1.
Car insurance start-up Root raises $664M in IPO: report
Automobile insurance startup Root Inc sold shares in its initial public offering (IPO) on Tuesday at $27 apiece, above its target range, to raise $663.7 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. The IPO values Root, which has $200 million in debt, at $6.7 billion. The company had set an initial target price range of $22-$25 per share for a sale of almost 24.6 million shares. Root's IPO is bigger than those of other technology-powered insurance providers that have gone public this year. In May, insurance comparison website SelectQuote Inc raised $360 million in a listing that valued the firm at $3.25 billion, while SoftBank Group-backed insurance provider Lemonade Inc was valued at $1.6 billion in an IPO that raised $319 million in July. [ Fox Business ]
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2.
Eightfold Recruiting Software Startup Reaches $1 Billion Value
Recruiting software startup Eightfold AI said it was valued at $1 billion in a $125 million financing round led by General Catalyst. Existing investors Capital One Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, IVP and Foundation Capital also participated in the round, according to Eightfold. The company has now raised $180 million, dating back to 2016. Eightfold’s software helps companies with all aspects of talent management, from recruiting to employee retention. Its corporate clients include Bayer AG, Capital One Financial Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. General Catalyst invested partly because Eightfold has seen its
business grow during the coronavirus pandemic, said Quentin Clark, managing director at the venture firm. [ Bloomberg ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
Special:
U.K. Betting Firm Genius Sports to Go Public in $1.5 Billion SPAC Deal
U.K. betting-data firm Genius Sports Group Ltd. has struck a $1.5 billion deal to start trading on the New York Stock Exchange by merging with a U.S. blank-check company, a move that targets the growing U.S. sports-wagering industry. London-based Genius Sports collects and distributes in-game data that forms the backbone for sports betting. The company works with organizations such as soccer’s English Premier League and the PGA Tour. [ WSJ ]
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3.
Wholesale Marketplace Faire Valued At $2.5 Billion After Sequoia-Led Round
Faire has completed a $170 million Series E round led by Sequoia Capital that more than doubled the valuation of the online wholesaler to $2.5 billion, as the San Francisco-based startup cashes in on pandemic shopping patterns by helping small businesses stock up on in-demand items. Bloomberg first reported the round last week, saying the company was in talks to raise more than $100 million at a valuation of over $2 billion. Existing investors including Y Combinator, Lightspeed Venture Partners,
Forerunner Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund participated in the round and were joined by new investors DST Global, D1 Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Dragoneer. Faire has raised a total of $439 million since it was founded in 2017. [ Forbes ]
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4.
Scorpion Therapeutics debuts with $108M to 'put the sting in cancer'
When Gary Glick, Ph.D., left the CEO post at IFM Therapeutics, he didn’t know what was next. But he soon found himself on a plane with Loxo Oncology co-founder Keith Flaherty, and they got to talking about how they could “expand the boundaries of targeted oncology.” Scorpion Therapeutics was born. “What a scorpion does is sting, and it does so precisely. We are a precision oncology company that would like to put the sting in cancer,” Glick, Scorpion’s president and CEO, said. The company is uncloaking with $108 million to pursue what it calls precision oncology 2.0. It wants to tackle the challenges found in precision medicine approaches today in three key ways: developing better medicines for known cancer-driving mutations, developing drugs for targets previously thought to be undruggable and finding new, untapped targets that could lead to even better drugs. The funding comes from Atlas Venture, Omega Funds, Vida Venture, Abingworth and Partners HealthCare Innovation. [ fierce biotech ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
5.
Mega-deals underscore PE's growing embrace of VC deals in tech
Over the past decade, the private equity industry has made an aggressive push into late-stage deals that were once solely carried out by venture capital firms. That trend was on full display in May, when a group co-led by Silver Lake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment
Board and Mubadala completed a $3 billion investment in Waymo, the self-driving car unit backed by Google parent Alphabet. It was the year's largest venture capital deal done with participation of private equity investors. And it was yet another sign that an industry previously known for leveraged buyouts of mature companies has markedly shifted its attention to the fast-growing tech universe. [ Pitchbook ]
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6.
Ryder Launches $50 Million Corporate Venture Capital Fund: RyderVentures
7.
