Lightspeed

Miniature venture funds are operating at select Silicon Valley private schools, receiving parent-investors from major firms like Sequoia and Lightspeed. These school programs, described as a recent trend, have seen high returns, such as one fund turning $15,000 into roughly $34 million at an IPO for Saint Francis High School. With anticipated IPOs from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, these school funds may hold significant investment potential.

Some Silicon Valley private schools are raising funds by building miniature venture capital funds instead of traditional galas. These funds accept donations from alumni and parent-investors, using expertise from firms like Lightspeed and Sequoia to invest in pre-IPO tech companies. Saint Francis High School pioneered this method with a major investment in Snap that returned substantial profits when the company went public.

Founders Ran Ribenzaft and Nitzan Shapira, who sold their previous startup Epsagon to Cisco for $500 million, raised a $34 million seed round for their new AI startup Harmony. Harmony automates workplace tasks like onboarding and password resets using AI integrated into Slack and Microsoft Teams.

AI companies are rapidly expanding into each other's markets, with labs like Anthropic and OpenAI entering coding platforms and agentic application spaces. Startups such as Emergent anticipate competition from larger firms but believe challenges like building secure, production-grade apps for non-technical users remain difficult for spread-thin competitors.

Foreign assets like MON and HYPE on Solana generate 50x higher trading volume per unit compared to their native chains, driven by Solana's capital efficiency. The Solana Foundation's Tokens initiative aims to expand non-native asset support, with foreign tokens reaching $818M market cap as of April 2026.