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Top News
It's official: 11-year-old Uber has agreed to buy the 10-year-old food delivery company Postmates for $2.65 billion in stock. It plans to run the business alongside its own food delivery business, Uber Eats, keeping the Postmates app running while merging some of its tech and delivery operations. Uber, which currently boasts a $56 billion market cap, is paying a slight premium to the $2.4 billion that Postmates’s private investors assigned the company during its most recent funding event last September. The company had raised just a bit more than $900 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.
Facebook said today that it will temporarily stop processing Hong Kong government requests for user data as it reviews a sweeping national security law that has chilled political expression in the city. As the New York Times notes, the "Facebook decision is a rare public questioning of Chinese policy by a large American internet company, and it raises questions about how the security law will be applied online in Hong Kong, where the internet is not censored as it is in the rest of China. Although the social network may ultimately decide to cooperate with some forms of the law, the expression of uncertainty alone is likely to raise hackles in Beijing."
TikTok said tonight that it will also pull its social video platform out of the Google and Apple app stores in Hong Kong amid the restrictive new law that went into effect last week, reports Axios. More here.
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Victress Capital, a Fund Founded by Women to Invest in Women Founders, Just Closed Its Second Fund
Women start 40 percent of the businesses in the U.S., but they receive just 3% of venture funding. It doesn't take a math whiz to recognize that such an extreme funding gap could spell opportunity, but it might help if you are math minded, a longtime investor, and happen to be woman and so conceivably understand certain products and pitches better than some men.
That was certainly the thinking of both Lori Cashman and Suzanne Norris, who came together in 2016 to form Boston-based Victress Capital, a consumer-focused, seed- and early-stage firm that just closed its second fund with nearly $22 million in funding to back gender diverse teams, meaning there is at least one woman on the founding team.
Cashman is a Duke grad who has spent her career as an investor, including previously cofounding a private equity firm, Linear Capital, to invest exclusively in owner-managed businesses. Norris, meanwhile, with two degrees Harvard, has been an investment banking analyst, a management consultant, and spent nearly four years as a VP focused on e-commerce with the company Kate Spade.
The two friendly acquaintances originally joined forces to enhance their "cognitive diversity," says Cashman, scraping together a total of $2 million from friends and family so they could establish a track record.
Ultimately, they used that money to fund 14 startups by writing checks ranging from $100,000 to $150,000. A couple of them have already been acquired.
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Massive Fundings
Annexon Biosciences, a nine-year-old, South San Francisco-based antibodies maker, has raised $100 million in Series D funding and filed for an IPO. Redmile Group led the round, joined by BlackRock, Deerfield Management, Eventide Asset Management, Farallon Capital Management, Janus Henderson, Logos Capital, and half a dozen earlier backers. FierceBiotech has more here.
FineEx, a 14-year-old, Shanghai, China-based warehousing and distribution services platform, has raised 500 million yuan ($70.8 million) in Series D funding led by Baidu Capital. China Money Network has more here.
KK Guan, a six-year-old, Hebei, China-based online-to-offline imported products marketplace, has raised 1 billion yuan ($142 million) in Series E funding led by CMC Capital Group. DealStreetAsia has more here.
Payfazz, a four-year-old, Indonesia-based startup focused on widening consumer access to financial services in the region, has raised $53 million in Series B funding. B Capital and Insignia Ventures Partners co-led the round, joined by BRI Capital and earlier investors Tiger Global, YC, and ACE & Co. TechCrunch has more here.
Social Bella, a five-year-old, Indonesia-based beauty startup, has raised $58 million in Series E funding from earlier investors Temasek, Pavilion Capital, and Jungle Ventures. Business News Asia has more here.
Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings
Mission Therapeutics, a nine-year-old, U.K.-based company that's been trying to commercialize research into the ubiquitin pathway for the treatment of cancers and non-malignant disease, has raised £12 million led by Pfizer Ventures. More here.
Smaller Fundings
Basemark, a five-year-old, Helsinki, Finland-based startup that makes a portable graphics and compute engine for mission-critical applications in automotive, aerospace, medical, military and other industries, has raised €7 million in funding led by ETF Partners. More here.
