🎅 The VC Naughty & Nice List

Some compounded quietly. Some absolutely did not.

The Nice List 🎄 

🎁 Capital Discipline - Ignored 2021 pricing, survived the winter, and now looks clairvoyant.
Funds and founders who chose runway over headlines.

🎁 Founders Who Cut Burn Early - Made the hard calls while others waited for “Q3 clarity.”
They’re still CEOs for a reason.

🎁 AI Infrastructure Builders - Sold GPUs, data, or tooling while everyone else sold decks.
They power the hype without depending on it.

🎁 Vertical AI Winners - Solved one painful workflow and charged for it immediately.
Legal, defense, healthcare, and enterprise ops quietly won.

🎁 Quiet Operators - No podcasts, no stealth hype, just revenue.
Turns out customers beat Twitter threads.

🎁 Defense & National Security Tech - From controversial to unavoidable.
Geopolitics made this category LP-safe overnight.

🎁 Founders Who Shipped - Product in market still beats “coming soon.”
Every single year.

The Naughty List

🪨 AI Wrapper Decks - Same product, new buzzwords, same churn.
Now with a GPU bill.

🪨 Perma-Stealth Startups - “Heads down building” since before ChatGPT launched.
The market moved on.

🪨 Tourist Capital - Arrived at the top, left at the first board meeting.
Great at wiring money, allergic to work.

🪨 Valuation Amnesia - Flat round, but somehow still a “step up.”
Creative math remains undefeated.

🪨 Overbuilt Agent Demos - Incredible Loom, zero customers.
Confidence remains high.

🪨 Growth Without Retention - Charts up, users gone, deck pristine.
Acquisition is not love.

🪨 Narrative-First Fundraises - The story closed. The business didn’t.
Vision ≠ traction.

🧑‍🚀 Top Deals You Can’t Miss

1️⃣ Nvidia Acquires Groq's Assets for $20B - Blockbuster deal announced on Christmas Eve, positioning Nvidia to lead the semiconductor race.

2️⃣ Alphabet - acquisition of Intersect, securing next-gen energy and data-center infrastructure for AI-scale compute.

3️⃣ Japan x SoftBank Group - sovereign-backed AI partnership signaling nation-state capital entering the model and infrastructure race.

4️⃣ Lululemon Athletica - strategic expansion deal reinforcing consumer brands as durable platforms, not just retailers.

🧠 Dopamine Dealflow

🌳 Series B+ & Growth

• Radiant, an El Segundo-based nuclear microreactor company, raised $300+ million in Series D funding. Lead investors Draper Associates and Boost VC led the round and were joined by Founders Fund, ARK Venture Fund, and Chevron Technology Ventures.

• MoEngage, a San Francisco and Bengaluru-based customer engagement platform, raised $280 million in Series F funding. Lead investors ChrysCapital and Dragon Fund led the round and were joined by Schroders Capital, TR Capital, and B Capital.

• Mythic, an Austin-based AI chipmaker, raised $125 million in a growth funding round. Lead investors DCVC led the round and were joined by NEA, Atreides, and strategic corporate backers.

• Exein, a Rome-based embedded cybersecurity company, raised €100 million in a growth funding round. Lead investors were not disclosed, with proceeds earmarked for global expansion.

🚀 Series A

• Neurable, a Boston-based brain–computer interface startup, raised $35 million in Series A funding. Lead investors Spectrum Moonshot Fund led the round and were joined by Pace Ventures.

• Ben, a London-based employee benefits platform, raised $27.5 million in Series B funding. Lead investors Mercia Ventures led the round and were joined by Atomico, Cherry Ventures, DN Capital, Seedcamp, and QuantumLight Capital.

• DataLane, a New York-based identity graph provider for local businesses, raised $22.5 million in Series A funding. Lead investors Amplify Partners led the round and were joined by early-stage venture firms and angels.

🌱 Seed & Early Rounds

• Outset, a San Francisco-based AI-moderated research platform, raised $30 million in Series B funding. Lead investors Radical Ventures led the round and were joined by M12, 8VC, Y Combinator, and Adverb Ventures.

• Leona Health, a Mexico City-based AI copilot for doctors built on WhatsApp, raised $14 million in Seed funding. Lead investors Andreessen Horowitz led the round and were joined by General Catalyst and Accel.

• YSE Beauty, a Los Angeles-based skincare brand, raised $15 million in Series A funding. Lead investors Silas Capital led the round and were joined by L Catterton and Willow Growth Partners.

• Price.com, a Los Angeles-based AI-powered savings platform, raised $12 million in a funding round. Lead investors Waterbridge Capital led the round and were joined by TRAC VC and individual backers.

• Peripheral Labs, a Toronto-based spatial and volumetric video startup, raised $3.6 million in Seed funding. Lead investors Khosla Ventures led the round and were joined by other early-stage investors.

🤝 Strategic, M&A & Undisclosed

• Alphabet agreed to acquire Intersect for $4.75 billion. Lead acquirer Alphabet is securing long-term energy and data-center infrastructure for AI-scale compute.

• Trian Fund Management and General Catalyst agreed to acquire Janus Henderson for $7.4 billion in an all-cash transaction.

💸 VC Funds Raised & Raising

• Deerpath Capital, a Fort Lauderdale-based private credit manager, raised $2.21 billion for Fund VII, bringing total investable capacity to approximately $3.5 billion, including leverage.

