PitchBook News - Startups face an existential threat

• Startups usually line up funding rounds to last them 12 to 24 months. Assuming that fundraising cycle, it turns out there are roughly 7,200 US companies that are due to recharge their bank accounts with fresh capital, based on my culling of PitchBook's data. A majority of them did their last fundraising 12 to 18 months ago.


• Companies whose latest financing was largely arranged or secured in the past six months are seemingly at an advantage vs. the ones that are just now returning to the well.


• But raising new funding in this climate has gotten much harder as the pandemic crisis drags on. Venture capitalists are getting ever more selective about where they place bets now, and more of them are demanding more protections for the few deals they're willing to make.


• Each month that the public health emergency drags on results in a dramatically higher risk of startups flaming out from a cash crunch, according to Ilya Strebulaev, a finance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Most economists say we're entering the worst decline in generations.


• "If it continues like it continued in 2001, more than a year," Strebulaev said, "there will be a lot of startup failures—a lot of them."

—Alexander Davis