Consumer tech app Streetbees raises $40 million from investors
(Reuters) - Streetbees, a startup that monitors the emotions of consumers and analyses their purchasing decisions, said on Wednesday it had raised $40 million from investors to develop its technology platform. London-based Streetbees operates an app on which 3.5 million consumers share their thoughts, feelings and impressions at moments when they engage with brands. PepsiCo, Unilever and Proctor & Gamble are among its clients. [ Reuters ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
8.
10 big things: Quibi's collapse and 'Billion Dollar Loser'
Quibi is dead. Just six months after its launch, the much-maligned streaming service announced plans to shut down this week, marking the end of a historically short run for a company that had raised huge sums of funding from some of the biggest media brands in the world. In the
end, not even two famed executives and $1.75 billion in backing were enough to prop up a product that consumers simply didn't want.
As far as startup sagas go, though, Quibi still has nothing on WeWork. It's now been more than a year since the co-working company submitted its ill-fated IPO filing, but the fallout from that disastrous document is still settling. This week, Fitch Ratings downgraded WeWork's credit into potentially dangerous territory, indicating a real possibility of default. And a new book was released detailing the "epic rise and spectacular fall" of the company and controversial co-founder Adam Neumann, a page-turner with a title that's harsh but fair: "Billion Dollar Loser." [ Pitchbook ]
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9.
Apple buys computer vision & artificial intelligence startup Vilynx for $50 million
Earlier in 2020, Apple reportedly purchased Barcelona startup Vilynx, gaining expertise and technologies related to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision. Citing sources familiar with the matter, a report on Tuesday claims that the Barcelona, Spain based startup was purchased to enhance Apple's artificial intelligence work as a whole. A mission statement about the company says that the company can "add rich metadata to enable search and social sharing." The company also claims that the metadata makes convent instantly discoverable. Tailored information is provided to creators by the company's software to determine "which portions of the video have the most views and which are not getting attention." The
CrunchBase profile of the company was recently updated to reflect that the company is now in Palo Alto, California. [ apple insider ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
10.
Eagle Eye Networks Closes on $40 Million in Funding and Plans to Hire 200 Employees
The demand for video has skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic and it’s not just from people hunkered down over their laptops on Zoom calls. All kinds of businesses from retail stores to gyms and restaurants are embracing video as a way to monitor their environments and maintain security. And that’s been a boon to Eagle Eye Networks, a cloud-based video security company, founded in 2012 by Dean Drako, a well-known serial entrepreneur in Austin who also founded Barracuda Networks, Drako
Motors, LivingTree, and Swift Sensors. Eagle Eye Networks on Tuesday announced it has raised $40 million in Series E venture capital funding from Accel, which has backed Facebook, Spotify and DocuSign to name a few. Eagle Eye Networks has raised $95 million to date, according to Crunchbase. Its high-profile investors include Michael Dell. [ silicon hills news ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
11.
French scale-up Odaseva raises $25 million to continue global expansion
French SaaS company Odaseva has raised $25 million in Series B funding to continue growing its data governance platform for enterprise. The round was led by Eight Roads Ventures with new investor F-Prime Capital and included previous backers Partech, Salesforce Ventures and Serena. “The Odaseva team started their journey focused on a major problem for large-scale Salesforce customers, helping them through their move to the cloud,” explains Reza Malekzadeh of Partech. Since the company
launched in 2012, Odaseva has broadened the scope of data protection for large-scale Salesforce customers, ‘building their trust in the cloud’. Customers use Odaseva’s technology for everything from backing up and archiving data to ensuring data privacy. [ Tech.eu ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
12.
Why Sequoia Just Led A $17 Million Series A In This Access Management Software Startup
StrongDM, a single sign-on company for backend infrastructure, announced today that it has raised $17 million in Series A led by Sequoia Capital. Cofounder and CEO Elizabeth Zalman says that back in the day in order for an employee to get access to infrastructure, companies had active directory sitting on top of one database and only a few people had access to it (privileged administrators or systems administrators). With the rise of the cloud and the explosion of more data sitting in more places and more people needing access to it,
these traditional approaches to control access stopped working. [ Forbes ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
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