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Term Sheet Next: Erica Wenger on elephants, branding in VC, and her first fund

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3 weeks ago

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“The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was against much of the unicorn obsession,” she said. “It’s just so one-dimensional. Listen, I’m all for making money, and I think elephants can be worth far more than a billion dollars. But people should be looking at traits beyond valuation to determine success. I’ve seen so many people gloat: ‘I backed eight, ten unicorns.’ I’m like: ‘what, you came in at the Series B?’ It wasn’t about the multiple, it wasn’t about the underlying health of the business.”

So, Wenger—who’s a three-time founder, including of exited startups Mistaken for Bacon and Mahkana—came to a decision: “Aileen [Lee] owned unicorns. I want to own elephants.” Elephants, she said, emphasized resilience, solid business fundamentals, and longevity, rather than making a point of chasing sometimes-ephemeral billion-dollar valuations. On Beehiiv in 2023, she first published her “elephants, not unicorns” thesis and it went viral, resonating in a landscape where profitability for all but the most sought-after AI darlings is key. Her goal was that the writing would serve as a branding bat signal. (Her essays have drawn in more than one million views, she told Fortune. Wenger, who also worked as Worklife Ventures’s head of platform, has more than 90,000 followers across social media platforms.)

“I want people to find me online, identify with my point of view, and seek me out,” said Wenger. “I want to have my brand and our firm be bigger than me. You can only have so many meetings in one day, so this was a way to reach people. You can also timestamp ideas: ‘I was calling this back then, look at the date.’”

Wenger kept up the wildlife theme, in some sense, when she started Park Rangers Capital in 2023. Now, after raising from 130 LPs, she’s closed the firm’s first fund at $4.3 million, and there are some early prospective winners in her portfolio like Superpower, Clay, and Beehiiv. 

“I really wanted to create a broader analogy about what I want to see change in venture,” said Wenger. “When I was a founder, I always felt like the relationship between the VC and founder was a little funky. The VC shouldn’t be the star of the show, it’s actually the founder who’s building. So, the analogy is that the founders are the national parks of the world. They’re majestic. They have life in them… And VCs are the humble park rangers. They’re stewards of the land. They make sure no one’s littering. They let you in, let you out, protect and serve.”

Wenger wanted to evoke “integrity, service, and humility” with the name. It was a characteristic act of narrative-making that resonated with Jacob Peters, founder of $300 million health tech startup Superpower. 

“She’s proving that brand, content, and conviction can compound just like capital,” he said via email. “While most investors wait for reputation to happen over decades, Erica is deliberately building it through ideas that resonate.”

To start, Park Rangers have been writing checks between $100,000 and $200,000. But General Atlantic’s Anton Levy—known for backing Alibaba, Uber, Snapchat, and Slack—said via email that Wenger will keep punching above her weight. 

“I’ve only known Erica for a few years, but Erica is a force of nature in the best way,” said Levy, co-president, managing director, chairman of the global technology group at General Atlantic. “She’s a hustler in the best sense of the word… relentless, creative, and deeply connected to the founders she backs. What makes her unique is that she doesn’t just talk about community and distribution, she lives it. She’s built a brand, a platform, and a network that most firms multiples her size would envy. “

Term Sheet asked Wenger the central question of this series: what’s next?

“For me, it’s continuing to build out our distribution, building out a really well-respected and beloved firm,” she said. “The way we ask our founders to build their own distribution—that’s the ultimate moat—we’re doing the same thing as a firm. My philosophy is that software is a commodity, as is capital. So, to stand out in this next decade, you have to be an incredible storyteller and go-to-market leader. You have to have a great brand, great content, and be very human. As a fund, we’re mimicking what we tell our founders to do.”

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Venture Deals

– CHAOS Industries, a Los Angeles, Calif.-based developer of threat-detection and anti-radar software for the defense industry, raised $510 million in Series D funding. Valor Equity Partners led the round and was joined by 8VC and Accel.

– Gopuff, a Philadelphia, Penn.-based courier service, raised $250 million in funding. Eldridge Industries and Valor Equity Partners led the round and were joined by Baillie Gifford, Equalis Capital, and others.

