Y Combinator’s latest batch of startups is too big for one Demo Day stageY Combinator has been steadily ushering in more and more startups into its classes, but this year the poll position accelerator is having to make some major logistical adjustments to accommodate just how massive its group of startups has become. YC has more than 200 startups in their winter 2019 batch (!!) By comparison, the spring 2018 group was just 132 teams. (For the statistically inclined, that’s at least a 51 percent increase batch-over-batch.) In order to accommodate this truly wild amount of elevator pitches, the accelerator is moving to a new venue in San Francisco for its Demo Day event March 18 and 19. [ Tech Crunch ] How a 27-Year-Old CEO Built a Near $1 Billion Fashion StartupZilingo Pte’s path to becoming a fashion platform with a valuation approaching $1 billion began in December 2014 when Ankiti Bose, then an analyst at Sequoia India, chatted with a neighbor at a house party in the Indian tech capital Bengaluru. [ Bloomberg ] Police Pension Backs Morgan Creek's $40 Million Blockchain Venture Capital FundPolice officers and other state employees in Virginia’s Fairfax County will be looking forward to retirement with potential dividends from an unusual source: bitcoin. Two separate pension funds that collectively manage $5.1 billion in assets for the state’s police force and other employees have joined a $40 million investment in the Morgan Creek Blockchain Opportunities Fund, which in addition to backing some of the best-known startups in the space, plans to invest in cryptocurrency. [ Forbes ] Google's Venture Firm Taps Biotech Veteran in Life-Sciences PushGV, the venture-capital arm of Google parent Alphabet Inc., has hired biotechnology industry veteran David Schenkein to co-lead its investments in life sciences, a signal of its increasing ambitions in health care. Schenkein was previously chief executive officer of Agios Pharmaceuticals Inc., which he grew from a small closely held startup to a $3.1 billion biotechnology company. Under his stewardship, the firm developed two U.S.-approved cancer drugs in 10 years, one of the fastest timelines in the industry’s history. He remains chairman of Agios. [ Bloomberg ] Mode, a collaborative analytics platform focused on empowering data scientists, just landed $23 million in fresh fundingMode, a five-year-old collaborative analytics platform based in San Francisco, has raised $23 million in Series C funding led by Valor Equity Partners. Foundation Capital and REV Venture Partners, which had led Mode’s Series A and B financing rounds, respectively, also joined the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $50 million. [ Tech Crunch ] China’s ‘easy’ money days over as value of venture capital deals plunges 67.5 per cent in JanuaryThe Chinese venture capital market collapsed in January, with both the value and number of deals down more than 60 per cent year on year according to new data, though some see the slump as a necessary “correction” amid tighter regulation and slowing economic growth. [ scmp ] Dandelion Energy, the Alphabet X spin out, raises another $16M led by GV and ComcastAs tech companies continue their race to control the smart home, a promising energy startup has raised a round of funding from traditionally tech and strategic investors for a geothermal solution to heat and cool houses. Dandelion Energy, a spin out from Alphabet X, has raised $16 million in a Series A round of funding, with strategic investors Comcast Ventures leading the round, along with GV, the investment arm of Alphabet formerly known as Google Ventures. [ Tech Crunch ] Late-Stage Venture Firm Qumra to Showcase Promising Israeli Pre-Growth Startups in New YorkTel Aviv-based late-stage venture capital firm Qumra Capital will reveal a list of the most promising Israeli startups at Calcalist’s third annual Mind the Tech conference, to take place in New York on April 10-12. Qumra’s list of “Tomorrow’s Promising Growth Companies” will include Israeli companies its partners believe have the potential to reach over $10 million in annual revenues. [ Calcalis Tech ] Datadog acquires app testing company MadumboDatadog, the popular monitoring and analytics platform, today announced that it has acquired Madumbo, an AI-based application testing platform. “We’re excited to have the Madumbo team join Datadog,” said Olivier Pomel, Datadog’s CEO. “They’ve built a sophisticated AI platform that can quickly determine if a web application is behaving correctly. We see their core technology strengthening our platform and extending
