Tech
Why Greylock capped its new fund at $1.5B when it says it could have raised more
While many top-tier venture firms keep raising massively larger funds, Greylock Ventures, one of the oldest and most prestigious venture firms in Silicon Valley, is intentionally resisting the trend of ballooning fund sizes.
On Tuesday, the 61-year-old firm announced that it had raised a $1.5 billion 18th fund. The number is 50% higher than its previous $1 billion vehicle from 2023 and roughly matches the capital the firm raised across seed and flagship funds during the pandemic. Still, Greylock partner Saam Motamedi told TechCrunch that Greylock could have easily raised a “multiple” of that figure, suggesting the partnership decided restraint was the better path at a time when fund sizes across the industry keep climbing.
“Our mission is to be the most important partner to the most important entrepreneurs,” Motamedi said. The firm prides itself on introducing its portfolio companies to top engineers and potential customers, as it did for Baseten, an AI infrastructure startup that is now valued at $13 billion, after first investing in its Series A in 2022. But Motamedi said Greylock can offer that level of support only by keeping the number of companies it backs small.
The firm’s 10 partners make only one or two new investments each annually, a pace Motamedi said will result in roughly 25 portfolio companies from this fund.
Like its predecessors, the new fund will focus primarily on incubating companies from the earliest stages and leading seed and Series A rounds. This is where Greylock has built its reputation; the firm has a strong track record of starting companies from scratch, most notably security giant Palo Alto Networks, which launched inside Greylock’s offices 21 years ago, and the email security startup Abnormal, which Greylock incubated in 2018 and that was last valued at $5.1 billion.
Even so, Greylock doesn’t stick strictly to early-stage deals. It will also back high-potential, later-stage companies even if it “missed them early on,” Motamedi said. The firm’s 17th fund included three such growth-stage bets: Anthropic, Revolut, and Wiz.
The firm made its first investment into Anthropic when the AI company raised its Series F at a $183 billion valuation. “It’s the largest investment in the firm’s history,” Motamedi said.
Motamedi estimates that roughly 15% of the new fund will be deployed into later-stage startups, but he maintains that Greylock remains fundamentally an early-stage investor.
As proof, Motamedi said that when the partners meet every Monday to review their investment pipeline, the agenda consists primarily of people’s names rather than company names.
“We’re getting to know people even before they start a company. It’s really a bet on the person,” he said. “Often the company doesn’t even exist.’”
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Tech
Microsoft patches record number of security vulnerabilities, citing its use of AI
Microsoft released a record number of security patches for Windows, Office, and other tech product lines this week, citing the use of AI to aid the discovery of code vulnerabilities.
The technology and cloud giant issued patches for 570 security flaws on Tuesday as part of its monthly scheduled release of fixes, which security researchers have long dubbed “Patch Tuesday.”
At least two of the vulnerabilities are classified as zero-days, meaning that they were exploited before Microsoft was made aware of them. One bug affecting Windows Server allows hackers to escalate their privileges from a limited user to a system administrator. Another bug affects the SharePoint file sharing server — the U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency CISA has warned hackers were actively exploiting the bug to compromise organizations.
Krebs on Security first reported the news.
The huge patch update comes a week after Microsoft said in a blog post that it expected its usual batch of monthly security patches to be far higher in number than before. The company cited its use of AI to help its employees uncover previously undiscovered security bugs in its software.
“As AI helps defenders discover more issues, customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release,” said Windows boss Pavan Davuluri.
As AI models become more advanced and focused on cybersecurity issues, security researchers are using them to uncover vulnerabilities that may have been dormant in software code for years, if not longer. Parts of Microsoft’s Windows code dates back decades.
Tech
Whatnot acquires Shaped to power real-time live shopping recommendations
Livestream shopping app Whatnot announced Wednesday that it has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company that specializes in real-time recommendation and search systems. The deal is meant to strengthen Whatnot’s discovery and personalization capabilities as the platform continues to expand across new product categories and millions of buyers.
According to the company, the acquisition helps Whatnot continue its investment in AI as it looks to solve one of live commerce’s biggest challenges: helping shoppers find the right products while inventory, auctions, and buyer demand change in real time.
Unlike traditional e-commerce platforms, where product catalogs remain relatively stable, Whatnot’s marketplace is constantly evolving, and live auctions can end within minutes or last for hours.
“By combining Shaped’s technology with Whatnot’s existing systems, we can make recommendations faster, more responsive, and more personalized,” Emmanuel Fuentes, VP of Data and AI at Whatnot, told TechCrunch. “That speed matters because live commerce is a uniquely hard recommendation problem. Inventory changes by the second, shows start and end continuously, and buyer intent shifts throughout a show.”
Fuentes said the company has spent the last six years improving the speed of its recommendation engine, reducing recommendation latency from roughly a day to just minutes. Integrating Shaped’s technology is expected to push those recommendations even closer to real time. The company says its systems process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions every week, using that data to continuously improve recommendations.
Founded to help businesses build AI-powered recommendation systems, Shaped developed technology that combines existing customer data with large language models and machine learning to deliver highly personalized search and discovery experiences. Its customer roster included companies such as Outdoorsy and QVC.
As part of the acquisition, Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell, along with nearly a dozen engineers and AI researchers, will join Whatnot. Murrell will lead the company’s newly formed Applied AI Research group. (Notably, Murrell worked at Meta before launching Shaped.)
The acquisition comes as Whatnot experiences significant growth. Launched in 2019, the company recently revealed that sellers have surpassed 1 billion orders. Last year, Whatnot raised $225 million in Series F funding, giving the company a valuation of more than $11 billion after adding 20 million buyers over the past year.
Whatnot has also significantly broadened its marketplace, launching more than 35 new categories last year — including art, golf, and vinyl — and more than 45 additional categories during the first half of 2026, with new subcategories continuing to roll out each month.
Additionally, the move comes as resale giants race to integrate AI throughout their platforms, such as eBay and Poshmark.
This story has been updated to correct dates that incorrectly referred to the first half of 2025. The correct time period is the first half of 2026
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Tech
Hack suggests AI music generator Suno scraped YouTube for training data
The AI music generator Suno was hacked, according to a report from 404 Media.
The hacker told the publication that they used a supply chain attack in November to access an employee’s credentials, allowing them to then access source code showing how Suno allegedly scraped decades of audio from YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius, stock music libraries, and podcast RSS feeds.
Suno previously admitted that it trains its AI on “publicly available music files” on the open internet, arguing that it can train on copyrighted material under the fair use doctrine, a subjective carve-out of copyright law. But according to the major record labels actively suing Suno, it is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to deliberately circumvent YouTube’s protections against data scraping; it also violates YouTube’s terms of service.
Udio, a competitor to Suno, has also been accused of scraping YouTube data. Google, the parent company of YouTube, faces similar allegations of copyright infringement from a variety of major book publishers.
The hacker reportedly accessed customer data including customer emails, phone numbers, and partial credit card numbers in Stripe.
Suno did not notify customers about the November 2025 breach and claims that this was a “limited security incident that was quickly contained.”
Microsoft patches record number of security vulnerabilities, citing its use of AI
Whatnot acquires Shaped to power real-time live shopping recommendations