Founders: Want to be featured on @tradedvc? → traded.co/submit/vc

🎶 The 12 Deals of Christmas - 2025 Recap

(Yes, read it like the song.)

🎶 On the First Deal of Christmas, Elon Musk gave to me…
🚀 A Rocket Ship for the Galaxy (SpaceX)
The Deal: $800B Tender Offer (Dec 2025)

🎶 On the Second Deal of Christmas, Sam Altman gave to me…
🔁 Two Corporate Structures (OpenAI)
The Deal: $6.6B Tender Offer at $500B valuation (Oct 2025)

🎶 On the Third Deal of Christmas, Peter Thiel gave to me…
🔮 Three Election Bets (Polymarket)
The Deal: $2B Strategic Round (Oct 2025)

🎶 On the Fourth Deal of Christmas, Marc Andreessen gave to me…
💻 Four Coding Agents (Cursor)
The Deal: Series D, $2.3B funding (Nov 2025)

🎶 On the Fifth Deal of Christmas, Elon Musk gave to me…
🔋 FIVE COLOSSUS CLUSTERS (xAI)
The Deal: Series C, $15B funding (Dec 2025)

🎶 On the Sixth Deal of Christmas, Jeff Bezos gave to me…
🔍 Six Search Engines (Perplexity)
The Deal: Series D, $500M funding (Oct 2025)

🎶 On the Seventh Deal of Christmas, Patrick Collison gave to me…
🪙 Seven Stablecoins (Stripe x Bridge)
The Deal: $1.1B acquisition (Oct 2024)

🎶 On the Eighth Deal of Christmas, Dario Amodei gave to me…
📜 Eight Safety Papers (Anthropic)
The Deal: Series E, $3.5B funding (March 2025)

🎶 On the Ninth Deal of Christmas, Tarek Mansour gave to me…
⚖️ Nine Legal Wagers (Kalshi)
The Deal: Series E, $1B funding (Dec 2025)

🎶 On the Tenth Deal of Christmas, Palmer Luckey gave to me…
🛡️ Ten Drones a-Flying (Anduril)
The Deal: Series G, $2.5B funding (June 2025)

🎶 On the Eleventh Deal of Christmas, Sundar Pichai gave to me…
🚕 Eleven Frozen Taxis (Waymo)
The Deal: $15B funding talks (Dec 2025)

🎶 On the Twelfth Deal of Christmas, Jensen Huang gave to me…
🤖 Twelve Robots Dancing (Figure AI)
The Deal: Series C, $1B funding (Sept 2025)

📚 Read of the Day 🎄

The Economics of Santa’s Workshop

An investment memo, written by Santa

FROM: Santa Claus, Founder & CEO
TO: Prospective LPs & Holiday Believers
STAGE: Pre-IPO (Permanent Private Company)

Santa’s Workshop is a vertically integrated manufacturing and logistics platform serving 2.4B customers in a single night. It gives away its product, prints infinite goodwill, and runs the most efficient last-mile operation ever built.

• Per-unit value delivered: ~$24

• Cost per unit: ~$10

• Gross margin (theoretical): ~59%

• CAC: $0

• LTV/CAC: Infinite

Santa exploits time zones with a 31-hour follow-the-moon delivery blitz, dynamically reallocates inventory using a Nice/Naughty behavioral scoring system, and spends nothing on marketing because belief does the work.

The catch: Santa burns cash for 364 days and executes perfectly for one night. Venture math breaks immediately.

Final take:
Some companies optimize for margin.
The best ones optimize for magic.

🎅 Investor CTA:
Santa is available for introductory meetings over milk and cookies, fireside preferred.
No decks. Chimney access encouraged.

🏴‍☠️🎵 Spotify’s Catalog Just Got Wrapped (By Pirates)

Spotify confirmed that a third party scraped large portions of its music library, with reports suggesting up to 300TB of data was copied. While Spotify says no user data was compromised, the incident highlights how even the most scaled content platforms struggle to fully defend their digital moats.

Why it matters:
In a world of AI scraping, data access is becoming a feature, not a bug. Content companies may own distribution, but exclusivity is getting harder to enforce at the internet scale.

👉 Worth reading if you care about content moats, data leakage, and the future of digital IP protection.

📰 News You Don’t Want To Miss

🪏 🪨 Gold, Silver, and Copper are surging - Precious metals hit record highs going into the New Year.

⚙️ 🎄 Nvidia Acquires Groq's Assets for $20B - Blockbuster deal announced on Christmas Eve, positioning Nvidia to lead the semiconductor race.

🎁 🤖 ChatGPT launches a year-end review like Spotify Wrapped - OpenAI leans into consumer engagement, signaling platform ambitions beyond research.

🎬 💰 Paramount renews bid for Warner Bros with $40B Larry Ellison backing - Hollywood consolidation is back, with serious capital behind it.

🧠 🔓 OpenAI warns AI browsers may always be vulnerable to prompt injection - Agentic systems come with permanent security trade-offs.

🎧 🪨 Nearly all of Spotify’s music catalog reportedly scraped - Content moats remain fragile at internet scale.

🚗 ❄️ Waymo cars stranded after San Francisco power outage - Autonomy still depends on old-world infrastructure.