Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of March 8, 2021. Deliverr Raised $170M Series D led by Coatue

Is the SPAC boom just too good to be true? 

In 2019, 59 SPAC IPOs raised $13.6 billion. In 2020, 248 SPACs raised $83 billion. In 2021, 228 SPACs raised $73B and it's only March folks! 

Just this past week, Warburg Pincus launched two SPACs ($250M Warburg Pincus Capital I-A and $500M Warburg Pincus Capital I-B) and Khosla Ventures launched a $300M Khosla Ventures Acquisition SPAC. Even Jay-Z (Subversive Capital Acquisition), Serena Williams (Jaws Spitfire Acquisition) and Steph Curry (Dune Acquisition) have launched their own SPACs. 

The majority of these SPACs are averaging about $250M. The minute they go public, the clock is on and it has up 24 months to find a company to merge with. 

From a founder and CEO's point of view, the SPAC route to go public is much less risky for the company compared to an IPO.  The CEO sign a deal with the SPAC sponsor for a fixed and negotiated price, and the deal is done!  From an venture investor's point of view, this is certainly another way for companies to exit and go IPO.

However from a public market investor point of view, do these companies deserve to go public?  Do they have consistent and predictable revenue with a healthy growth rate?  Do they have a strong management team?

Will this SPAC bubble burst in 2021?  Only time will tell...

P.S. I am hosting Harry Man, Partner at Matrix Partners at 5 pm PST today (March 9 at 9 am HKT) at FoundersHK to talk about fundraising, investment, SPAC and Hong Kong startup ecosystem. Harry is a Hong Konger and invested in many unicorns including  Didi, Momo (Nasdaq: MOMO), 21Vianet (Nasdaq:VNET) and many Chinese unicorns.  Join us!

This week a total of 20 startups raised $936.9M in funding, 2 exits:

• $133.8M goes to 7 Enterprise startups
• $170M goes to 1 E-Commerce startup
• $2M goes to 1 Marketplace startup
• $1.5M goes to 1 EdTech startup
• $18M goes to 1 Pet care startup
• $3.3M goes to 1 Construction startup
• $170M goes to 1 Robotics startup
• $378M goes to 4 BioTech startups
• $60.3M goes to 3 Healthcare startups