1. Implicit Gender Bias in Startup Funding: Foundry Group founder Brad Feld (Techstars, Zynga) takes his cues from Dana Kanze’s recent TED Talk to emphasize promotion over prevention.
2. The Big Leap: Katie Jacobs Stanton, veteran of Google, Twitter, Angels, and Barack Obama’s White House, announced her entry into the full-time investing world.
3. What Sweetgreen Can Teach Startups About Scaling Intimacy: First Round Review mulls over what seems to be a paradoxical business model.
4. Today’s Graphs look into all funding rounds for South American startups dating back to 2008.
5. Knock (New York, NY), home trade-in platform: $400M B & Debt led by Foundry Group, participation from RRE, Corazon, WTI, FJ Labs, Company Ventures.
6. Rubrik (Palo Alto, CA), cloud data management and protection platform: $261M E led by Bain Capital Ventures, participation from Lightspeed, Greylock, Khosla, IVP. The company was valued at $3.3B and has raised $553M to date. CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha is a partner at Lightspeed and was previously an investor with Blumberg.
7. DMI Finance (Liechtenstein), non-banking lending platform active in India: $230M from New Investment Solutions.
8. Our top funding round was Real Estate for $400M raised in one deal.
9. Today’s average round came in at $35,130,000.
10. To unlock the content below (four more VC Reads, the complete VC Graphs, 38 more rounds, and the funding breakdown) upgrade to Inside Premium.

Today's VC Reads topics include how to scale the sensation of being personally involved, reports of two years of profitability for a startup preparing for IPO, stumbles by the world's most valuable startup, and more.

Today's funded companies include a platform for schools to rent their space for extra funding, an agricultural supply chain management platform, a solar power hardware producer, and more.

VC funding levels, which remained extremely low until 2015, have recently taken off thanks to late-stage rounds.

The number of rounds began falling early in 2014 and the average round began growing somewhat later in 2015.

A fall in series A-C funding was compensated for by debt and PE funding, among others.

The decline in funding rounds was driven almost entirely by losses for new entrants.

The average round has grown in general, driven largely by gains from late-stage and debt funding.

Today's funding total was divided into 17 categories.

Inside VC's writer/curator Stephen currently lives in Berlin and is pursuing a Master's degree in philosophy. He otherwise enjoys cooking Indian/Southeast Asian cuisine, received his Bachelors in NYC, and lived almost two years in Bucharest.

Editing team: Lon Harris (editor-in-chief at Inside.com, game-master at Screen Junkies), Krystle Vermes (Breaking news editor at Inside, B2B marketing news reporter, host of the "All Day Paranormal" podcast), and Susmita Baral (editor at Inside, recent bylines in NatGeo, Teen Vogue, and Quartz. Runs the biggest mac and cheese account on Instagram).