Primary Ventures has closed a $625 million Fund V focused on seed investing nationwide, which is a sizable fund for a firm that focuses solely on early-stage investing. It perhaps showcases how the size of early-stage rounds has dramatically increased in the age of AI. 

Ben Sun, a co-founder and general partner at Primary Ventures, told TechCrunch the average check size for this fund will range from $5 million to $10 million, and he hopes the firm will invest in 40 to 50 companies over the course of three years. He said the fund will also go as early as pre-seed. 

The fund will also continue to spread its investments nationwide. Primary is one of New York’s most well-known venture firms, and at one point, most of its investments were focused in the Big Apple. Sun said the location thesis has changed.

The firm, which overall focuses on early-stage investing, has now done deals in Chicago, Seattle, Virginia, and D.C. “The talent, the founder, and the startups are happening everywhere,” he said. “The potential outcomes are so much bigger than they’ve ever been.”

He sees seed investing as headed toward its own asset class, especially as the quality of talent and their startups continue to rise, paired with tech’s current transformation. Firms are competing, after all, to find the hottest deals. “I think [a fund of this size] allows you to go in and compete and bring more resources to the table to work with the best founders and opportunities.” 

Sequoia also recently raised a $200 million seed fund, as did Uncork Capital, which announced a $225 million seed fund earlier last year.

Though Primary calls itself a generalist, Sun said the firm has sector specialists, each with their own focus. He likes consumer, but also has investors focused on vertical AI, fintech, healthcare, enterprise, cybersecurity, and infrastructure. “We pretty much cover probably 80% or 90% of the seed sector activities out there.” 

Fund V has already invested in three companies. Primary previously raised $60 million in Fund I when it launched in 2015, followed by $100 million in Fund II and $150 million in Fund III. 

It raised a $275 million fund and an additional $163 million for an opportunity fund. Some of its investments include the AI chip company Etched, the risk management platform Alloy, the women’s networking hub Chief, and the AI marketplace Dandelion Health. It has $1.65 billion in assets under management. 

Swedish music streaming giant Spotify saw its user numbers peak last quarter, driven by its year-end “Wrapped” campaign, which rounds up stats and listening highlights for users and new features on its free tier.

The company said it saw a record 38 million new users in the fourth quarter, taking its total to 751 million monthly active users, up 11% from a year earlier. Paying subscribers increased by 10% to 290 million in the quarter.

Spotify said the “Wrapped” campaign resulted in more than 300 million engaged users and 630 million shares on social media in 56 languages.

Revenue came in at €4.53 billion ($5.39 billion), about 7% more than a year earlier, thanks to an 8% increase in subscription revenue. However, the company’s ad-supported business saw revenue dip by 4% to €518 million ($616.6 million). Gross margin, an important metric investors watch for indications of improvements to Spotify’s profitability, improved by 83 basis points to a record high of 33.1% as the company sold more ads for podcasts and music.

The solid performance comes as Spotify’s new co-CEOs Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström take the reins from co-founder Daniel Ek, and they will now oversee a business that has far outgrown what it initially set out to do.

After launching as a music-streaming pure-play, Spotify has expanded its remit to include podcasts, audiobooks, and even physical bookstores. It’s launched music videos within the app as well as video podcasts and has doubled down on its retention strategy by adding social features like group chats and letting users share what they’re listening to. You can even use Spotify to book tickets to concerts, or explore the story behind songs.

The company has also added AI features like an AI DJ and AI-generated playlists, and now lets users exclude tracks from being recommended to help them better tailor what they listen to.

Profitability has been a big focus for Spotify in recent years, and the company has tried to achieve that by increasing subscription prices in the U.S. and Europe. It’s also added new features to its free, ad-supported tier to attract more people away from rivals like YouTube Music and Amazon Music, letting users search for and choose songs they want to listen to.

The company expects to reach 759 million users and 293 million paying subscribers in the current quarter.

