The New Venture Advantage: Controlling the Internet’s Attention

PLUS: Former Shopify Executive Building Something New

Venture Radar

The New Venture Advantage: Controlling the Internet’s Attention

Andreessen Horowitz’s newly built “viral on demand” team marks a major evolution in what venture capital firms compete on. Traditional VC value-add; capital access, talent networks, and operational support, is no longer scarce. What is scarce today is attention. With product advantages short-lived and markets crowded, controlling narrative and cultural momentum has become a critical source of leverage in startup success.

By internalizing a media and content engine, a16z is turning influence into infrastructure. The ability to push a company into mainstream awareness, fast, can dramatically accelerate early traction. Virality reduces customer acquisition costs, attracts better talent, and helps startups raise follow-on capital at materially higher valuations. Perception becomes a competitive moat long before the business fundamentals mature.

This shift is part of a broader macro trend: venture firms are turning into media powerhouses. Distribution capability is becoming as important as capital itself. If a firm can amplify a startup’s story to millions, its portfolio stands a better chance at winning entrenched markets, or even defining new ones, before rivals show up.

There are risks. When attention can be manufactured independent of performance, startups may be crowned “category kings” prematurely. The gap between hype and underlying economics can widen quickly, setting the stage for harsher corrections when market sentiment cools.

Still, the direction of travel is undeniable. Venture returns have always been governed by power laws, now those power laws are being accelerated by cultural influence. The firms that can scale attention will shape not only which companies win, but how fast they get there.

Geeks of the Week

Startup Name: Perceptix

Geography: US

One-liner: AI-first technology for data-driven inspection insights.

Founder(s) Background: Director of Engineering at Amazon, Head of Strategy at Plotify.

Thoughts:

• Re-thinking the Workspace Where Humans and Agents Collide
  Perceptix isn’t just another inspection-software company; it’s positioning itself at a critical inflection where digital inspection workflows, operational data and intelligent agents converge. As enterprises industrialise AI-driven inspection and monitoring, the traditional world of human-led manual checks and siloed dashboards is giving way to workflows where humans collaborate with, and even through, AI agents. Perceptix’s play is to become the orchestration layer bridging human inspectors, embedded sensors/cameras and autonomous agents that annotate, prioritise and summarise insights in seconds.

---

Startup Name: Arklex AI

Geography: US

One-liner: Effortless AI agent orchestration, optimized for customer-facing tasks.

Founder(s) Background: Associate Professor at Columbia University, Team Lead at Amazon.

Thoughts:

• Re-Architecting the Agent-First Enterprise Stack
  Arklex AI is positioning itself at a pivotal moment: as companies shift from single-purpose AI tools to networks of autonomous agents, the platform that enables humans to design, coordinate and govern those agents becomes the foundation of enterprise intelligence. Arklex challenges the old assumption that software is built for direct human interaction, instead, it argues that future workflows will be driven by agents working with agents, with humans guiding them at the policy and oversight level.

---

Startup Name: Morph.ai

Geography: US

One-liner: Building the future of autonomous software engineering

Founder(s) Background: Product lead (AI) at Meta, Director of Product, ML and Data Science at Snowflake.

Thoughts:

• Redesigning the Developer Stack for Human–Agent Co-Creation
  Morph is operating at a pivotal shift in software engineering: we are moving from code written entirely by humans to code co-created by humans and intelligent agents. Traditional development tools assume that humans write, fix, test, and review everything. Morph challenges that assumption by introducing a workflow where agents generate code, agents evaluate it, and humans govern and approve. The development pipeline becomes collaborative, not manual.

---

Founder(s) building in stealth

• Former Head of Accounting Product at Mercury (through acquisition) / Head of Financial Services at Shopify.

• Founding CEO of Hired ($150mil raised).

• Head of OktaX (next-gen product lab inside Okta).

---

Deals of the Week

• Doppel raises US$70 million Series C at ~US$600 million valuation
  Doppel, a U.S. startup focused on AI-powered social engineering defence, announced on 19 November 2025 that it raised US$70 million in a Series C round, valuing the company at roughly US$600 million.

• Code Four secures US$2.7 million seed round
  U.S.-based startup Code Four, founded by two 19-year-old MIT drop-outs, raised US$2.7 million via a seed funding round announced on 19 November 2025 to build AI tools for police-department workflows.

• Maxima raises US$41 million at ~US$143 million valuation
  The U.S. startup Maxima, based in California and building an AI accounting automation platform, announced on 18 November 2025 that it secured US$41 million in a round led by Kleiner Perkins and Redpoint Ventures, at an estimated valuation of about US$143 million

---

Notable Mergers and Acquisitions

• Salesforce completes acquisition of Informatica for enterprise data management capabilities
  On 18 November 2025, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) announced it had completed its acquisition of Informatica, a leader in enterprise AI-powered cloud data management

• Palo Alto Networks to acquire Chronosphere for US$3.35 billion
  In a U.S.-based cybersecurity/observability deal announced during this period, Palo Alto Networks agreed to purchase Chronosphere for ~US$3.35 billion in cash and replacement equity awards, strengthening its AI-era observability stack.

---

This edition is brought to you in partnership with Stella Capital.