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April 2, 2021
Happy Good Friday (and Happy Easter) to many of you. Don't overdose on chocolate; we need you back here next week.
Before we go, we leave you with the newest episode of StrictlyVC Download, featuring YouTube star Jake Paul and his newest business partner, entrepreneur Geoffrey Woo. As we wrote on Monday, the two have launched a rolling fund called Anti Fund. We talk at greater length about that here; we also talk with Paul about whether any platform comes close to YouTube when it comes to paying influencers, what he thinks about Clubhouse, and whether he worries that his past will come back to haunt him. (Paul, who is 24, has been online since he was a high school senior and, as such, has a reputation -- actively stoked -- as an obnoxious teen. After talking with him, however, we wouldn't underestimate him.)
Giant thanks to NordVPN for sponsoring this week's episode. Check it out if you're looking for a peace of mind when on public Wi-Fi. Go to https://nordvpn.com/strictlyvc, or use code strictlyvc to get a discounted two-year plan plus one additional month.
One more quick mention: our interns are on spring break next week, meaning we'll be busy keeping them out of trouble. You may notice that issues of StrictlyVC are abbreviated as a result; we'll be back in full form the week after next.
More Monday.:)
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Top News
At least 55 of the largest corporations in the U.S. paid $0 in federal taxes on their 2020 profits, including Salesforce (yet again). You can find the full list in a new report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
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Want to Take a Road Trip with Kevin Costner? Investors Are Betting You Will
Woody Sears has long been interested in storytelling. Following the debut in 2007 of the first iPhone, he founded a storytelling app called Zuuka that built up a library of narrated and illustrated kids’ books for the iPhone and iPad.
Sears later sold that company to a small New York-based outfit. But Sears, who is based in Santa Barbara, Calif., isn’t done with stories yet. Instead, he just raised $1.6 million in seed funding for his second and newest storytelling startup, HearHere, a subscription-based audio road-trip app that, with users’ permission, pushes information to them as they’re driving, giving them informational tidbits in three- to five-minute-long segments about their surroundings, including points of interest they might not have been aware of at all.
The idea is to surface the unknown or forgotten history of regions, which makes sense in a world where more people have returned to road trips and parents have grown desperate to pull their kids’ attention away from TikTok. In fact, Sears’s neighbor, Kevin Costner, liked the idea so much that he recently joined its five-person team as a cofounder and narrator and investor, along with Snap Inc., the law firm Cooley, Camping World CEO and reality TV star Marcus Lemonis, AAA, and numerous other individual investors, including from NextGen Venture Partners.
Because we, too, like history and road trips (and okay, fine, Kevin Costner), we talked with Sears and Costner earlier today to learn why they think they’ll succeed with HearHere when other content-rich geo-location based apps have fallen short of meaningful adoption. Excerpts from that chat follow, edited lightly for length.
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Massive Fundings
Alloy Therapeutics, a year-old, Lexington, Ma.-based drug discovery startup, has raised $75 million in Series C funding co-led by 8VC, Presight Capital and Peter Thiel. Other backers in the round include Mubadala Capital, Founders Fund, Gaingels and earlier backers Luma Bio-IT, Alexandria Venture Investments and Ulysses Diversified Holdings. FierceBiotech has more here.
dLocal, an eight-year-old, Uruguay-based cross-border payments startup, has raised $150 million in new funding at a post-money valuation of $5 billion less than seven months after securing $200 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. (Wow.) Alkeon Capital led the latest round, which also included participation from Bond, D1 Capital Partners and Tiger Global Management. General Atlantic had led its previous round, which closed last September and made dLocal Uruguay’s first unicorn. TechCrunch has more here.
Plaid, the nearly eight-year-old, San Francisco-based fintech company, is nearing the close of a funding round that will value the company at roughly $13 billion led by Altimeter Capital, reports Bloomberg. If this sounds at all familiar, it might be because a story last week in Barron's reported that Plaid was raising money at a $15 billion valuation. Either way, it's seemingly about to valued at far more than $5.3 billion. That's the price Visa agreed to pay to acquire the company last year -- a deal the U.S. Justice Department later sued on antitrust grounds. More here.
Tempo, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based an at-home weight-training startup, is finalizing a more than $100 million investment led by SoftBank, reports The Information. The company -- which sells $2,500 to $4,000 workout machines equipped with barbells, dumbbells and a touchscreen that plays workout instruction videos and live classes, which require an additional $39 a month subscription -- has so far raised $78 million to date, including via a $60 million Series B round that it closed last year, co-led by Norwest Venture Partners and General Catalyst. More here.
Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings
Aclaimant, an eight-year-old, Chicago-based safety and risk management platform for the workplace, has raised $15 million in Series B equity and debt funding. Next Coast Ventures led the round, joined by earlier investors Mercury Fund, KEC Ventures, Royal Street Ventures and Aspen Capital Group. VentureBeat has more here.
Smaller Fundings
Kintent, a 1.5-year-old, Boston-based startup that's automating the questionnaire process that tech vendors must undergo to ensure that they adhere to their customers' compliance standards, has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Tola Capital. TechCrunch has more here.
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New Funds
Animal Capital, a venture outfit launched by a group of TikTok stars who think they can help grow brands with a specific Gen-Z focus, says it has raised around $15 million for its debut fund. More here.
Anthos Capital, a 13-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based venture firm, is looking to raise up to $1.5 billion for its fifth growth equity fund, shows an SEC filing first flagged by Axios. More here.
Column Group, a 14-year-old, San Francisco-based science-focused venture firm, is raising from $750 million to $800 million for its first public-private crossover fund, says the WSJ. More here.
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Exits
Pinterest has held talks to buy VSCO, a photography app that spawned a teenage social media craze, reports the New York Times, whose sources say the the discussions are ongoing and that a deal may not materialize. Pinterest has a market cap right now of $49 billion, while VSCO has raised $90 million in funding and was last valued at $550 million. More here.
Unsplash, a startup that hosts freely usable images and was designed to upend behemoths like Getty Images, just sold to Getty Images for undisclosed terms, observes a frustrated Om Malik, the writer and investor. More here.
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Going Public
Over the past year, the stock market has been deluged with newly public electric-vehicle startups that raised money by pitching plans for rapid growth. Months into their lives on the public markets, a set of these companies are missing targets, adding costs and, in the case of Canoo, upending major parts of a business model laid out to investors.
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People
Physicist Isamu Akasaki, a co-winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the world’s first efficient blue light-emitting diodes, has died at age 92, Meijo University today. Akasaki, a professor at the university, had been recognized for the invention which has contributed to bright and energy-saving white light sources, widely known as LED lamps. The Japan Times has more here.
Waymo's chief executive, John Krafcik, said today that he's stepping down from the role after more than five years to "kick off new adventures" after a "refresh period." In his stead, the Google affiliate is promoting its chief technology and operating officers, Dmitri Dolgov and Tekedra Mawakana, to lead the decade-old effort to make self-driving cars a reality. They will share the title of co-chief executive. The WSJ has more here.
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Data
The housing market is crazier than it has been since 2006, reports the WSJ. Says one Redfin agent to the outlet: “It’s exhausting. I’m speechless. It’s heartbreaking for buyers; it’s a celebration for sellers.”
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Essential Reads
For more than six months, federal prosecutors say, a New York man used inside information to make illegal profits in the stock market—and a core element of his alleged scheme was his interaction with Bloomberg News, which published several stories shortly after the trader arranged to make significant purchases of the companies’ shares. Columbia Business Review has more here.
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