Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of September 28 2020. Next Insurance Raised $250M Series D

This week, Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) will go public as one of the first direct listings of 2020, with a market valuation of $20 billion.

The direct listing process is very similar to the traditional IPO except there is no handpick price or investor share allocation. Many argued that this is a much simpler, more elegant, and fairer approach to both price discovery and allocation. 

I really these two process diagrams from Bill Gurley's blog:





Regardless if you go public via IPO or direct list, the company still must select an adviser, prepare an S-1, and do the obligatory roadshow. The only negative for using the direct listing route is you cannot simultaneously raise capital. Considering Palantir's $1.05B in revenue (although not profitable yet) and that the company raised over $2.6B in venture funding, they should be ok!

Disclosure: Palantir is one of my portfolio companies.

This week a total of 18 startups raised $790.3M in funding, 4 M&As:

• $81.8M goes to 6 Enterprise startups
• $16M goes to 1 Mobile startup
• $9.3M goes to 1 HR startup
• $250M goes to 1 Insurance startup
• $9.7M goes to 2 Food Commerce startups
• $55M goes to 1 Wellness startup
• $18M goes to 1 Healthcare startup
• $90M goes to 2 BioTech startups
• $250M goes to 1 Hardware startup
• $1.5M goes to 1 Construction startup
• $9M goes to 1 Supply Chain startup