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May 29, 2020
Friday! [Roasts the marshmallows.]
Before we go, we leave you with the newest StrictlyVC Download. This week's guest: Jeff Cavins of the peer-to-peer RV rental platform Outdoorsy, which is suddenly poised to be among the summer's hottest startups, given widespread concerns around hotel stays and flights right now. We talked with Cavins about the investors who were once openly contemptuous of what he wanted to build, and why he might have the last laugh. (Suckers!)
Hope you have a peaceful weekend, everyone. x
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Top News
New York City, long the epicenter of the global coronavirus crisis, is poised to start reopening in slightly more than a week.
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Jeremy Conrad Left His Own VC Firm to Start a Company, and Investors Like What He's Building
When this editor first met Jeremy Conrad, it was in 2014 in San Francisco, at the 8,000-square-foot former fish factory that was home to Lemnos, the hardware-focused venture firm Conrad co-founded three years earlier.
Conrad — who'd studied mechanical engineering at MIT — was excited at the time about investing in hardware startups, having just closed a small new fund. One investment his team made around that time was in Airware, a company that made subscription-based software for drones and would go on to garner meaningful buzz and $118 million in venture funding.
Alas, like many hardware-related software startups, it would eventual shut down, closing its doors in 2018. But by then, Conrad had already moved on. Thanks to a team who'd been camping out at Lemnos in 2017, he'd fallen in love with the future of construction. Though he didn't know much about real estate at the time, the "more I learned about it — not dissimilar to when I started Lemnos — it felt like there was a gap in the market, an opportunity that people were missing,” says Conrad from his home in San Francisco, where he has hunkered down throughout the COVID-19 crisis.
Enter Quartz, Conrad’s now 1.5-year-old, 14-person company, which quietly announced $7.75 million in Series A funding earlier this month, led by Baseline Ventures, with Felicis Ventures, Lemnos and Bloomberg Beta also participating. What it’s selling to real estate developers, project managers and construction supervisors is really two things: safety and information.
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Massive Fundings
Ginkgo Bioworks, an 11-year-old, Boston-based focused on helping genetically engineer tiny microbes, has raised $70 million in funding from Illumina and earlier backers General Atlantic and Viking Global Investors. Bloomberg has more here.
Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings
Loom, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based app that lets users record their screen and face to share asynchronously via email or message (instead of using, say, Slack or a live Zoom call to communicate something), has closed on $28.75 million in additional Series B funding, led by Sequoia Capital and Coatue. The deal values the company at an estimated $350 million, doubling the valuation from a previous fundraise seven months ago, reports Forbes. We'd profiled one of the company's founders five years ago when, at age 20, he was still aggressively building up his network.
Palvella Therapeutics, a five-year-old, Wayne, Pa.-based biopharmaceutical company focused on genetic diseases, has raised $45 million in Series C funding from CAM Capital, Samsara BioCapital, BVF Partners, Adams Street Partners, Opaleye Management, Ligand Pharmaceuticals, Agent Capital, BioAdvance and Nolan Capital. More here.
Stackin’, a four-year-old, L.A.-based curated marketplace that texts recommendations about fintech apps to its customers, as well as sends them financial advice, has raised $12.6 million in Series B funding led by Octopus Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
Tia, a three-year-old, New York-based women’s healthcare platform, has raised $24.3 million in Series A funding. Threshold Ventures led the round, joined by Define Ventures, ACME and Torch Capital. Forbes has more here.
Variant Bio, a two-year-old, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company developing therapeutics by studying the genes of people from understudied populations, has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by Lux Capital led the round. Xconomy has more here.
Smaller Fundings
a55, a three-year-old, São Paulo, Brazil-based income-secured lender to small- and medium-size enterprises, has raised $5 million in funding led by Santander Innoventures. FinanceFeeds has more here.
Cabana, a 10-month-old, Seattle-based startup renting tricked-out vans to customers who don't want to jump on a plane or stay in a hotel (yes, you're sensing a trend), just raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Craft Ventures led the round, joined by Goldcrest Capital. The company's founder had previously spent 15 months focused on global government relations for the mobility company Lime. TechCrunch has more here.
