Your Daily Gist — February 21, 2026

Welcome to Daily Gist — your newsletters, distilled into conversation! The AI boom didn't just change which startups get funded — it completely reshuffled who gets to write the checks. Okay, that's a bigger deal than it sounds. Because in 2021, everybody and their hedge fund was writing checks into startups. Are we saying that crowd is just... gone? Largely, yes. Crunchbase dug into who's actually backing the hottest companies now versus 2021, and t