– Alembic, a San Francisco-based developer of a casual AI platform designed to provide marketing analytics for C-Suite executives, raised $145 million in Series B funding. Prysm Capital and Accenture led the round and were joined by Silver Lake Waterman, Liquid 2 Ventures, and others. 

– Parallel, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company developing infrastructure designed to enable AI agents to access and think with the web, raised $100 million in Series A funding. Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures led the round and were joined by Spark Capital and existing investors.

– Fabric8Labs, a San Diego, Calif.-based developer of advanced additive manufacturing facilities that can create metal parts that cannot be created with traditional manufacturing, raised $50 million in funding. NEA and Intel Capital led the round and were joined by existing investors Lam Capital, TDK Ventures, SE Ventures, and others.

– CloudX, a San Francisco-based AI-powered advertising platform for mobile publishers, raised $30 million in Series A funding. Addition led the round and was joined by DST Global, Terrain, and others.

– sunday, an Atlanta, Ga.-based payment platform designed for restaurant hospitality, raised $21 million in Series B funding from DST Global Partners and others.

– Vend Park, a Boston, Mass.-based AI-powered parking technology and operations company, raised $17.5 million in Series A funding. Blue Heron Capital led the round and was joined by Nuveen’s Real Asset Ventures, Communitas Capital, and others.

– Anzen, a San Francisco-based AI-powered distribution platform for commercial insurance, raised $16 million in Series A funding. Madrona led the round and was joined by Sandbox Industries, SNR, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. 

– Milestone, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based platform for measuring the adoption and impact of AI coding tools, raised $10 million in seed funding. Heavybit and Hanaco Ventures led the round and were joined by Atlassian Ventures and angel investors.

– Obello, a San Francisco-based AI-powered graphic design platform, raised $8.5 million in seed funding. Obvious Ventures led the round and was joined by Baukunst and others.

– Bindwell, a San Francisco-based company using AI to develop pesticides designed to be safer, raised $6 million in seed funding. General Catalyst and A Capital led the round and were joined by SV Angel and Paul Graham.

– Skycore Semiconductors, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based developer of power integrated circuit technology for data centers, raised €5 million ($5.8 million) in seed funding. Amadeus APEX Technology Fund led the round and was joined by First Momentum, Mätch VC, and Balnord.

– Cronvall, a Helsinki, Finland-based industrial procurement marketplace, raised €3.9 million ($4.5 million) in funding from Greencode Ventures, Stephen Industries, and Innovestor.

– Vida, an Austin, Texas-based AI phone agent operating system for enterprises, raised $4 million in Series A funding. Trammell Venture Partners led the round and was joined by Timechain and others.

– Theo Ai, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based legal AI platform designed to predict the outcomes of cases, raised $3.4 million in a seed extension. Run Ventures led the round.

– Greenshoe, a Chicago, Ill.-based AI platform designed for SEC disclosure automation and investor relations, raised $3 million in seed funding. AIX Ventures led the round and was joined by Hearst Level Up Ventures, Blueprint FTC, Service Provider Capital, and others.

– Preveta, a Los Angeles, Calif.-based AI-powered care navigation platform designed for specialty care, raised $2.4 million in a Series A extension. Navigate Ventures and Sovereign Capital led the round and were joined by Bullpen Capital and TMV.

– Sensetics, a Princeton, N.J.-based haptics and touch data company, raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding. MetaVC Partners and Fitz Gate Ventures led the round and were joined by Blue Sky Capital and AIC Ventures.

Private Equity

– TSG Consumer acquired a minority stake in Pura Vida Miami, a Miami, Fla.-based all-day cafe and lifestyle brand. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Exits

– Cognizant agreed to acquire 3Cloud, a Chicago, Ill.-based Microsoft Azure services provider, from Gryphon Investors. Financial terms were not disclosed. 

