Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of May 1, 2023. Replit Raised $97.4M Series B

Hello from Rio de Janeiro!  I will be speaking this Tuesday on Center Stage at Web Summit Rio. Come join us!

Here are a few great reads and lists for the week:

• 💰 Financial Benchmarks for SaaS founders- Great State of the Cloud 2023 report by Bessemer. I like really their recommendation on Good, Better, Best financial benchmarks for SaaS founder:
  • CaC Payback: 12-18 months (good), 6-12 months (better), 0-6 months (best)
  • Operational efficiency: <.5X (good), .5-1.5X (better), 1.5X+ (best). The Bessemer Efficiency Score metric (Net New ARR / Net Burn) accounts for the leverage your business is getting from both its operational overhead as well as the gross margin profile. 
  • Net revenue retention: 100% (good), 110% (better), 120+% (best) 
  • Time to cash out: Runway of 12 months (good), 18 months (better), 24+ months (best) 
  • Revenue growth: 75%+ (good), 100%+ (better), 125%+ (best) 
  • Logo retention: >85% (good), >90% (better), 95%+ (best)

• 📺 Alfred on Bloomberg VC Spotlight - Investing in this Economic Climate is Not for the Faint of Heart.  Global funding in the first quarter reached $76 billion — marking a 53% decline year over year from $162 billion in the first quarter of 2022. Alfred is excited about open source, open core, developer tools, data, AI, ML, Data Lake, Data Lake House, databases turning, etc.  Watch here
• 🎵 AI Hit Song of Fake ‘Drake’ and ‘The Weeknd’ Rattles the Music World - Heart On My Sleeve, a song by AI Drake & The Weeknd, which became a viral curio on social media, racking up millions of plays across TikTok, Spotify, YouTube and more before it was removed this week. It is now possible to produce infinite streams of media in the style or likeness of someone else, soon with little effort, so we all have to come to terms with what that means. Take a listen
• 💼 The Looming Layoffs for Venture Capitalists - Anthemis Group has just cut 28% of its staff, coming just one month after Y Combinator slashed about 20% of its workers. The VC industry exploded in the past 15 years. In 2007, there were 987 VC firms. By 2021, there were 2,889. This growth allowed firms to expand their headcount quite significantly. However, with less LP capital flowing into funds this past year, it will be impossible for all of them to avoid layoffs. The most vulnerable firms are the newcomers, or emerging fund managers, and solo venture capitalists. Weaker firms, particularly newer funds, should join forces to survive. Read on TheInformation
• 🐦 Jack Dorsey says Elon wasn’t the ideal leader for Twitter after all - Dorsey said he thought Musk, the Tesla CEO who serves in the same role at Twitter today, should have paid $1 billion to back out of the deal to acquire the social media platform. The comments are a stark reversal from Dorsey’s strong endorsement of Musk’s takeover, when he wrote a year ago that if Twitter had to be a company at all, “Elon is the singular solution I trust.”.  I am testing BlueSky (Jack’s new Twitter clone) as we speak!  Follow me if you are on it!

This week a total of 12 startups raised $304.9M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $127.5M goes to 7 Enterprise startups
• $90.4M goes to 2 FinTech startups
• $86M goes to 2 BioTech startups
• $1M goes to 1 Cannabis startup