1.
Health tech venture firm OTV closes new $170 million fund and expands into Asia
OTV (formerly known as Olive Tree Ventures), an Israeli venture capital firm that focuses on digital health tech, announced it has closed a new fund totaling $170 million. The firm also launched a new office in Shanghai, China to spearhead its growth in the Asia Pacific region. OTV currently has a total of 11 companies in its portfolio. This year, it led rounds in telehealth platforms TytoCare and Lemonaid Health, and its other investments include genomic machine learning platform Emedgene; microscopy imaging startup Scopio; and at-home cardiac and pulmonary monitor Donisi Health. OTV has begun investing in more B and C rounds, with the goal of helping companies that already have validated products deal with regulations and other issues as they grow. OTV focuses on digital health products that have the potential to work in different countries, make healthcare more affordable, and fill gaps in overwhelmed healthcare systems. [ Tech Crunch ]
Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
2.
Visa Partners With Ethereum Digital-Dollar Startup That Raised $271 Million
Credit card giant Visa today announced it is connecting its global payments network of 60 million merchants to the U.S. Dollar Coin (USDC) developed by Circle Internet Financial on the ethereum blockchain. The digital currency is now valued at $2.9 billion. While Visa itself won’t custody the digital currency, effective immediately, the partnership will see Circle working with Visa to help select Visa credit card issuers start integrating the USDC software into their platforms and send and receive USDC payments. Circle itself is also going through the same Fast Track program. In turn, businesses will eventually be able to send international USDC payments to any business supported by Visa, and after those funds are converted to the national
currency, spend them anywhere that accepts Visa. [ Forbes ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
Price discipline is dead. Long live the tech bubble.
The big picture: Determining "proper" tech startup valuations has always been subjective, but lately it's been more akin to throwing a dart at the ceiling than at the board. By the numbers: Private markets are following public markets, as they're wont to do, with median valuations for early-stage and later-stage startups hitting record highs, per PitchBook. - The pandemic is now viewed as a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation
for a majority of startups. Either they benefit from trends like work-from-home, or investors are paying for expected growth post-vaccine.
- "I give up," a Silicon Valley venture capitalist told me while discussing Salesforce's $27.7 billion deal for Slack. "I could have made a solid case for Slack at one-third that amount or at even more than what Salesforce is paying, and I'm feeling the same about most of the venture deals I see getting done." [ Axios ]
Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
3.
Thoma Bravo acquires Flexera for second time paying $2.85B
Thoma Bravo must really like Flexera, an IT asset management company out of Chicago. The private equity firm bought the company for the second time today. Sources told TechCrunch the price was $2.85 billion. Technically, Thoma Bravo is getting a majority stake in the company, buying it from previous owners TA Associates and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board. The firm originally bought Flexera in 2008 from Macrovision for just $200 million. It turned it around just three years later in 2011 for $1 billion profit, according to reports. While reports last year had the company’s investors looking for $3 billion, they didn’t quite reach that mark, but it’s still a hefty profit as the company continues to change hands, giving each of its owners a substantial return on investment. [ Tech Crunch ]
Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform
4.
Everlywell Lands $175M For Virtual Care Offerings
Everlywell, an Austin-based digital health company, secured $175 million in an oversubscribed Series D round to expand its consumer testing and virtual care offerings. With the new investment, CEO Julia Cheek confirmed the company’s valuation at $1.3 billion. “This
represented a mass majority of the funding we have received and the result of our company’s shift into hypergrowth,” Cheek told Crunchbase News. “This massive growth is an underlying shift that is more broad than just COVID-19. We see an opportunity to partner with telehealth providers and develop broader access to services that could turn into other offerings.” Everlywell provides more than 30 at-home collection tests for everything from prevention and management, fertility, nutrition and STIs. Three-fourths of the company’s testing growth was 100 percent year over year. It also reached its 1 million-person milestone this year, quadrupled sales and grew from a workforce of 90 to 200, she added. [ Crunchbase ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
5.
ShipMonk Raises $290 Million in Growth Equity Funding to Help Online Merchants Scale Operations, Meet Rapidly Growing Ecommerce Demand
ShipMonk, a leading provider of ecommerce fulfillment and technology solutions, today announced a $290 million growth equity round, led by global growth investor Summit Partners. The financing represents a minority stake in the business and will help further accelerate ShipMonk’s rapid growth through continued investment in R&D, hiring, the development of B2B fulfillment capabilities and international expansion. The company also announced the addition of Summit Partners’ Managing Director Christopher Dean and Vice President Chelsea Jurman to its Board of Directors. [ Business wire ]
Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
6.
Ben Ling’s Bling Capital just rounded up $113 million more from investors
Ben Ling is as done with 2020 as the rest of us, but certainly for him, the year could be worse. Ling, who founded his own venture outfit in 2018 — naming it Bling Capital (a nickname from way back) — just closed on $113 million in capital commitments across two
new funds: a seed-focused $77 million fund, and an opportunity fund focused on breakout companies from his portfolio that closed with $36 million in capital commitments. It’s a decent amount of money for a so-called solo GP fund, especially coming as it does just two years after Bling closed on two very similar-size funds: a $61 seed-stage fund and a $35 opportunities-type fund. Yet Ling says it could have been twice as much committed capital, given demand. “I had to basically kick people out,” he says of those willing to write him a check. [ Tech Crunch ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
7.
Sourcegraph raises $50 million to tackle ‘big code’ problems with universal search
Sourcegraph, the company behind a universal code search platform for companies including Amazon, PayPal, Qualtrics, and Cloudflare, has raised $50 million in a series C round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. As many tech luminaries have noted in recent years, every company is now a
software company, which means every company now has to deal with code in some form. But the bigger and more disparate these codebases become, as more developer tools and repositories are added to the mix, as engineering personnel come and go, the more complex it becomes to keep on top of things. [ Venture Beat ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
8.
