CB Insights - the tech IPO is back

Hola,

A picture is worth 1,000 words. 

So without further babble, here’s our just-released visualization on 2020’s tech results. We cover the top-line tech industry stats for 2020, from the rise in $100M+ mega-rounds to the year’s largest M&A deals. 

Here’s a quick overview:

• Big tech cos outperformed the S&P in the public markets … by a lot — FAMGA saw a 51.9% growth rate, while the S&P 500 saw 17.2% in growth 

• Mega-rounds rose as investors made fewer — but larger — bets

• With a flurry of activity in H2’20, tech IPOs recovered nicely from a 2019 slump

• The largest M&A deals spanned computing, telehealth, and fantasy sports

Hard to believe this all happened in 2020, but the data doesn’t lie.

Fresh off the press

23andMe is going public via SPAC.

Here's what the $3.5B deal means for the future of omics, i.e. the study of biological data, across genes, proteins, and more.

It’s so hard to say goodbye 

Tech had an eye-popping year. But not all startups were able to weather 2020’s ups and downs.

Some were hit by pandemic shutdowns and loss of funding, while others allegedly mismanaged spending or faced problems unrelated to Covid-19. Read the post-mortems of 365+ startups here. 

It’s gonna work out

Fitness tech startups raised a record $2.3B in 2020 — a 30% YoY jump — amid a pandemic that upended the status quo in the fitness industry.

Some of the new fitness habits established over the past year may be here to stay. Expert Intelligence clients can see 70+ companies building the future of fitness, from VR fitness to holistic coaching, here.

$125.6B: Amazon reported revenue of $125.6B for Q4’20 — the first time the e-commerce giant has tallied up more than $100B in sales in a single quarter. We look at how Amazon set up a flywheel for growth in our report on innovation frameworks. 
 

$2B: The Honest Company is reportedly preparing for an IPO that could value the D2C beauty retailer at about $2B. We dig into how the company, founded by Jessica Alba, used Instagram and well-targeted content marketing to establish its customer base in our analysis of 22 D2C success stories. 

+300%: UiPath, a robotic process automation (RPA) company, raised $750M at a $35B valuation — about a 300% increase in valuation since it last raised. RPA is gaining traction with companies looking to streamline repetitive tasks like digitizing documents or entering data. Clients can see a breakdown of UiPath’s business model here.
 

$7.50: Future Meat Technologies said that it could produce a lab-grown chicken breast for $7.50. The plummeting cost of cultured meat — the first lab-grown burger cost about $325,000 to make in 2013 — reflects an acceleration toward commercialization. We unpack the alternative proteins landscape in this report.

14.9%: Office space availability in Manhattan reached a record-breaking 14.9% in January, according to real estate broker Colliers International. The shift to remote work could continue long after the pandemic eventually subsides. We look at the startups helping employees work from home in this market map. 
 

11 qubits: Microsoft made its quantum computing cloud platform publicly available, signaling an increasing level of commercial interest in the emerging tech. The service, which already counts companies like Ford and Willis Towers Watson as clients, includes access to an 11-qubit quantum computer built by startup IonQ alongside other development tools. Learn more about what quantum computing is and how it could impact industries like finance and logistics in our explainer. 

Wombats are the only animals in the world to poop in cubes. 

A recent study found this is due to unique sections of their intestines that have varying thickness and stiffness. These grooves, combined with the wombat’s long digestion period and irregular contractions, produce the flat-sided cubes.

While this breakthrough may not change manufacturing forever, one author of the study says this could help researchers raising wombats in captivity. The squarer the poop, the healthier the wombat, Science Mag reports.

Have a great rest of the week.

Marcelo