Food delivery startup Postmates files for IPOAnother popular startup has joined the IPO race: Food delivery startup Postmates has filed initial paperwork to go public. The company confirmed its plans in an announcement on its website. San Francisco-based Postmates launched in 2011 by co-founders Sam Street, Sean Plaice and Bastian Lehmann, who is also the company's CEO. [ CNN ] Sean Parker’s govtech Brigade breaks up, Pinterest acqhires engineers Facebook co-founder Sean Parker bankrolled Brigade to get out the vote and stimulate civic debate, but after five years and little progress the startup is splitting up, multiple sources confirm to TechCrunch. We’ve learned that Pinterest has acqhired roughly 20 members of the Brigade engineering team. The rest of Brigade is looking for a potential buyer or partner in the political space to take on the rest of the team plus its tech and product. Brigade CEO Matt Mahan confirmed the fate of the startup to TechCrunch. [ Tech Crunch ] Companies Raising Supergiant VC Aren’t Getting Any YoungerThis week, point-to-point “microtransit” service company Lime announced it raised $310 million in a Series D round which valued the company at $2.4 billion, post-money. That is pretty impressive for a startup founded just a couple of years ago. Since 2017, Lime has raised over $765 million in venture funding to date, which is due in part to the pretty daunting economics of the bike and scooter business. It takes a lot of capital to acquire and deploy that hardware. [ Crunch base ] OakNorth raises $440 million from SoftBank and ClermontBritish startup OakNorth has raised a $440 million funding round from SoftBank’s Vision Fund as well as the Clermont Group. The company is creating a digital bank and focuses on loans for small and medium enterprises and the technology behind those loans. [ Tech Crunch ] Aurora Nets $530M Series B For Self-Driving TechSelf-driving car startup Aurora has raised $530 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital. The round, which also included participation from Amazon and T. Rowe Price, is said to have lifted the three-year-old company’s valuation to over $2.5 billion, according to TechCrunch. The Palo Alto-based company has been a standout in the autonomous vehicle space largely due to the caliber of its founding team, which includes pioneers in the field from Uber, Google, and Tesla. This round brings its total raised to date to $620 million. It raised a $90 million Series A in February 2018 from Greylock Partners and Index Ventures. [ Crunch base ] UK Startup Shows Off World’s Largest 3D Printed Rocket EngineWe’ve seen 3D printed rockets before, but never on this scale. UK space startup Orbex just showed off its Prime Rocket’s gigantic second stage — the “world’s largest 3D printed rocket engine,” according to a press release. The entire rocket, including the engine, will stand at 56 feet (17 meters) tall — roughly a quarter of the size of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, for context. In other words, things are heating up in the world of 3D printed spacecraft. [ Futurism ] SaaS’s Continued RunBrief notes from Silicon Valley’s SaaS entmoot, and how one new fund is laying long bets on modern software companies. Software as a service, better known as SaaS, is a big deal in the technology world today. Hundreds of billions of dollars of company have been built on the back of the model. Which, unlike the gig economy, may not be
morally pernicious. That’s because SaaS has the potential to be a win for both companies selling the stuff and the buying customers. The argument goes like this: Software companies prefer to sell their products as service, as they can charge for it in regular amounts, making their revenue more predictable and more valuable. On the other side of the coin, customers like SaaS because their upfront outlays are smaller, they don’t have to integrate it into their own data centers, and frequent updates should keep new features flowing. [ Crunch base ] Sydney healthtech Patient Connector helps patients find specialist doctorsWhile consumers can search for and compare and contrast various providers to find which works best for them when it comes to finding a plumber or internet service provider, it can be difficult for the average patient navigating the healthcare system to make informed decisions about which doctors they see. Aiming to bridge this information gap for patients needing a specialist doctor is Patient Connector. Founder Tess van der Rijt came up with the idea at Christmas one year, when her uncle became unwell and needed surgery. [ Startup Daily ] Extend Fertility banks $15M Series A to help women freeze their eggsFertility services are raising venture cash left and right. Last week, it was Dadi, a sperm storage startup that nabbed a $2 million seed round. This week, it’s Extend Fertility, which helps women preserve their fertility through egg freezing. Headquartered in New York, the business has secured a $15 million Series A investment from Regal Healthcare Capital Partners to expand its fertility services, which also include infertility treatments, such as in