Scoop: Uber in talks to sell air taxi business to Joby
Uber is in advanced talks to sell its Uber Elevate unit to Joby Aviation, Axios has learned from multiple sources. A deal could be announced later this month. Between the lines: Uber Elevate was formed to develop a network of self-driving air taxis, but to date has been most notable for its annual conference devoted to the nascent industry. The sale comes as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi works to attain profitability, and follows partial sales of Uber's
money-losing freight and self-driving units. - Axios had previously reported that Uber was seeking a buyer.
- Elevate had a helicopter service running in New York City, but suspended those operations during the pandemic. At
last check, the unit had around 80 employees.[ Axios ]
Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
9.
At Blck VC, Under 30 Investors Frederik Groce And Sydney Sykes Are Driving Venture Capital Forward
It’s late in the afternoon in California in November as a group of about 50 professionals tune in to hear Kesha Cash, Ulili Onovakpuri and Richelle Parham discuss their paths into venture capital investing. As with many events in 2020, this one’s happening over Zoom. But check the chat box, and you’d quickly realize this is not your typical snoozy webinar. As the three investors dish on breaking into firms, fundraising and how to overcome imposter syndrome, the comments, questions and memes flow at breakneck speed. “I’m nodding so hard my head’s going to pop off. Sooo many shared experiences,” writes attendee Brenda Campbell to the chat. [ Forbes ]
Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
10.
Watch Whisperer Hodinkee Clocks $40 Million Investment
In 2014, after more than five years as a tastemaker for luxury watches, Hodinkee CEO Benjamin Clymer had an important decision to make. Was it time to sell? A magazine publishing company based in New York had offered to buy his startup—a blog for watch aficionados—for up to $20 million. Mr. Clymer was conflicted, so he turned to a friend: Tony Fadell, co-founder of smart thermostat maker Nest Labs, who had just sold the company to Google for $3.2 billion. [ WSJ ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
11.
Paris-based Pigment raises €24.1 million to reboot the spreadsheet
French startup Pigment, a business forecasting platform, has raised over €24 million. The Series A round was led by Blossom Capital, with participation from investors New York-based FirstMark Capital and Frst, as well as angel investors including Paul Melchiorre, former CEO of business planning giant Anaplan, and David Clarke, the ex-CTO of Workday. Founded in 2019, Pigment is trying to overhaul the painful experience of using error-prone spreadsheets and inflexible software to forecast the
future of businesses. Instead of a rigid annual planning process, Pigment’s platform allows users to take control over their business data – presenting an intuitive, full-spectrum view of the company that allows users to play with multiple future scenarios in real-time through charts, simulations and continuous modeling. [ eu-startups ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
12.
AI construction startup Versatile raises a $20M Series A
San Francisco-based construction startup Versatile is announcing today that it has raised a $20 million Series A. The round was led by Insight Partners and Entree Capital, along with existing investors Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, Root Ventures and Conductive Ventures. The round follows $8.5 million in funding, including a $5.5 million seed round that arrived in August of last year. The URBAN-X accelerator alum has developed a piece of hardware designed to be mounted to a crane. From that
vantage point, it’s capable of capturing and analyzing data across the construction site. “You can only improve what you can measure, and at Versatile we are just scratching the surface of what we can do to create value for our users and use data to turn job sites into controlled manufacturing with fast feedback loops,” co-founder and CEO Meirav Oren said in a release tied to the news. [ Tech Crunch ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
13.
Pave, Formerly Trove, Receives $16 Million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz
Pave, formerly named Trove and recently rebranded, has received $16 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other big names participated in the round including Bessemer Venture Partners, Bezos Expeditions (as in Jeff Bezos), Dash Fund, and Y Combinator. Kristina Shen, General Partner, a16z, will join Pave’s board of directors, and Marc Andreessen will be a board observer. Pave also announced plans to launch the Pave Compensation Benchmarking Project this week — a compensation data
survey. [ crowdfund insider ]
Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
14.
On the podcast: Grocery fulfillment and dark stores—clear aisles, full carts, can't lose?
Prior to COVID-19, less than 4% of grocery purchases were made online. At the height of the pandemic, that share climbed to 35%. In this episode, we chat with Publicis Groupe chief commerce strategy officer Jason Goldberg about how more shoppers than ever are leveraging dark store and digital fulfillment technologies to meet their families' nutritional needs. Plus, we catch up with PitchBook's Alex Frederick—a senior analyst on the Emerging Technology team who focuses on food and agtech—about how the pandemic accelerated market adoption of digital grocery shopping by up to a decade overnight. [ Pitchbook ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
15.
Luminar going public makes 25-year-old Austin Russell one of world’s first, and youngest, self-driving billionaires
Tesla isn’t the only upstart auto industry player having a big year. Luminar, which creates lidar technology critical to many automakers’ autonomous driving efforts, is going public on Thursday through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and the deal will make Luminar co-founder and CEO Austin Russell a billionaire — at the age of 25. Russell, who founded the company as a 17-year-old high school student, said the feeling of becoming a billionaire (on paper, at least) is “absolutely incredible” and
“totally surreal.” But the Luminar CEO said it also follows the plan his company has had in mind since founding. “It is totally surreal and it totally makes sense and it is hard to explain the dichotomy of it, but this has always been the goal,” he said. “We set up the company to be a long-term sustainable business and power the future of autonomy for all of these automakers. We are in it for the long-term,” Russell told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday morning. [ CNBC ] Checkout 15K+
Venture Capital Data on our platform.
|