Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of August 1, 2022. Carmot Therapeutics Raised $160M Series D led by The Column Group

My partner Alfred often says, “Cash is not King.  Cash is King Kong.” This is particularly true during a downturn.  Investors should not only chase after both valuation hike and paper markup based on hypothetical and projected growth 2 years from now.  What really matter should be revenue and profit growth?

In this week’s issue, I want to answer some of the basic questions on companies we care about:

• 💰 How Does FTX Make Money? FTX makes money from various trading fees, interest from loans, interchange and payment fees, listing and transaction fees from its NFT marketplace.
• 💰 How Does Databricks Make Money? Databricks makes money from a pay-as-you-go usage base model when users use its platform. Enterprise also subscribe to Databricks’ premium services to use its resources whenever required.
• 💰 How Does Airbnb Make Money? Airbnb makes money by charging a service fee on top of each booking. Hosts pay a flat service fee of 3% of the booking subtotal.  Thus making money as more bookings repeatedly go through it. In 2021, Airbnb generated $5.99 billion in service fees.
• 💰 How Does Stripe Make Money? Stripe makes money through interchange fees (2.9%+30 cents), which are paid by merchants and sellers whenever someone uses the card. Stripe also charges $3 and $15 per issued and lost card, respectively. Additionally, a currency conversion fee of 1 percent and $0.30 is applied. 
• 💰 How Does Tencent Make Money?  Tencent makes money via many different business models. Gamers pay in-app purchases of virtual goods, online advertising on social network, mobile payment service via WeChat, interest fee from WeBank and subscription fees on Tencent Video and many more.

This week a total of 23 startups raised $810.7M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $107.4M goes to 7 Enterprise startups
• $217M goes to 3 Crypto/Blockchain startups
• $4M goes to 1 Insurtech startup
• $16.7M goes to 1 Real Estate startup
• $20M goes to 1 IoT startup
• $40M goes to 1 AgTech startup
• $4.5M goes to 1 Renewable Energy startup
• $20M goes to 1 Delivery Tech startup
• $50M goes to 1 Manufacturing startup
• $278.1M goes to 4 BioTech startups
• $53M goes to 2 Healthcare startups