Forbes Daily Briefing

In 2014, Australian entrepreneur Tuhin Srivastava had scored a meeting with Sarah Guo, then the youngest partner at storied VC firm Greylock. He was pitching her on a healthcare startup that used machine learning to analyze a person’s medical history. Guo was impressed — not by the idea, which was “generic,” she says, but by him and his cofounder. Five years later, he tried again, this time with something far more promising: tools that make it easier to build and run AI applications. 

It was years before the stunning launch of ChatGPT mainstreamed artificial intelligence, but Guo was already confident that more businesses would soon turn to AI and need cheap and efficient ways to use it. She wrote a $1.5 million check into what became Baseten, co-leading the startup’s $3 million seed round in 2019. “All we had was some idea of a company on scratch paper,” Srivastava says.

For the first four years, the company made no money. AI tools weren’t being rapidly adopted back then. The best thing to do was to wait for the market to come around. Almost overnight, it did.

Today, Baseten is valued at $5 billion, with revenue growing over 10 times in the past year. (It’s now reportedly in talks to raise at an $11 billion valuation.) Guo invested in every round, first from Greylock and then from her own VC firm Conviction, which she launched in October 2022. Today, she says her stake is worth 10 times its initial value. “We own the most from day zero and it's clearly going to be a winner company,” says Guo, 36.

By Rashi Shrivastava,

Writer
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Ina 12-acre industrial campus in Sacramento across the street from a U.S. Navy recruiting center, Natura grows 80,000 pounds of weed a year inside 18 glass-ceilinged hot houses. Most of the cannabis will eventually be ground up and made into pre-rolled joints, which are infused with hash and dusted with an extra punch of THC, the compound that gets people high. 

Every day, Natura produces 40,000 of its pre-rolls for its in-house brand Sluggers Hit, or about 1.2 million joints a month, generating around $60 million in revenue last year and is on track to hit $85 million by the end of 2026. Leaning into sports tropes, Sluggers’ best-selling product is its five-pack of pre-rolls in a tin wrapped in a metallic mylar bag like the kind collectible sports cards come in. Sluggers’ branding is eye-catching and riffs off sports teams—its New York Diesel pack is emblazoned with a logo reminiscent of the Knicks’ orange and blue and its Green Monster five-pack is an ode to Fenway Park. Sluggers even has a collaboration with actor Chauncey Leopardi, who played Squints in the classic 1993 baseball movie The Sandlot, and just released a limited edition run with rapper Xzibit.

By Will Yakowicz,

Forbes Staff
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May was a good month to be a billionaire, as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq climbed by 5% and 8%, respectively, boosting the fortunes of the world’s ten richest people to $2.9 trillion combined as of June 1 at 12 a.m. Eastern time. As a group, they’re $220 billion richer than they were a month ago.

No one had a better May than Larry Ellison, who is back in the top five after adding a staggering $71 billion to his fortune (which is now an estimated $276 billion). For that, Ellison can thank red-hot demand for AI. The software giant he cofounded and runs as chairman and chief technology officer is building multiple gigawatt-scale data centers across the U.S. and, on May 1, announced an agreement with the U.S. Department of War to deploy its AI tools on classified networks for government warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations. Oracle stock, of which Ellison owns around 40%, climbed 40% in May.

Hot on Ellison’s heels is Michael Dell, the month’s second-biggest gainer after adding $67 billion as the AI boom continues to lift his Dell Technologies, too. The tech giant reported banner earnings on May 28, smashing expectations and disclosing a 757% year-over-year surge in annual AI server revenue—helping drive the stock up 33%, its best trading day ever. In all, Dell stock jumped more than 100% in May. Both Ellison and Dell edge past Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who drops to No. 7—despite getting $7 billion richer, as shares of the Facebook parent company climbed just 3%, underperforming the broader market and Zuck’s billionaire competitors amid huge AI capital expenditures and employee layoffs at Meta.
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It’s hard to imagine now, but back in 2021 venture capitalists weren’t sold on Anthropic. The mega-AI startup is now valued at $380 billion, but at the time it had no public product, no revenue and was trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. “AI was not viewed as this supersexy, exciting thing that you would want to invest in,” says cofounder and president Daniela Amodei, who had been an early OpenAI employee before leaving with six of her colleagues to start Anthropic that year. 

Her brother, CEO Dario Amodei, quickly drummed up $1.1 billion in funding from a range of billionaire investors, including Facebook alum Dustin Moskovitz and soon-to-be-disgraced crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried. It was enough to cobble together an early version of Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, but not nearly enough to fully train it to compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which exploded onto the scene in November 2022. Scared of spending billions backing what appeared to be an also-ran, most traditional VCs shied away—except Spark Capital partner Yasmin Razavi.

By Iain Martin,

Forbes Staff
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Two former Benchmark investors are pitching something you don’t usually see this soon: a joint, $800 million AI fund—less than a year after each left to raise smaller, founder-led vehicles on their own.

Victor Lazarte left the Silicon Valley fund in July 2025 after backing companies like Mercor, Heygen and Applied Compute in his two-year stretch as a partner. After exiting Benchmark, he quickly raised $200 million for his own fund, VL.

Now, Lazarte is pitching a much bigger fund to make bets on early and growth stage startups. He’s telling prospective limited partners he plans to raise a new fund called Diffusion and co-manage it with Kris Fredrickson, according to several investors who say they were pitched on the effort. The target is roughly $800 million, one of the larger first-time venture raises of the year.

Fredrickson started his investing career at Benchmark before moving to hedge fund Coatue, where he backed companies like Instacart, Chime and Scale AI. Forbes reported last July that Fredrickson had raised $175 million for his own fund, Verified, to back growth stage AI startups like legal platform Harvey and search engine Perplexity.

By Iain Martin,

Forbes Staff
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