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July 21, 2020
Tuesday! Hope yours went well.
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Top News
Snap today warned that the uncertainty around the back-to-school season and the operations of sports leagues could impact advertising demand this fall. “Advertising demand in Q3 has historically been bolstered by factors that appear unlikely to materialize in the same way they have in prior years, including the back to school season, film release schedules, and the operations of various sports leagues,” said its CFO in prepared remarks. CNBC has more here.
China’s dominant ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing insists that an IPO is not its top priority, and the company does not have any related plan for the moment. The outlet Caixin reported earlier today that Didi was making preparations for an IPO in Hong Kong.
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Carta's Former Marketing VP is Suing Over Gender Discrimination, After Spearheading Report on Unequal Pay
Emily Kramer joined the Silicon Valley company Carta to build up the company’s brand. Now, the company’s former VP of marketing is looking to shine a light on Carta for another reason: in a new lawsuit against Carta, which makes equity management software, Kramer accuses the eight-year-old outfit of gender discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination, and of violating the California Equal Pay Act.
Carta declined an interview request today, saying through a spokesperson that it isn’t commenting because the suit is a “pending legal matter.” But we spoke earlier this afternoon with Kramer, and she accuses the company of both unfair labor practices and of being disingenuous in its stated “commitment to transparency and equality in equity.”
The equality piece is certainly the bigger of the two issues, by Kramer’s own telling. She says she learned that she was underpaid when, in the summer of 2018, roughly six months after she joined Carta, it partnered with the women-led investment collective #ANGELS to produce a report that highlighted ownership of venture-backed companies’ equity by gender.
The suspicion driving the report — and later proved out by its findings — is that as with salary, where women continue to earn less than their male peers, they are also given less equity ownership in the startups for which they work. Kramer, who says she spearheaded the effort, posted the report, which included internal analysis that showed that Carta, too, was allocating less equity to women than men.
In response, says the report, 40% of the women at Carta received an equity fix, compared to 32% of the men.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kramer, the only female executive at Carta at the time, says she discovered she was herself underpaid by $50,000 relative to her peers, and that her original equity grant was just one-third of the same amount of shares paid to comparable employees, who she says were all men.
Indeed, at the crux of her suit against Carta is that equity grant. While on the heels of the report, the company bumped up her pay by $50,000 and provided her nearly 300,000 more stock options in addition to the 150,000 options she was originally provided, it declined to backdate or accelerate the options to account for the previous six months of her tenure.
That might not seem like a big deal. But given Carta’s ever-soaring valuation — it was marked at half a billion dollars when Kramer joined the company and it was more recently assigned a $3 billion valuation by its investors — that’s tantamount to a “significant” amount money, notes Kramer. And she wasn’t about to leave it on the table.
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Massive Fundings
Gett, the 10-year-old, London and Israel-based company ride-hailing company, raised $100 million from undisclosed investors. TechCrunch has more here.
Hippo, a 5.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based home insurance startup, has raised $150 million in Series E funding at a $1.5 billion valuation. Dragoneer, Ribbit Capital, FinTLV, and Innovius Capital were joined by earlier backers Felicis Ventures and Iconiq Capital. Hippo has now raised around $310 million in total funding, including via a $100 million Series D round that was announced a year ago. Bloomberg has more here.
Innovium, a six-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based networking chip startup, has raised $170 million at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion close to from Premji Invest, DFJ Growth, BlackRock, and earlier backers Greylock, Capricorn, WRVI, Qualcomm Ventures, Redline, S-Cubed Capital and DAG Ventures. ZDNet has more here.
Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings
Afresh Technologies, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based AI-based supply chain platform for grocers, has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Innovation Endeavors. Other backers in the round include Food Retail Ventures, Maersk Growth, Impact Engine, and earlier investor Baseline Ventures. The Spoon has more here.
Insider, an eight-year-old, Singapore-based company that develops software to help clients make marketing decisions, just raised $32 million in Series C funding. Riverwood Capital led the round, joined by Sequoia Capital India, Wamda, and Endeavor Catalyst. TechCrunch has more here.