Caraway, a nearly two-year-old, New York-based direct-to-consumer home brand selling ceramic pots and pans, has raised $5.3 million in seed funding, including from Republic Labs, Springdale Ventures, Wesray Social, Bridge Investments, WTI, CompanyFirst, and G9 Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
Commerce Layer, a 3.5-year-old, Prato, Italy-based commerce platform and order management system that enables retailers to add global shopping capabilities to any site, mobile app, chatbot, or IoT device, has raised $6 million in Series A funding. Benchmark led the round (it may be its first Italy-based startup), joined by Mango Capital, DAXN, PrimeSet, SV Angel, and NVInvestments. TechCrunch has more here.
Kippo, a year-old, L.A.-based dating and social app for gamers, has raised $2 million in seed funding. Primer Sazze Partners led the round. More here.
Truth{set}, a year-old, San Francisco-based quality monitor of consumer data, has raised $4.8 million in seed funding from super{set}, WTI, Ulu Ventures, and angel investors. More here.
Warehouse Exchange, a five-year-old, L.A.-based on-demand warehouse platform, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding, including from Xebec Realty. TechCrunch has more here.
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New Funds
Natalie Hwang, the former head of Simon Property Group’s venture capital arm, has launched a New York-based firm, Apeira Capital Advisors, and is targeting $200 million in capital commitments for it. Bloomberg has seen the company's documents and says it aims to use (in Apeira's words) “hedge fund principles and practices” to achieve returns, and that Hwang plans to make long-term wagers on high-growth companies whose valuations have soared too high. More here.
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Exits
Connexity, a lead-gen platform for online retailers, has acquired Skimlinks, a 12-year-old, U.K.-based platform that helped publishers make money through affiliate links. Terms of the deal were undisclosed. According to Crunchbase, Skimlinks had raised a total of $25.5 million. TechCrunch has more here.
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People
There's an ongoing spat between Twitter and Facebook right now over whether social media platforms should fact-check politicians, after Twitter slapped warning and fact-check labels on Donald Trump's recent tweets.The latest salvo is from Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo, who pitched in to criticize Facebook. (Some of Facebook's employees aren't so happy with the company, either.)
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told CNBC today that a larger share of the enterprise software company’s employees will work remotely as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. About 20% of the firm’s staff worked from home prior to the crisis, according to Gelsinger. “I expect, as we continue in this environment, we’re sort of going to end up in the 50% to 60% [range] over time, and I don’t think we’re atypical,” he said.
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Layoffs
Brex, the buzzy startup offering a credit card for other startups, has cut 62 employees, or roughly 17% of its staff. TechCrunch has more here.
Acorns, a startup that helps its customers invest their spare change in the stock market, has laid off between 50 to 70 people, TechCrunch has learned. It also closed its Portland office, an outpost that it reportedly had big plans for as recently as last year. More here.
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Making connections in the venture industry has never been more important. Coming up June 3 & 4, the Global Corporate Venturing Digital Forum will bring together the industry's top investors and entrepreneurs for top-level content and extensive networking opportunities, all on an intuitive online platform. Make sure you're there! Take advantage of your 15% discount using the code STRICTLY15 during registration.
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Essential Reads
The race to automate vehicles on China’s roads is heating up. Ride-share giant Didi announced today an investment of $500 million in its brand-new autonomous driving subsidiary from none other the early investor SoftBank, which wrote the check from its second Vision Fund.
And from The Verge: "A fourth prototype of SpaceX’s next generation Starship rocket exploded right after a test at the company’s south Texas test site Friday. Shortly after SpaceX ignited the engine on the test rocket, a massive fireball engulfed the vehicle in flames, leaving very little hardware still standing and apparently causing damage to the test site. The failed test comes just a day before SpaceX is set to perform an unrelated launch for NASA that will send two astronauts to the International Space Station. That historic mission will take place out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, on SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has flown more than 100 times before."
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