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October 20, 2020
Tuesday!
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Top News
Investors don't seem terribly concerned (yet) by the potential threat the antitrust action poses. Alphabet's shares ended the day trading up slightly.
Also up: Snap's shares. They shot skyward in after-hours trading after the company revealed a massive earnings beat on its third quarter call, besting analyst expectations on both revenue and earnings per share. TechCrunch has more here.
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Talking SPACS with Investor Bradley Tusk
Bradley Tusk has become known in recent years for being involved in what's about to get hot, from his early days advising Uber, to writing one of the first checks to the insurance startup Lemonade, to pushing forward the idea that we should be using the smart devices in our pockets to vote.
Indeed, because he's often at the vanguard, it wasn't hugely surprising when Tusk, like a growing number of other investors, formed a $300 million SPAC or special acquisition company, one that he and a partner plan to use to target businesses in the leisure, gaming, and hospitality industries.
Because Tusk -- a former political operative who ran the successful third mayoral campaign for Mike Bloomberg -- seems adept at seeing around corners, we called him up late last week to ask whether SPACs are here to stay, how a Biden administration might impact the startup investing landscape, and how worried (or not) big tech should be about this election. You can hear the full conversation here. Mindful of length, we are featuring solely the part of our conversation that centered on SPACs.
Lemonade went public this summer and its shares, priced at $29, now trade at $70.
They are down today last I checked. When you only check once in a blue moon, you're like, 'Hey, look at how great this is,' whereas if, like me, you check me every day, you're like, 'It lost 4%, where's my money?'
We got really lucky; Lemonade was our second deal that we did out of our first fund, and the fact that it IPO'd within four years of the company's founding is pretty amazing.
Is it amazing? I wonder what it says about the common complaint that the traditional IPO process is bad -- is it just an excuse?
[CEO] Daniel Schrieber was very clear that he and [cofounder] Shai Wininger had a strategy from day one to go public as quickly as they possibly could, because in his view, an IPO is supposed to represent kind of the the beginning. It's the 'Okay, we've proven that there's product market fit, we've proven that there's customer demand; now let's see what we can really do with this thing.' And it's supposed to be about hope and promise and future and excitement. And if you've been a private company for 10 years, and you're worth tens of billions of dollars and your growth is already starting to flatten out a little bit, it's just much less exciting for public investors.
The question now for everyone in our business is what happens with Airbnb in a few weeks or whenever they are [staging an IPO]. Will that pixie dust be there, or will they have been around so long that the market is kind of indifferent?
Is that why we're seeing so many SPACs?
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Massive Fundings
Handshake, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based recruitment platform that invites college-age students to register their interest and skills and for recruiters to search for candidates and advertise entry-level openings, has raised $80 million in fresh funding. GGV Capital led the round, joined by EQT Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Spark Capital, True Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Emerson Collective, and Imaginable Futures. TechCrunch has more here.
Newfront, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based tech-driven insurance brokerage that was cofounded by Opendoor's former head of finance, has taken the wraps off $100 million in funding to date and its post-money valuation of $500 million. The company's lead investors are Founders Fund and Meritech Capital. More here.
Output, a seven-year-old, L.A.-based maker of software and gear for musicians, composers, producers and sound designers, has raised $45 million in Series A funding led by Summit Partners. More here.
Perch, a year-old, Boston-based platform company that acquires D2C businesses and products that are already selling on Amazon (then tried to grow those operations), has raised $123.5 million. Spark Capital led the round, joined by Boston Seed and earlier investor Tectonic Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
Retool, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that better enables companies to quickly build their own custom internal tools, has raised a $50 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital. Other participants in the round include the founders of Github, Gusto, PagerDuty, Plaid, Segment, Stripe, and Y Combinator. More here.
V2food, a two-year-old, Sydney, Australia-based plant-based meat startup, has raised A$77 million ($54.3 million) in Series B funding from Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Esenagro, Huaxing Growth Capital, ABC World Asia, Altitude Partners, and Novel Investments. Bloomberg has more here.
Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings
4iQ, a four-year-old, Los Altos, Ca.-based identity intelligence company, has raised $30 million in Series C funding. ForgePoint Capital and Benhamou Global Ventures co-led the round, joined by C5 Capital, Adara Ventures, and TheVentureCity. VentureBeat has more here.
eVisit, a seven-year-old, Mesa, Az.-based maker of telehealth enablement SaaS, raised $14 million in Series A funding. TVC Capital led the round, joined by Kickstart Seed Fund and University Growth Fund. MobiHealthNews has more here.
Solarea Bio, a three year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biotech startup that's developing microbial-based products to prevent the onset or progression of health problems associated with chronic inflammation, has raised $11.2 million in Series A funding. S2G Ventures and Bold Capital Partners led the round, joined by earlier backers Viking Global and the Gisev Family Office. More here.
Venn, a nearly two-year-old, L.A.-based streaming network for gaming and entertainment, has raised $26 million in Series A funding. Leading the round: earlier investor BITKRAFT and new backer Nexstar Media Group, a publicly traded operator of regional television broadcast stations and cable networks around the U.S. TechCrunch has more here.
Zest AI, an 11-year-old, L.A.based maker of credit underwriting software, has raised $15 million from Insight Partners. Crunchbase News has more here.
Smaller Fundings
Abodu, a 2.5-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based startup that offers three customizable housing models that are made to order and can be delivered to homeowners in as little as 12 weeks, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Initialized Capital. TechCrunch has more here.