– Investcorp acquired Kanawha Scales & Systems, a Poca, W.V.-based provider of calibration, maintenance, and repair systems for industrial weighing systems and automated control solutions, from American Equipment Holdings, a portfolio company of Rotunda Capital Partners. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Funds + Funds of Funds

– nvp capital, a New York City-based venture capital firm, raised $80 million for its second fund focused on enterprise software and vertical AI companies. 

People

– Redpoint Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, hired Renee Shah as a partner. Previously, she was with Amplify Partners.



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Senate Dems’ plan to fix Obamacare premiums adds nearly $300 billion to deficit, CRFB says

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6 hours ago

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December 5, 2025

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The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is a nonpartisan watchdog that regularly estimates how much the U.S. Congress is adding to the $38 trillion national debt.

With enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies due to expire within days, some Senate Democrats are scrambling to protect millions of Americans from getting the unpleasant holiday gift of spiking health insurance premiums. The CRFB says there’s just one problem with the plan: It’s not funded.

“With the national debt as large as the economy and interest payments costing $1 trillion annually, it is absurd to suggest adding hundreds of billions more to the debt,” CRFB President Maya MacGuineas wrote in a statement on Friday afternoon.

The proposal, backed by members of the Senate Democratic caucus, would fully extend the enhanced ACA subsidies for three years, from 2026 through 2028, with no additional income limits on who can qualify. Those subsidies, originally boosted during the pandemic and later renewed, were designed to lower premiums and prevent coverage losses for middle‑ and lower‑income households purchasing insurance on the ACA exchanges.

CRFB estimated that even this three‑year extension alone would add roughly $300 billion to federal deficits over the next decade, largely because the federal government would continue to shoulder a larger share of premium costs while enrollment and subsidy amounts remain elevated. If Congress ultimately moves to make the enhanced subsidies permanent—as many advocates have urged—the total cost could swell to nearly $550 billion in additional borrowing over the next decade.

Reversing recent guardrails

MacGuineas called the Senate bill “far worse than even a debt-financed extension” as it would roll back several “program integrity” measures that were enacted as part of a 2025 reconciliation law and were intended to tighten oversight of ACA subsidies. On top of that, it would be funded by borrowing even more. “This is a bad idea made worse,” MacGuineas added.

The watchdog group’s central critique is that the new Senate plan does not attempt to offset its costs through spending cuts or new revenue and, in their view, goes beyond a simple extension by expanding the underlying subsidy structure.

The legislation would permanently repeal restrictions that eliminated subsidies for certain groups enrolling during special enrollment periods and would scrap rules requiring full repayment of excess advance subsidies and stricter verification of eligibility and tax reconciliation. The bill would also nullify portions of a 2025 federal regulation that loosened limits on the actuarial value of exchange plans and altered how subsidies are calculated, effectively reshaping how generous plans can be and how federal support is determined. CRFB warned these reversals would increase costs further while weakening safeguards designed to reduce misuse and error in the subsidy system.

MacGuineas said that any subsidy extension should be paired with broader reforms to curb health spending and reduce overall borrowing. In her view, lawmakers are missing a chance to redesign ACA support in a way that lowers premiums while also improving the long‑term budget outlook.

The debate over ACA subsidies recently contributed to a government funding standoff, and CRFB argued that the new Senate bill reflects a political compromise that prioritizes short‑term relief over long‑term fiscal responsibility.

“After a pointless government shutdown over this issue, it is beyond disappointing that this is the preferred solution to such an important issue,” MacGuineas wrote.

The off-year elections cast the government shutdown and cost-of-living arguments in a different light. Democrats made stunning gains and almost flipped a deep-red district in Tennessee as politicians from the far left and center coalesced around “affordability.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is reportedly smelling blood in the water and doubling down on the theme heading into the pivotal midterm elections of 2026. President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Pennsylvania soon to discuss pocketbook anxieties. But he is repeating predecessor Joe Biden’s habit of dismissing inflation, despite widespread evidence to the contrary.

“We fixed inflation, and we fixed almost everything,” Trump said in a Tuesday cabinet meeting, in which he also dismissed affordability as a “hoax” pushed by Democrats.​

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle now face a politically fraught choice: allow premiums to jump sharply—including in swing states like Pennsylvania where ACA enrollees face double‑digit increases—or pass an expensive subsidy extension that would, as CRFB calculates, explode the deficit without addressing underlying health care costs.