Shelf Engine, a five-year-old, Seattle-based company that optimizes the process of stocking store shelves for supermarkets and groceries, has raised $12 million in financing to go to market. Initialized Capital and GGV Capital led the round, joined by Foundation Capital, Bain Capital, 1984 and Correlation Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
Taranis, a five-year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based agricultural imaging and analytics firm, raised $30 million in Series C funding co-led by Vertex Growth — an affiliate of Singapore sovereign fund Temasek — and Orion Fund, a subsidiary of Malaysian conglomerate, the Kuok Group. AgFunderNews has more here.
CurvaFix, a seven-year-old, Bellevue, Wa.-based medical device startup whose technology aims to help repair fractures in curved bones, has raised $10.7 million in Series B funding. Sectoral Asset Management led the round, joined by Delta Dental Washington Seed Fund. GeekWire has more here.
Joywell Foods, a six-year-old, Davis, Ca.-based food technology company focused on developing healthy sweeteners, has raised $6.9 million in Series A funding. Evolv Ventures, backed by Kraft Heinz, led the round; it was joined by Khosla Ventures, SOSV, and Alumni Ventures Group. AgFunderNews has more here.
Meemo, a year-old, San Francisco-based social finance app founded by former product developers at Snap and Google, has raised $10 million in funding. Backers include Saama Capital, Greycroft, monashees and Sierra Ventures, along with numerous individuals, among them Hans Tung of GGV Capital and numerous of the co-founders’ former colleagues. TechCrunch has more here.
MeetElise, a three-year-old, New York-based maker of leasing agent software, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding led by Navitas Capital. The Real Deal has more here.
Readout Health, an 18-month-old, St. Louis-based company that makes a digital metabolic biomarker under the brand Biosense, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by iSelect Funds. More here.
Roundtrip, a three-year-old, Philadelphia, Pa.-based company that provides on-demand and scheduled non-emergency medical transportation for patients, just raised $4 million in funding from Motley Fool Ventures, ZOLL Medical Corp., UH Ventures, and Grays Ferry Capital. More here.
Smol, a two-year-old, London-based eco-friendly, direct-to-consumer maker of laundry capsules and dishwasher tablets, has raised £8 million in Series A funding led by Balderton Capital, with participation from JamJar Investments. TechCrunch has more here.
Sprout, a 10-month-old, San Francisco-based tech-enabled platform that matches autistic children with therapists who create customized treatment plans that can be administered both in-home and online, has raised $10 million in seed funding. Backers include General Catalyst, Bling Capital, and Felicis Ventures. Crunchbase News has more here.
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New Funds
Forerunner Ventures, the nearly 10-year-old, San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm known for its bets on Jet, Bonobos, Glossier, Outdoor Voices, and Warby Parker, among a smaller but growing number of enterprise startups, has closed its fifth fund with $500 million in capital commitments. The firm closed its last fund with $360 million in 2018. More here.
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IPOs
Why Jack Ma's Ant Group chose a dual IPO in Hong Kong and Shanghai and not New York.
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Exits
eBay said today it has reached a deal to sell off its Classifieds business unit to Adevinta, a Norway-based classified ads publisher majority owned by Norwegian publisher Schibsted. The deal is valued at $9.2 billion, which includes eBay getting $2.5 billion in cash and 540 million Adevinta shares. The deal makes eBay a 44% owner of Adevinta, with a 33.3% voting stake. TechCrunch has more here.
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LinkedIn is cutting 960 jobs, about 6% of its workforce, saying the pandemic has dampened demand for its recruiting products. CNBC has more here.
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Data
Axios, helped by Pitchbook, just pored over a list of all U.S.-based venture funds that have raised at least one fund of at least $100 million in the past five years to see how many of them feature women who are writing checks. What they found: Nearly 12.4% of decision-makers at U.S. venture capital firms are now women, up from the 9.65% determined to be writing checks in February 2019. It's not great, but it's up meaningfully from 2016, when that percentage was 5.7%. More here.
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Essential Reads
According to The Information, some of ByteDance’s U.S. investors are discussing the possibility of joining forces to buy a majority stake in TikTok as it grows more difficult for the Chinese-owned company to keep control of the fast-growing video app. The outlet says the talks appear to be preliminary. More here.
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