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Going public through a special-purpose acquisition company is officially mainstream. Special-purpose acquisition companies, once looked down upon by Wall Street-types as a less respectable way to go public, have been forming and going public at an unprecedented pace this year.
While last year was considered a record year for SPACs, this year has already shattered 2020’s record. READ MORE
Series A funding round sizes have grown significantly in recent years.
Over the past decade, the average global Series A round increased from less than $6 million to more than $18 million, Crunchbase data shows. The median has grown from $3 million to $10 million over the same time period. READ MORE
2021 has been a banner year for venture funding with an all-time high of over $288 billion invested within the first half of the year globally. These investments have yielded flashy headlines for brands and an assumption by the general public that these businesses are positioned to win.
But there’s an alternative approach equally deserving of the flashy headlines — bootstrapping. In the Twittersphere and beyond, bootstrappers are speaking up, fighting for their stories to be heard. READ MORE
The venture capital industry as we know it is broken. At least for women, that is.
In terms of funding to women founders, 2020 was among the worst years on record. On a global level, only 9% of all funds deployed to technology startups went to founding teams that included at least one woman. Solo woman founders and all-women teams raised just 2% of all VC dollars, Crunchbase data showed. READ MORE
The private equity industry is on a spending spree like never before.
Buyout barons Blackstone Group Inc., Apollo Global Management Inc., KKR & Co. and others account for a record 30% of global transactions this year, with deal flow and fundraising close to all-time highs. READ MORE
Sometimes weeks after a headline exits our news feeds, a story still resonates. That’s been the case for me and a fraud suit the Securities and Exchange Commission filed in late August against Manish Lachwani, former CEO of once high-flying software startup HeadSpin.
In its six-year history, Palo Alto-based HeadSpin raised around $116 million for its platform, which helps companies optimize customer digital experience across mobile and web. It did so the way most companies do–with fundraising pitches talking up sharp growth and big-name clients. READ MORE
(Bloomberg) -- It looks likely billionaires and private equity firms will keep loading up companies with debt to turn them into dividend-paying ATMs.
A surge in dividend recapitalizations -- or shareholders saddling corporations with debt to pay themselves cash -- is expected to continue into 2022 thanks to “extraordinary capacity” built into credit agreements, according to Moody’s Investors Service. READ MORE
We’ve spent so long staring at record venture capital results around the world from Q2 that it’s nearly Q3.
We’ve seen record results from cities, countries, and regions. There’s so much money sloshing around the venture capital and startup worlds that it’s hard to recall what they were like in leaner times. We’ve been in a bull market for tech upstarts for so long that it feels like the only possible state of affairs. READ MORE
Venture debt is a form of debt financing, typically a non-convertible, senior secured loan, offered to venture backed new age businesses. It serves as a strategic tool to complement equity financing, and if incorporated effectively, has various effective use cases for new age businesses including: READ MORE
A bill in Congress aimed at lowering prescription-drug prices would derail biotechnology venture investment, venture capitalists said in a press conference Wednesday.
The bill, H.R. 3, would enable Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers for certain expensive and commonly used drugs, and these prices couldn't exceed 120% of the drug's average price in a group of international countries, The Wall Street Journal has reported. If companies refused to negotiate or didn't agree to the price, they would be subject to an excise tax of up to 95% of that drug's sales. READ MORE
Mailchimp is selling itself to Intuit in a transaction valued at $12 billion. The deal is a coup not only for companies that eschew venture capital backing — Mailchimp is famous for its bootstrapping history — but also for the city of its founding, Atlanta.
Mailchimp’s mega-exit comes in the same year that fellow Atlanta-based startup Calendly raised a massive $350 million round that valued the technology company north of $3 billion, per Crunchbase data. READ MORE
Scientists and engineers are still toiling in labs in a race to develop quantum computers that would significantly outperform traditional computers.
But that isn't holding venture capitalists back. They're pouring record-high funding into work on computing power that is still considered years away from being ready. READ MORE
If you have any interest in or knowledge of Greek mythology, then you would most likely have heard of the 'Amazons', a group of female warriors and hunters, who matched men in physical strength and agility in all fields of combat.
It is said that their society was closed for men and their daughters were raised to be the breadwinners and achievers. READ MORE
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, oceans, and land.”
These fiery words come from the latest landmark U.N. report detailing intensifying, universal climate change impacts. They cover air, water and land. READ MORE
In many ways, there has never been a better time to be a venture capitalist. Nearly everyone in the industry is raking in money, either through long-awaited exits or because more capital flooding into the industry has meant more money in management fees — and sometimes both.
Still, a growing number of early-stage investors are becoming wary about the pace of dealmaking. It’s not just that it’s a lot harder to write checks at what feels like a reasonable clip at the moment, or that most VCs feel they can no longer afford to be price sensitive. Many of the founders with whom they work are being handed follow-on checks before figuring out how best to deploy their last round of funding. READ MORE
The number of IPOs involving special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) plunged 87% from April through June compared with the first quarter of 2021 as regulators and investors stepped up scrutiny of the blank-check companies. READ MORE
Just last month, a pair of investment funds closed more than $12 billion of private equity funding for climate- or energy transition-related investments. I noted at the time that it was a welcome inflow of capital to an area that hadn’t seen much interest in years … or ever, really. I also wondered a bit where that money might go.
Now we know — or at least have a decent idea — thanks to Climate Tech VC’s review of funding in the first half of 2021. The newsletter’s authors tracked about $16 billion of funding in 1Q and 2Q 2021, including more than 250 individual deals across seven sectors: carbon, climate, consumer, energy, food and water, industrial, and mobility. That’s almost as much as all of 2020 and not far behind 2018’s total of $17.9 billion. READ MORE
Have you ever wondered how WeWork, valued at $47 billion in January 2019, fell to $12 billion in September of the same year when they planned to IPO? As tech unicorns, privately held companies with an initial valuation over $1 billion, become more and more commonplace, it is important to ask if these valuations are accurate or if they are artificially inflated without regard to their intrinsic value.
Venture capitalists are not looking to invest in companies and run them into perpetuity. Their business model is to invest in numerous companies, double down on companies that do well, and sell them for a big payday. The only way this model works is when their portfolio companies are successful in raising capital at higher valuations in each subsequent funding round. READ MORE
There's always been an aspect of the job that is like a beauty contest. There’s this old line that being a VC was 99 percent saying “No” and 1 percent begging. And now, it's more like 10 percent begging. You spend a lot of your time trying to convince some 23-year-old little shit that you are better than some internet celebrity who they think is going to be more effective than you are because they have more Twitter followers. READ MORE
StartupBlink, a global startup and innovation research center, has launched the Startup Ecosystem Rankings Index 2021. The 2021 Index ranks 1,000 cities and 100 countries worldwide, tracking both momentum and trends within the startup ecosystem since 2017. This year’s report also features many new sections including sections on Industry rankings, the Top Island Cities Ranking, Analysis by Sub Score, Analysis by Population, City Ecosystems in Unranked Countries, and even a ranking based on special entities such as Unicorns and Pantheons. READ MORE
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