the full breakdown of why startups fail here.

Hot: High-touch voice AI

Enterprise voice AI platforms are shifting focus from developer-led models to high-touch enterprise deployments.

According to CB Insights hiring data, leading platforms like ElevenLabs, Bland AI, and Deepgram are building out dedicated implementation teams of forward-deployed engineers, solutions architects, and deployment strategists.

Healthcare, financial services, quick-service restaurants, and the public sector top the target list as these verticals demand complex integrations and high reliability that self-serve models can't deliver.

Get the full breakdown in our recent report on this year’s AI agent predictions.

Not: Healthcare startup durability

Healthcare & biotech accounts for more startup shutdowns since 2023 than any other sector, ahead of fintech (13.2%) and food & agriculture (12.5%).

The industry also destroyed the most capital: $5.1B, reflecting the capital intensity of clinical-stage drug development.

For example, Areteia Therapeutics raised $425M but shut down after its respiratory therapeutics for asthma didn’t meet expectations in clinical trials. 

Check out our full analysis of startup post-mortems here.

The +1

Source: u/misteregamer1 via Reddit 

Scale fails women. Y-axis needs to grow up. 

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. Want to know what the future of robotics holds? Register for our briefing here.

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