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October 1, 2020
Hello! Happy Thursday and quick question: Did any of you happen to make your way through three seasons of "Dark," only to finish the last episode and want to commit hari-kari as the closing credits rolled? Asking for a friend.
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Top News
Donald and Melania Trump have COVID-19, Trump tweeted just a bit ago, adding, "We will get through this TOGETHER!"
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Bullpen Capital Raises $130 Million More to Fund the Far Afield and Misunderstood
Bullpen Capital, a now 10-year-old, venture fund in San Francisco that focuses on what it calls post-seed investing — it backs startups that have already raised up to $5 million and “aren’t quite ready for a $10 million check but another $5 million would make them dangerous,” says firm co-founder Paul Martino — just closed its fifth fund with $130 million in capital commitments.
The firm also brought aboard a new general partner: Ann Lai, formerly of Binary Capital, a firm that has since closed its doors but where Lai, who has a PhD in engineering sciences from Harvard, developed a thesis around bringing in more diverse startups from both a founder and geographic perspective — work that, it turns out, is also a prime focus for Bullpen.
In a call with both Martino and Lai earlier this week, they pointed to the startup Hemster to illustrate how both Bullpen and Lai respectively think about startups, and why, soon after Lai brought the deal to Bullpen roughly a year ago, it knew it had found its newest GP.
Hemster was founded by a solo founder, who happens to be a woman (Allison Lee), who happens to be a first-time entrepreneur. In the traditional world of venture capital, that’s three knocks against the company.
What the company does — on-demand tailoring — doesn’t necessarily sound on its face like a venture-like bet, either. Martino admitted that his first reaction to Lai’s pitch was: Why would we fund this?
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Massive Fundings
Cazoo, a two-year-old, London-based online used car buying platform, has raised £240 million ($310 million) of funding. General Catalyst and D1 Capital Partners led the round, joined by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Blackrock. TechCrunch has more here.
Sendinblue, a 13-year-old, Paris, France-based marketing campaign startup for small businesses, has raised $160 million in funding. Investors include Bridgepoint, Bpifrance, Blackrock, and Partech. TechCrunch has more here.
SOPHiA GENETICS, a nine-year-old, Lausanne, Switzerland-based clinical insights platform, has raised $110 million in Series F funding led by the Israeli venture firm aMoon, with participation from Hitachi Ventures, among others. MobiHealthNews has more here.
Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings
Braintrust, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based network for freelance technical and design talent (which additionally rewards members with its own cryptocurrency tokens to give them ownership in the business), has raised $18 million in new funding. ACME and Blockchange coled the round, joined by Pantera, Multicoin and Variant. TechCrunch has more here.
Carmot Therapeutics, a 12-year-old, Berkeley, Ca.-based biotech company focused on metabolic diseases, has raised $47 million in Series C funding, including from Amgen, The Column Group and Horizons Ventures. More here.
Coralogix, a seven-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that helps software companies avoid getting lost in their log data by automatically figuring out their production problems, has raised $25 million in Series B funding. Red Dot Capital Partners and O.G. Tech Ventures co-led the round, joined by Aleph VC, StageOne Ventures, Janvest Capital Partners, and 2B Angels. TechCrunch has more here.
Facet Wealth, a four-year-old, Baltimore, Md.-based financial planning company that hopes to be folded into employee benefit packages, has raised $25 million in Series B funding. Warburg Pincus led the round, joined by Slow Ventures and others. TechCrunch has more here.
Pacaso, a nine-month-old, San Francisco-based company for second home ownership launched by Zillow co-founder and former CEO Spencer Rascoff along with Austin Allison, who'd sold his previous company (dotloop) to Zillow, has raised $17 million in Series A funding. Maveron led the round, joined by Crosscut and Global Founders Capital. GeekWire has more here.
R-Zero, an eight-month-old, San Francisco-based biosafety company that aims to reduce the spread of infectious disease through ultraviolet devices that aim to disinfect surrounding spaces, just raised $15 million in Series A funding. DBL Partners led the round, joined by Bedrock Capital. More here.
Smaller Fundings
Bamboo Systems, a five-year-old, Cambridge U.K-based ARM based server-class platform, has raised $7 million in funding. Seraphim Capital and Opea Holding led the round, joined by Future Fund. More here.
Einride, a four-year-old, Stockholm, Swedish startup that has developed an electric and autonomous trucking platform, just raised $10 million in new funding from investors including Norrsken VC, EQT Ventures, Nordic Ninja VC, and Ericsson Ventures. VentureBeat has more here.
Macrometa, a two-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based edge computing service for app developers, has raised $7 million in seed funding led by DNX Ventures, with participation from earlier investors Benhamou Global Ventures, Partech Partners, Fusion Fund, Sway Ventures, Velar Capital and Shasta Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
Pixie, a 2.5-year-old, Bay Area-based startup that provides developers with tools to get observability into their Kubernetes-native applications, has raised $9.15 million in Series A funding led by Benchmark, with participation from GV. TechCrunch has more here.
Sora, a two-year-old, Atlanta-based online high school, has raised $2.7 million in seed funding Union Square Ventures led the round. More here.
Yotta Savings, a months-old, New York-based maker of a prize-linked savings account that rewards customers saving money by entering them into weekly drawings, raised a $3.3 million in seed funding from Slow Ventures, FundersClub, TwentyTwo VC, Chapter One, and CapitalX. Crunchbase News has more here.
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Going Public
Hims, a direct-to-consumer company that sells health products and services targeted at millennials, will raise $280 million through a merger with a SPAC sponsored by Oaktree Capital Management. CNBC has more here.
Playboy is going public again after being acquired by a blank-check firm, a deal that valued the brand made famous by its iconic adult magazine at $415 million. Playboy, which was taken private in 2011 by founder Hugh Hefner and private-equity firm Rizvi Traverse, will return to the public markets by merging with Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp. The WSJ has the details here.
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Data
Amazon today released comprehensive data into the spread of the coronavirus among its employees, disclosing for the first time that more than 19,000 workers, or 1.44% of the total, contracted the virus this year.There have been at least eight confirmed Amazon worker Covid-19 deaths this year, but Amazon did not give an updated figure in its announcement Thursday.The total does not include Amazon’s network of third-party delivery drivers, which handle a portion of last-mile deliveries, notes CNBC. More here.
Rent prices continued to plunge in big U.S. cities last month, with San Francisco leading the decline, according to data from Zumper, a real-estate start-up. In September, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco dropped more than 20% from a year ago, to $2,830. That’s the largest decline the company has recorded, says CNBC. More here.
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Essential Reads
The Senate Commerce Committee today voted to authorize subpoenas forcing testimony from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet and Google, setting up what could be a contentious hearing amid an already contentious national election, notes the WSJ. The senators cited the need to review Section 230, the legal provision that grants the companies legal immunity in managing content on their sites, as well as privacy and other issues.
U.S. authorities brought criminal charges today against the owners of one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency trading exchanges, BitMEX, accusing them of allowing the Hong Kong-based company to launder money and engage in other illegal transactions. The New York Times has more here.
The secondary market for private tech stocks is becoming a better indicator of how the public market will value those stocks, Wall Street executives say, and the public debuts of Asana and Palantir seemed to bear that out. More in The Information.
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Detours
Foul-mouthed parrots have been removed from a safari park for incessantly swearing, then laughing about it.
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