E-peas, a six-year-old, Belgium-based startup at work on ultra low power microcontrollers and sensors for the Internet of Things, has raised $9 million (€8 million) in funding. Partech and Airbus Ventures led the round, joined by KBC Focus Fund, W.IN.G, Noshaq Ventures, LeanSquare, Nivelinvest, and Vives. EU Startups has more here.
Transcelestial, a four-year-old, Singapore-based last-mile connectivity startup, has raised $9.8 million in Series A funding, including from Partech. The outlet e27 has more here.
Vendia, a months-old, San Francisco-based serverless code-sharing platform, has raised $5.1 million in seed funding led by Neotribe Ventures, with participation from Correlation Ventures, WestWave Capital, HWVP, Firebolt Ventures, Floodgate, and Future\Perfect Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
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New Funds
Sequoia Capital India has closed on two new funds that total $1.35 billion in capital commitments as it looks to ramp up its investments in the world’s second-largest internet market and Southeast Asia. One is a $525 million venture fund; the other is an $825 million growth fund. TechCrunch has more here.
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IPOs
Inozyme, a five-year-old, Boston-based biopharma that's developing novel therapeutics for the treatment of diseases of abnormal mineralization impacting the vasculature, soft tissue and skeleton, has filed for an $86 million IPO. The company has raised $115 million from investors; its biggest outside shareholders are Longitude Venture Partners, NEA, and Novo Holdings. More here.
Nkarta, a five-year-old, South San Francisco-based company that's building differentiated autologous and allogeneic cell therapy candidates for the treatment of cancer, has registered plans sell 10 million shares at between $14 and $16 each, which would give the company a fully diluted value of $426 million in the middle of that range. The company had raised $125 million from investors; its biggest outside shareholders include RA Capital, Novo Holdings, and SR One. More here.
Nurix Therapeutics, an 11-year-old, San Francisco-based oncology biotech, has filed for a $100 million IPO (which is likely a placeholder amount). The company has raised $224 million from investors; its biggest outside shareholders include The Column Group, Third Rock Ventures, and Foresite Capital (7.5%). More here.
Poseida Therapeutics, a six-year-old, San Diego-based developer of CAR-T product candidates, has registered plans to sell 10 million shares at between $12 and $14 each, which would give it a fully diluted value of $867 million in the middle of that range. The company has raised at least $210 million from investors; its biggest outside shareholders include Malin Corp., Novartis, and Longitude Venture Partners. The San Diego Union-Tribune has more here.
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Exits
Pine Labs, an Indian payments company backed by Sequoia Capital and Mastercard, is considering a bid for Wirecard’s businesses in Southeast Asia and India, according to Bloomberg's sources. The outlet notes that the sale will be clouded by ongoing probes into the Germany fintech's operations after it was forced into insolvency by an accounting scandal. Wirecard said last month that almost 2 billion euros ($2.25 billion) that it previously reported as cash probably never existed. More here.
Indian online learning platform Unacademy has acquired another India-based startup, PrepLadder, for $50 million as the edtech giant (which is backed in part by Facebook) scouts for deals to expand its presence in the country. PrepLadder, which employs about 150 people, offers courses aimed at medical students. The two-year-old startup had never raised any capital from external investors and has more than 80,000 subscribers, says its founder. More here.
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Data
According to new research, U.S. online grocery sales hit a record $7.2 billion in June, up 9% over May, as 45.6 million households turned to online grocery pickup and delivery services for a larger portion of their grocery needs. In March, when the U.S. first went under coronavirus lockdowns, online grocery sales hovered around $4 billion. TechCrunch has more here.
Some popular home security cameras could allow would-be burglars to work out when you've left the building, according to a study published today. CNN Business has more here.
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Essential Reads
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News tonight that the U.S. is looking at banning TikTok over concerns that it could be used by the Beijing government as a surveillance and propaganda tool. The potential ban would deal another blow to TikTok after it recently went down in its biggest market, India.
Representatives of several venture capital firms that were listed as small-business bailout recipients in federal data say they didn’t apply for the program or get any of its funding. Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Foundation Capital and Advent Capital Management are among the firms saying they didn’t seek Paycheck Protection Program loans, despite data released today showing they were approved among almost 4.9 million loans totaling $521.5 billion.
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Detours
Harvard has decided that up to 40 percent of its undergraduates will be allowed on campus at a time during the next academic year, with first-year students invited to campus for the fall semester but sent home in the spring to allow seniors to return before they graduate.
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