Julie Bort

Julie Bort covers the intersection of artificial intelligence, startups and venture capital, with a focus on how money, power and new technology shape each other. She serves as Startups/Venture Desk editor at TechCrunch, anchoring coverage of AI-first companies, their backers and the market forces around them. Her work ranges from rapid funding and valuation updates to deeper looks at venture strategy, founder dynamics and the shifting pecking order among major tech and AI players, including pieces on how the traditional FAANG cohort has evolved.

AI’s $100 billion impact

AI companies and their investors are the core of Bort’s beat, and she covers them as a business story first. She follows AI startups from early traction to major rounds and valuations, reporting on companies like Flow Engineering, Arcee, Firmus and LiteLLM as they raise hundreds of millions and attract backers such as Nvidia, Valor, Atreides and Sequoia. Her reporting tracks AI’s role in venture capital at scale, including work on the “$100 billion impact” of AI on 2024’s venture capital surge and what that means for startups.

She regularly profiles AI infrastructure and tooling startups, such as open AI chip maker SiFive, AI inference players like Gimlet Labs and AI gateways like LiteLLM, framing their technology in terms of investor appetite and market bottlenecks. Bort also covers AI-focused funds, conflicts and corporate alignments, writing on AWS’s dual investments in Anthropic and OpenAI and on OpenAI alums quietly backing new funds, showing how AI reshapes venture relationships as much as products.

Her AI coverage extends into safety, governance and real-world deployment, including articles on AI biology labs at Anthropic, AI tools protecting hospitals from corrupt doctors and efforts to make AI safer for children.

VC megadeals are booming

Bort treats large financings and IPOs as moments to examine how venture capital works under the surface. She has reported extensively on megadeals and late-stage valuations, covering Anduril’s $5 billion raise and doubled $61 billion valuation, Shield AI’s jump to a $12.7 billion valuation after a U.S. Air Force deal, and Helsing’s multibillion financing backed by investors like Daniel Ek.

She follows companies through the arc from private funding to public markets, including repeated coverage of Cerebras, from its huge IPO that delivered billions to Benchmark to subsequent valuation moves and stock performance.

Her desk tracks high-profile fintech and productivity companies as they approach or execute IPOs, such as Klarna’s path to a “blockbuster IPO” and SailPoint’s listing as a test of the stuck IPO window. Bort also reports on major venture funds and capital pools, writing on a16z crypto’s $2.2 billion fund as the sector cools, on Sequoia and other top firms backing AI startups, and on how AI and non-AI categories stack up within the boom in VC megadeals.

Across these stories she foregrounds valuation, deal terms and investor behavior, using concrete numbers and named backers to make the dynamics legible to readers without drifting into generic market commentary.

Silicon Valley is so dominant again

Beyond individual deals, Bort covers Silicon Valley and the wider startup ecosystem as a culture and power structure.

She has written on how Silicon Valley startups again command more than half of U.S. venture funding, tying geography to capital concentration and influence. Her work frequently explores founder and investor behavior, from “VC rage bait” that sparked reaction from a16z to Insight Partners’ views on what keeps founders from raising big rounds. She profiles unconventional paths into tech and venture, including Olympic champion Kristen Faulkner’s comparison of winning a gold medal to becoming a VC, and high school founders of apps like Cal AI and API startups that raised significant seed rounds.

Bort reports on workplace and compensation experiments at startups like Lovable and broader culture trends such as the return of nap pods and hustle culture with the AI startup boom, connecting day-to-day practices to funding conditions and investor expectations. She also covers conflicts and drama among big names and companies - SpaceX internal stock deals, brawls on X over VC behavior, disputes involving companies like Rippling and Deel - using these episodes to show how power is contested inside the ecosystem.

Even a16z VCs say no one really knows what an AI agent is

Bort often uses confusion around new technical buzzwords as a way to explain what is actually happening in the market. She has written explicitly on ambiguity around “AI agents,” including a piece where even a16z investors concede that the term lacks a clear definition, then ties that to new agent-based startups and experiments from giants like Microsoft. Her coverage of agent and automation companies, such as Armadin’s “agent swarm” security startup and multiple OpenClaw-related stories, looks at how investors and founders try to package these concepts into fundable narratives.

She reports on coding assistants and tools - Cursor, Claude Code, Nova AI, Supabase’s “vibe coding” - to show how developer workflows change and what kinds of AI features actually resonate in practice. Alongside these, she covers corporate positioning around AI safety and regulation, interviewing VCs like Martin Casado on why many AI regulations are flawed, and documenting new AI “safety” funds and biology labs.

Taken together, these pieces show a reporter who uses funding rounds, product launches and investor commentary to cut through hype and describe how AI concepts turn into businesses, policies and work tools.