Conducto, a 14-month-old, New York-based startup that's launching a toolkit for simplifying complex CI/CD and data science pipelines, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Jump Capital. More here.
Decentriq, a three-year-old, Zurich, Switzerland-based enterprise data security startup, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding. Btov Partners led the round, joined by Paladin Capital Group and Atlantic Labs. EU Startups has more here.
Fabric, a 3.5-year-old, Bellevue, Wa.-based modular e-commerce startup that pitches itself as ideal for online sellers who've outgrown Shopify but don’t want the expense of Salesforce tools, has raised $9.5 million in seed funding led by Redpoint. Forbes has more here.
Flick, a two-year-old, Edinburgh, Scotland-based live group chat platform for sports influencers and their fans (its founders previously cofounded FanDuel), has raised $5 million in Series A funding. AlleyCorp led the round, joined by Bullpen Capital, Everblue Management, Amity Ventures, and Courtside VC. More here.
Index, a 10-month-old, Bay Area-based startup that aims to help non-technical users build business intelligence dashboards without coding, has $2.6 million in seed funding from entrepreneur-investor David Sacks, Slack, Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator and other individual investors. TechCrunch has more here.
Jam, a six-month-old, Austin, Tex.-based collaboration platform that builds chat, comments and task management directly onto a website, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Union Square Ventures led the round, joined by Version One Ventures, BoxGroup, and Village Global. TechCrunch has more here.
Neuromod, a nearly 10-year-old, Dublin, Ireland-based medical device a non-invasive bimodal neuromodulation treatment for chronic tinnitus, raised €10.5 million in Series B equity and debt funding. Fountain Healthcare Partners led the round, joined by Moffett Investment Holdings, Medical Device Resources, Kreos Capital, and SVB. Silicon Republic has more here.
Polymarket, a two-year-old, New York-based blockchain-based finance application meant to be an auditable, low-friction, globally accessible bazaar of real-time knowledge, has raised $4 million in funding. Polychain Capital led the round, joined by numerous notable individual investors, including Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan. Forbes has more here.
Quake, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based subscription podcast company, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by Wndrco. Axios has more here.
Synthetaic, a 13-month-old, Milwaukee, Wi.-based startup working to create images that can be used to train artificial intelligence, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Lupa Systems led the round, joined by Betaworks Ventures and TitletownTech, which is a partnership between Microsoft and the Green Bay Packers. TechCrunch has more here.
Vectary, a six-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company that says its 3D design tool works in the browser and enables users to create AR content for e-commerce, web or retail, has raised $7.3 million. EQT Ventures led the round, joined by earlier investor BlueYard. TechCrunch has more here.
Welcome Homes, an eight-month-old, New York-based startup that aims to allow customers to custom-order homes online, has raised $5.4 million in seed funding led by Global Founders Capital. More here.
YPC Technologies, a 4.5-year-old, Montreal, Quebec-based company at work on kitchen robotics technologies, has raised a $1.8 million in seed funding led by Hike Ventures and Real Ventures, with added participation from Toyota AI Ventures and Uphill Capital. TechCrunch has more here.
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Going Public
Wish, the highly valued e-commerce platform, continues on its path toward an IPO. It today announced the appointment of Stephanie Tilenius and Julie Bradley to its board of directors. Tilenius is CEO of Vida Health and worked formerly as a Google execs and an SVP at eBay; Bradley was TripAdvisor’s CFO and a VP of finance for Akamai Technologies.
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People
Investor and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian talks with Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, about the hate mail he is still receiving months after protest-quitting Reddit's board (and why he's even more certain it was the right move).
A little-known Democratic super PAC backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest donors is quietly unleashing a torrent of television spending in the final weeks of the presidential campaign in a last-minute attempt to oust Donald Trump, Recode has learned. The barrage of late money includes at least $22 million from Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. More here.
Brock Pierce, child actor-turned 'millennial crypto king' turned independent U.S. presidential candidate, has meanwhile just poured another $1.3 million into his own campaign, notes Recode's Teddy Schleifer.
Austin Russell, the 25-year-old founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies, is set to become a billionaire when shares of his driverless car startup go public through a reverse merger with special purpose acquisition company Gores Metropoulos. According to a proxy statement filed yesterday, Russell will hold a roughly 35% stake that’s worth about $1.1 billion at the company’s current valuation; he's also expected to hold about 83% of the voting power, which will give him control over the election of board members and all other major decisions submitted to stockholders for approval, says Bloomberg. More here.
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Data
The awful news: the pandemic has caused nearly 300,000 deaths in the United States through early October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released today. The federal agency included deaths directly caused by the coronavirus but also nearly 100,000 fatalities that were indirectly related because they were misclassified or missed or deaths from emergencies like heart attacks that went untreated because people were afraid to go to the hospital.
The better news: Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients, including older patients and those with underlying conditions.
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Essential Reads
Microsoft is teaming with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others as it opens a new front in its cloud-computing battle with Amazon: targeting space customers.
Jeffrey Katzenberg has told people in the industry that he may have to shut down Quibi, the mobile video streaming service that he and Meg Whitman launched earlier this year and which immediately fell flat, despite (or because of) raising $2 billion in funding beforehand. The Information has more here.
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Detours
The only thing standing between this country and pure, unadulterated disaster is your $7.
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Retail Therapy
Ellen DeGeneres's Santa Barbara compound just hit the market for $39 million.
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