Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of August 24 2020. Lambda School Raised $74M Series C

The world economy is experiencing the worst recession since the Great Depression, yet the stock market (especially for cloud and SaaS companies) is reaching a new record high.


(Source: Wall Street Research, company filings and S&P Capital IQ. Market data as of 15-May-2020)

What exactly is supporting these extremely high SaaS valuations?

Thanks to COVID-19, digital transformation is no longer just a line item on a quarterly report.  It becomes the top priority item for virtually every business in every industry.  Even when the world does return to normal (which I have no idea when), there is no way that any businesses nor enterprises would let a pandemic create such disruption again.

Public market investors are bullish and will continue to pour money into companies they believe will benefit from the impact of COVID long-term, hence driving up share prices and multiples. 

Here are a few core areas that are driving tremendous growth:

• Work-from-home infrastructure technology
  • Communication - messaging (Slack, Microsoft Team, Asana)
  • Communication - video ((Zoom, Agora, TokBox, Twilio)
  • Collaboration and Work management - (Atlassian's Trello, Asana, Wrike) 
• eCommerce infrastructure (Shopify, WordPress, Weebly, Squarespace, Strikingly)
• Cloud Infrastructure
  • Workflow and operations (ServiceNow)
  • Distributed computing (Databrick)
  • Cloud Content delivery (Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly) 
  • Data and Service Monitoring (New Relic, Splunk, PagerDuty, Loggly)
  • Security
  • Data privacy
  • Data analytics 

• $83.6M goes to 6 Enterprise startups
• $27M goes to 2 HR startups
• $74M goes to 1 eLearning startup
• $35M goes to 1 eCommerce startup
• $25M goes to 1 Food & Beverage startup
• $60M goes to 2 Healthcare startups
• $2M goes to 1 Other startup