into many new digital experience monitoring capabilities for our customers.” [ Tech Crunch ] How to Make Connections That Count — Advice From a Silicon Valley Veteran (and Introvert)Lunar Way, the Nordic banking app that’s riding new EU regulation to help inject more competition into the region, has raised €13 million in new funding. The round is led by SEED Capital, with participation from Greyhound Capital, Socii Capital and a number of individual investors from the financial services industry. [ First Round ] AI 100: The Artificial Intelligence Startups Redefining IndustriesThe most promising 100 AI startups working across the artificial intelligence value chain, from hardware and data infrastructure to industrial applications. CB Insights’ third annual cohort of AI 100 startups is a list of 100 of the most promising private companies providing hardware and data infrastructure for AI applications, optimizing machine learning workflows, and applying AI across a variety of major industries. [ CB Insights ] Venture Capital Funding For Artificial Intelligence Startups Hit Record High In 2018The Artificial Intelligence (AI) winter is definitely over.As venture capital (VC) funding nears record since the dot-com era, with U.S. companies raising $99.5 billion versus $119.6 billion in 2000 according to the latest PwC MoneyTree Report, AI startups also experienced their best year ever, raising a record $9.33 billion, or nearly 10% of last year's total VC investments. Recode Daily: Reddit users are posting Winnie the Pooh memes to protest a $150 million investment from China’s TencentReddit has received a $150 million investment from Tencent, the Chinese tech giant behind WeChat and League of Legends, sparking fears of censorship from Reddit users. After rumors of the investment appeared last week, some Reddit users posted images and memes banned in China in protest of Tencent’s involvement: Winnie the Pooh’s likeness is banned in China because users have mocked its resemblance to President Xi Jinping; images of the iconic Tank Man from the Tiananmen Square massacre are censored in China because of state rules aimed at keeping internet users from opposing the government. Meanwhile, China continues to block US-based services it wishes to censor, including Twitch, Google, and Facebook; Reddit has been blocked in China since August. [ Re/code ] Venture Capital in the NordicsSome of the most experienced venture capitalists in the Nordics for a panel debate on current trends in the region. Find out which types of companies venture funds are looking for at the moment, how to leverage current trends in the market, and which direction the venture market is taking. Founders and VCs share 8 lessons for raising a seed round in 2019In this series, “Founder’s Field Guide,” we’ll tackle topics that are top-of-mind for entrepreneurs and offer candid, tactical advice from our founders (who have been through it) and our team (who advised along the way). The seed funding environment is vastly different than it was five years ago. Companies are waiting longer to raise and when they do, they’re securing bigger initial rounds. And though, at 4,000 in 2018, the number of seed rounds is higher than a decade ago, that number has fallen since a peak in 2015. As the most active early-stage investor in New York, and like any other seed firm, we’ve stayed on our toes, reacting to an ever-changing fundraising environment and learning from each round we participate in to better equip ourselves for new ones. [ Medium ] 1-29-19 Venture Capital Panel: Investment and Latest Innovations in AI StartupsErwin Hosono is a partner at Mighty Capital and active non-profit board member. Previously, he was a principal at Bradford Equities Management LLC, a middle market private equity firm in New York; before graduate school, he coded software at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. Erwin holds an MPPM from the Yale School of Management and an AB in economics from Duke University. Kara Swisher is interviewing Jack Dorsey — follow it live on TwitterTwitter wants to be home to the world’s most important and interesting public conversations. On Tuesday, at least, that should be true: Recode co-founder Kara Swisher will interview Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, via Twitter (of course), starting at 5 pm ET. You can follow their conversation live using the hashtag #karajack. Dorsey has been on a media tear lately — and not without a bit of personal drama. In November, he
accidentally weighed in on India’s controversial caste system, and then headed to Myanmar, a country where social media is helping perpetuate an attempted genocide, for a blissful meditation retreat. Since then, Dorsey made news on The Bill Simmons Podcast, and then on the Making Sense podcast with Sam Harris. He spoke to Rolling Stone and, quite unforgettably, HuffPost. [ Tech Crunch ] TechTO Exclusive: Scaling a Toronto startup with Silicon Valley venture capitalThis was first presented at the TechTO Exclusive event on February 7, 2019. In this presentation, our panelists, Nikolai Bratkovski (CEO & Co-Founder at Opencare.com), Kimmy Scotti (Partner at 8VC & CEO/Founder at Monthly Gift) and John Frankel (Founding Partner at ff Venture Capital) discuss the finer points of fundraising, scaling, managing a board, accessing Silicon Valley venture capital, and more. Stars align for startups at emerging space incubatorSouth Australian space incubator, Venture Catalyst Space, began working with its first five companies in September 2018. But the growth and national focus of the space industry in Adelaide is leading to heightened competition for places in the second round, which begins later this year. [ Startup Daily ] |