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Netflix–Warner Bros. deal sets up $72 billion antitrust test

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6 hours ago

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December 5, 2025

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Netflix Inc. has won the heated takeover battle for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Now it must convince global antitrust regulators that the deal won’t give it an illegal advantage in the streaming market. 

The $72 billion tie-up joins the world’s dominant paid streaming service with one of Hollywood’s most iconic movie studios. It would reshape the market for online video content by combining the No. 1 streaming player with the No. 4 service HBO Max and its blockbuster hits such as Game Of Thrones, Friends, and the DC Universe comics characters franchise.  

That could raise red flags for global antitrust regulators over concerns that Netflix would have too much control over the streaming market. The company faces a lengthy Justice Department review and a possible US lawsuit seeking to block the deal if it doesn’t adopt some remedies to get it cleared, analysts said.

“Netflix will have an uphill climb unless it agrees to divest HBO Max as well as additional behavioral commitments — particularly on licensing content,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jennifer Rie. “The streaming overlap is significant,” she added, saying the argument that “the market should be viewed more broadly is a tough one to win.”

By choosing Netflix, Warner Bros. has jilted another bidder, Paramount Skydance Corp., a move that risks touching off a political battle in Washington. Paramount is backed by the world’s second-richest man, Larry Ellison, and his son, David Ellison, and the company has touted their longstanding close ties to President Donald Trump. Their acquisition of Paramount, which closed in August, has won public praise from Trump. 

Comcast Corp. also made a bid for Warner Bros., looking to merge it with its NBCUniversal division.

The Justice Department’s antitrust division, which would review the transaction in the US, could argue that the deal is illegal on its face because the combined market share would put Netflix well over a 30% threshold.

The White House, the Justice Department and Comcast didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. 

US lawmakers from both parties, including Republican Representative Darrell Issa and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren have already faulted the transaction — which would create a global streaming giant with 450 million users — as harmful to consumers.

“This deal looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare,” Warren said after the Netflix announcement. Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, said in a social media post earlier this week that a Warner Bros.-Netflix tie-up would raise more serious competition questions “than any transaction I’ve seen in about a decade.”

European Union regulators are also likely to subject the Netflix proposal to an intensive review amid pressure from legislators. In the UK, the deal has already drawn scrutiny before the announcement, with House of Lords member Baroness Luciana Berger pressing the government on how the transaction would impact competition and consumer prices.

The combined company could raise prices and broadly impact “culture, film, cinemas and theater releases,”said Andreas Schwab, a leading member of the European Parliament on competition issues, after the announcement.

Paramount has sought to frame the Netflix deal as a non-starter. “The simple truth is that a deal with Netflix as the buyer likely will never close, due to antitrust and regulatory challenges in the United States and in most jurisdictions abroad,” Paramount’s antitrust lawyers wrote to their counterparts at Warner Bros. on Dec. 1.

Appealing directly to Trump could help Netflix avoid intense antitrust scrutiny, New Street Research’s Blair Levin wrote in a note on Friday. Levin said it’s possible that Trump could come to see the benefit of switching from a pro-Paramount position to a pro-Netflix position. “And if he does so, we believe the DOJ will follow suit,” Levin wrote.

Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos had dinner with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last December, a move other CEOs made after the election in order to win over the administration. In a call with investors Friday morning, Sarandos said that he’s “highly confident in the regulatory process,” contending the deal favors consumers, workers and innovation. 

“Our plans here are to work really closely with all the appropriate governments and regulators, but really confident that we’re going to get all the necessary approvals that we need,” he said.

Netflix will likely argue to regulators that other video services such as Google’s YouTube and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok should be included in any analysis of the market, which would dramatically shrink the company’s perceived dominance.

The US Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the transfer of broadcast-TV licenses, isn’t expected to play a role in the deal, as neither hold such licenses. Warner Bros. plans to spin off its cable TV division, which includes channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT, before the sale.