India has ordered social media platforms to step up policing of deepfakes and other AI-generated impersonations, while sharply shortening the time they have to comply with takedown orders. It’s a move that could reshape how global tech firms moderate content in one of the world’s largest and fastest growing markets for internet services.

The changes, published (PDF) on Tuesday as amendments to India’s 2021 IT Rules, bring deepfakes under a formal regulatory framework, mandating the labeling and traceability of synthetic audio and visual content, while also slashing compliance timelines for platforms, including a three-hour deadline for official takedown orders and a two-hour window for certain urgent user complaints.

India’s importance as a digital market amplifies the impact of the new rules. With over a billion internet users and a predominantly young population, the South Asian nation is a critical market for platforms like Meta and YouTube, making it likely that compliance measures adopted in India will influence global product and moderation practices.

Under the amended rules, social media platforms that allow users to upload or share audio-visual content must require disclosures on whether material is synthetically generated, deploy tools to verify those claims, and ensure that deepfakes are clearly labeled and embedded with traceable provenance data.

Certain categories of synthetic content — including deceptive impersonations, non-consensual intimate imagery, and material linked to serious crimes — are barred outright in the rules. Non-compliance, particularly in cases flagged by authorities or users, can expose companies to greater legal liability by jeopardizing their safe-harbor protections under Indian law.

The rules lean heavily on automated systems to meet those obligations. Platforms are expected to deploy technical tools to verify user disclosures, identify, and label deepfakes, and prevent the creation or sharing of prohibited synthetic content in the first place.

“The amended IT Rules mark a more calibrated approach to regulating AI-generated deepfakes,” said Rohit Kumar, founding partner at New Delhi-based policy consulting firm The Quantum Hub. “The significantly compressed grievance timelines — such as the two- to three-hour takedown windows — will materially raise compliance burdens and merit close scrutiny, particularly given that non-compliance is linked to the loss of safe harbor protections.”

Aprajita Rana, a partner at AZB & Partners, a leading Indian corporate law firm, said the rules now focus on AI-generated audio-visual content rather than all online information, while carving out exceptions for routine, cosmetic, or efficiency-related uses of AI. However, she cautioned that the requirement for intermediaries to remove content within three hours once they become aware of it departs from established free-speech principles.

“The law, however, continues to require intermediaries to remove content upon being aware or receiving actual knowledge, that too within three hours,” Rana said, adding that the labeling requirements would apply across formats to curb the spread of child sexual abuse material and deceptive content.

New Delhi-based digital advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation said the rules risk accelerating censorship by drastically compressing takedown timelines, leaving little scope for human review and pushing platforms toward automated over-removal. In a statement posted on X, the group also raised concerns about the expansion of prohibited content categories and provisions that allow platforms to disclose the identities of users to private complainants without judicial oversight.

“These impossibly short timelines eliminate any meaningful human review,” the group said, warning that the changes could undermine free-speech protections and due process.

Two industry sources told TechCrunch that the amendments followed a limited consultation process, with only a narrow set of suggestions reflected in the final rules. While the Indian government appears to have taken on board proposals to narrow the scope of information covered — focusing on AI-generated audio-visual content rather than all online material — other recommendations were not adopted. The scale of changes between the draft and final rules warranted another round of consultation to give companies clearer guidance on compliance expectations, the sources said.

Government takedown powers have already been a point of contention in India. Social media platforms and civil-society groups have long criticized the breadth and opacity of content removal orders, and even Elon Musk’s X challenged New Delhi in court over directives to block or remove posts, arguing that they amounted to overreach and lacked adequate safeguards.

Meta, Google, Snap, X, and the Indian IT ministry did not respond to requests for comments.

The latest changes come just months after the Indian government, in October 2025, reduced the number of officials authorized to order content removals from the internet in response to a legal challenge by X over the scope and transparency of takedown powers.

The amended rules will come into effect on February 20, giving platforms little time to adjust compliance systems. The rollout coincides with India’s hosting of the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi from February 16 to 20, which is expected to draw senior global technology executives and policymakers to the country.