vitro and intrauterine insemination. The company has also appointed Anne Hogarty, the former chief business officer at Prelude Fertility and vice president of international business at BuzzFeed, to the role of chief executive officer. Hogarty replaces Extend Fertility co-founder Ilaina Edison, who had held the C-level title since the business launched in 2016. Edison will remain on the startup’s board of directors. [ Tech Crunch ] A Guide to Preemptive Funding OffersFunding rounds happen in one of two ways. Either a founder asks for money and gets it, or an investor offers money and the founder accepts it. This may seem simple, but the dynamics are complicated. I’ve written about how founders should fundraise. However, in running YC’s Series A Program, I’ve noticed how many companies raise money without any process at all. This normally happens when an investor offers a founder money before that founder is ready to run a process. This is usually a good signal. However, unprepared founders can get trapped by the dynamics of a preemptive offer and forced into suboptimal outcomes. [ Y Combinator ] FDA chief summons Altria and JUUL to Washington to discuss teen vapingThe head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is calling Altria and Juul to meet in Washington to discuss their tie-up and how it impacts the companies’ plans to combat teen vaping. Earlier this year. “After Altria’s acquisition of a 35 percent ownership interest in JUUL Labs, Inc., your newly announced plans with JUUL contradict the commitments you made to the FDA,” Commissioner Scott Gottlieb wrote in a strongly worded letter addressed to Altria chairman and chief executive, Howard A. Willard III. [ Tech Crunch ] A Common Mistake in Hiring PlansAs you build out your startup’s financial model for 2019, a key component will be the hiring plan. You’ll need to calculate the number of managers and individual contributors to achieve your goals. But don’t forget to plan for mishires. You will make mistakes hiring people. We all do and it’s part of the process of building a company. Someone looks great on paper but isn’t a culture fit. Another doesn’t ramp quickly enough. A third might not have the work ethic. Whatever the reason, it will happen. [ Tomasz Tunguz ] Car subscription service Cluno scores $28M in Series B funding led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures Cluno, the Munich startup providing what it calls a “car subscription” service, has raised $28 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Valar Ventures, the U.S.-based venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel. Acton Capital Partners and Atlantic Labs, which both backed the company’s Series A round, also participated. It brings total raised by Cluno to $36 million in funding in under one year. [ Tech Crunch ] Carbonite to buy Broomfield-based Webroot for $618.5MCarbonite, a cloud-based data protection provider, announced on Thursday that it is acquiring Broomfield-based cybersecurity outfit Webroot. A news release from Business Wire stated the two companies entered into an agreement by which Carbonite will buy Webroot for $618.5 million in cash. Carbonite will use on-hand cash as well as funds secured under a new credit facility, according to the release. [ Daily Camera ] Jeff Bezos used to fight the spotlight. Now the world’s wealthiest person is surrenderingJeff Bezos, now the world’s wealthiest person, for a long time lived the life of a merely somewhat-wealthy person. He gave very little money to charity, but no one noticed. He was not the toast of the Golden Globes or in the camera pan at the Super Bowl. The CEO of Amazon was not anonymous, but he could avoid the personal spotlight enough to fully focus on merciless business execution. [ Re/code ] With $100M fundraise, Health Catalyst hits $1B valuationHealth Catalyst, a data analytics company, has closed a $100 million Series F equity and debt funding round led by OrbiMed. Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Sands Capital Ventures, UPMC Enterprises and Kaiser Permanente Ventures also participated. The round propels the Salt Lake City company’s valuation above $1 billion, making it the newest healthcare unicorn. [ Med City News ] Rebag Raises $25 Million In Its Series C Round Of FundingLuxury handbag reseller Rebagis on a roll. The fashion retail company that purchases luxury handbags from their owners and resells them at boutiques in New York and Los Angeles just raised $25 million for its Series C round of funding and has ambitious expansion plans over the next three years. “2018 was certainly a big year for us,” said Rebag CEO and founder Charles Gorra. “We established a brand. We we went from digital to a offline, so we set a lot of the ground. Now with this it’s about massive expansion.” [ Forbes ] How a startup is using telemedicine to disrupt the healthcare industryThis article is from an episode on Disrupting Japan. This is heavily revised from the original show transcript. For the full interview, go here. The medical industry is one of the hardest sectors to disrupt. In some ways, it’s a good thing because it literally involves experimenting with people’s lives. It’s reasonable to be conservative and take things slow. [ Tech In Asia ] HYPE UQ SPIN Accelerator opens applications for sportstech startupsApplications for this year’s HYPE UQ SPIN Accelerator are open. Aimed at startups in the sportstech space, the three month program will be run online, with three on-site workshops at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Along with connecting participants to mentors from organisations including Nike, Adidas, and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the program will also award $25,000 in prize money to the best startup as judged on demo day. [ Startup Daily ] |