Even if antitrust reviews just focus on streaming, Netflix believes it will ultimately prevail, pointing to Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime and Walt Disney Co. as other major competitors, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. 

Netflix is expected to argue that more than 75% of HBO Max subscribers already subscribe to Netflix, making them complementary offerings rather than competitors, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing confidential deliberations. The company is expected to make the case that reducing its content costs through owning Warner Bros., eliminating redundant back-end technology and bundling Netflix with Max will yield lower prices.



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The rise of AI reasoning models comes with a big energy tradeoff

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7 hours ago

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December 5, 2025

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Nearly all leading artificial intelligence developers are focused on building AI models that mimic the way humans reason, but new research shows these cutting-edge systems can be far more energy intensive, adding to concerns about AI’s strain on power grids.

AI reasoning models used 30 times more power on average to respond to 1,000 written prompts than alternatives without this reasoning capability or which had it disabled, according to a study released Thursday. The work was carried out by the AI Energy Score project, led by Hugging Face research scientist Sasha Luccioni and Salesforce Inc. head of AI sustainability Boris Gamazaychikov.

The researchers evaluated 40 open, freely available AI models, including software from OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp. Some models were found to have a much wider disparity in energy consumption, including one from Chinese upstart DeepSeek. A slimmed-down version of DeepSeek’s R1 model used just 50 watt hours to respond to the prompts when reasoning was turned off, or about as much power as is needed to run a 50 watt lightbulb for an hour. With the reasoning feature enabled, the same model required 7,626 watt hours to complete the tasks.

The soaring energy needs of AI have increasingly come under scrutiny. As tech companies race to build more and bigger data centers to support AI, industry watchers have raised concerns about straining power grids and raising energy costs for consumers. A Bloomberg investigation in September found that wholesale electricity prices rose as much as 267% over the past five years in areas near data centers. There are also environmental drawbacks, as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com Inc. have previously acknowledged the data center buildout could complicate their long-term climate objectives. 

More than a year ago, OpenAI released its first reasoning model, called o1. Where its prior software replied almost instantly to queries, o1 spent more time computing an answer before responding. Many other AI companies have since released similar systems, with the goal of solving more complex multistep problems for fields like science, math and coding.

Though reasoning systems have quickly become the industry norm for carrying out more complicated tasks, there has been little research into their energy demands. Much of the increase in power consumption is due to reasoning models generating much more text when responding, the researchers said. 

The new report aims to better understand how AI energy needs are evolving, Luccioni said. She also hopes it helps people better understand that there are different types of AI models suited to different actions. Not every query requires tapping the most computationally intensive AI reasoning systems.

“We should be smarter about the way that we use AI,” Luccioni said. “Choosing the right model for the right task is important.”

To test the difference in power use, the researchers ran all the models on the same computer hardware. They used the same prompts for each, ranging from simple questions — such as asking which team won the Super Bowl in a particular year — to more complex math problems. They also used a software tool called CodeCarbon to track how much energy was being consumed in real time.

The results varied considerably. The researchers found one of Microsoft’s Phi 4 reasoning models used 9,462 watt hours with reasoning turned on, compared with about 18 watt hours with it off. OpenAI’s largest gpt-oss model, meanwhile, had a less stark difference. It used 8,504 watt hours with reasoning on the most computationally intensive “high” setting and 5,313 watt hours with the setting turned down to “low.” 

OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google released internal research in August that estimated the median text prompt for its Gemini AI service used 0.24 watt-hours of energy, roughly equal to watching TV for less than nine seconds. Google said that figure was “substantially lower than many public estimates.” 

Much of the discussion about AI power consumption has focused on large-scale facilities set up to train artificial intelligence systems. Increasingly, however, tech firms are shifting more resources to inference, or the process of running AI systems after they’ve been trained. The push toward reasoning models is a big piece of that as these systems are more reliant on inference.

Recently, some tech leaders have acknowledged that AI’s power draw needs to be reckoned with. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the industry must earn the “social permission to consume energy” for AI data centers in a November interview. To do that, he argued tech must use AI to do good and foster broad economic growth.



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