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April 19, 2021
Hi, welcome back from the weekend.:)
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Top News
How to watch Apple's first media event of this year tomorrow.
The UK government will look into the national security implications of U.S. group Nvidia’s purchase of British chip designer ARM Holdings from SoftBank, it said today, throwing a possible wrench into the $40 billion deal.
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Sponsored By ...
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Massive Fundings
Adagio Therapeutics, a year-old, Waltham, Ma.-based developer of antibodies for coronaviruses that was spun out of another venture-backed company called Adimab, has raised $336 million in Series C funding. RA Capital Management led the round, joined by Redmile Group, Federated Hermes, Foresite Capital, ArrowMark Partners, PremjiInvest and earlier investors Fidelity, OrbiMed, Polaris Partners, Mithril, GV, Population Health Partners, Adimab and Omega Funds. STAT has more here.
Alan, a five-year-old, Paris-based independent health insurance company, has raised $220 million in funding a post-money valuation of $1.67 billion. Coatue is leading the round, joined by Dragoneer, Exor, and earlier investors Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Temasek. According to Crunchbase, the company had previously raised €125 million ($150 million) over several rounds of funding. TechCrunch has more here.
Druva, a 13-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based cloud data protection and backup company, has raised $147 million in funding at a post-money valuation of $2 billion. The company has raised $475 million altogether. Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec led the latest round, joined by Neuberger Berman. TechCrunch has more here.
Phenix, an eight-year-old, Chicago-based company that streams synchronous real-time video to broadcast sized audiences, has raised $16.7 million in Series B funding at a $90 million valuation. KB Partners led, joined by Verizon Ventures and Manheim Investments. Forbes has more here.
Razorpay, a six-year-old Bangalore-based fintech that accepts, processes and disburses money online for small businesses and enterprises, has raised $160 million in Series E funding at a post-money valuation of $42 billion, roughly triple where it was valued late last year. The new round was co-led by earlier backers GIC (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund) and Sequoia Capital India. Earlier backers Ribbit Capital and Tiger Global also participated in the new round, which takes Razorpay’s to-date raise to $366.5 million. TechCrunch has more here.
SES (SolidEnergy Systems), a nine-year-old, Woburn, Ma.-based lithium-metal battery developer, has raised $139 million in funding led by General Motors, which which the company has been working for six years. TechCrunch has more here.
Zilch, a three-year-old, London-based startup whose buy-now-pay-later business cuts deals directly with consumers, has raised $80 million in Series B funding that values the company at more than $500 million from Gauss Ventures and M&F Fund, along with other unnamed investors. TechCrunch has more here.
Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings
Payhawk, a three-year-old, London-based paperless corporate card that simplifies expenses for businesses, has raised $20 million in funding led by QED Investors, with participation from earlier backer Earlybird Digital East. TechCrunch has more here.
Tink, a five-year-old, Berlin-based marketplace for smart-home and IoT products, raised €40 million in Series D funding co-led by Cadence Growth Capital, Rocket Internet and ProSeiben’s SevenVentures. Tech.eu has more here.
Smaller Fundings
1Doc3, a seven-year-old, Bogota, Colombia-based telemedicine startup, has raised $3 million co-led by MatterScale Ventures and Kayyak Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
Affogata, a six-year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based customer intelligence platform, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding round co-led by Mangrove Capital Partners and PICO Venture Partners, with additional participation from individual investors. Tech.eu has more here.
Bespoke Financial, a three-year-old, L.A.-based cannabis financing company, has raised $8 million in Series A funding co-led by Casa Verde Capital and Sweat Equity Ventures; other participants in the round include Ceres Group Holdings, Greenhouse Capital Partners, DoubleLine Capital’s co-founder and former president Philip Barach, and Rob Stavis, an investor with Bessemer Venture Partners. TechCrunch has more here.
CoLearn, a three-year-old, Jakarta, Indonesia-based startup that launched as a chain of physical tutoring centers and quickly shifted to an offline-online model when COVID-19 hit, has raised $10 million in Series A funding co-led by Alpha Wave Incubation and GSV Ventures, with participation from earlier backers Sequoia Capital India and AC Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
The Expert, a 10-month-old, L.A.-based platform for video consultations with interior designers, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Sweet Capital, Promus Ventures, Golden Ventures, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, AD 100 designer Brigette Romanek and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow. TechCrunch has more here.
Home Delivery Services (HDS), an eight-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca-based delivery company founded by Louis Borders that plans to sell groceries and general merchandise online, has raised $3 million in funding from Bob DiRumualdo, the chairman of Ulta and CEO of Naples Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
insureQ, a two-year-old, Munich, Germany-based insurance startup that's targeting the self-employed, along with small and mid-size businesses, has raised €5 million in seed funding led by Nauta Capital, with participation from Flash Ventures and Global Founders Capital. Tech.eu has more here.
Knox Financial, a three-year-old, Boston-based startup that aims to help people identify and manage residential rentals with its algorithm-based platform, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by G20 Ventures. Other participants in the round include Greycroft, Pillar VC, 2LVC, and Gaingels. The company has now raised $14.7 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.
Popl, a 14-month-old, L.A.-based startup that uses NFC technology to make sharing contact information as easy as using Apple Pay, has raised $2.2 million in funding, including from serial entrepreneur Justin Kan, Urban Innovation Fund, Y Combinator, Cathexis Ventures and individual investors, including Wish cofounder Peter Szulczewski. TechCrunch has more here.
Soona, a three-year-old, Denver-based digital content studio for e-commerce companies (it stages shoots, then delivers photo or video within 24 hours it says), has raised $10.2 million in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
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New Funds
Expa, the eight-year-old, Bay Area-based venture firm firm founded by Garrett Camp, is raising up to $200 million for its third fund, shows a new SEC filing. More here.
Rapha Capital Management, an investment firm led by serial entrepreneur Kevin Slawin, is looking to raise up to $100 million fund that will focus exclusively on early-stage life sciences companies. FierceBiotech has more here.
The videoconferencing giant Zoom has launched a $100 million "apps" fund to encourage more founders to launch businesses that use the Zoom toolset. TechCrunch has more here.
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Exits
Today, Mastercard took steps to advance its identity verification efforts by acquiring the two-year-old, 200-person, Seattle-based startup Ekata for $850 million. Ekata was originally spun out of Whitepages Pro. TechCrunch has more here.
Atlassian, the publicly traded maker of collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams, has acquired Brisbane, Australia-based ThinkTilt, the five-year-old company behind the popular Jira-centric no-code/low-code form builder ProForma. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. ThinkTilt appears to have raised a minimal amount of money (Crunchbase lists just $1.1 million in seed funding). TechCrunch has more here.
Several sports media firms are looking for buyers or investors, hoping to cash in on the expansion of online sports betting across the U.S., notes The Information. Among them: the Chernin Group’s The Action Network; the subscription sports news site The Athletic; and Authentic Brands Group, which acquired the sports magazine Sports Illustrated in 2019. More here.
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Going Public
Automation services provider UiPath has raised both the size and price range of its initial public offering in a move that boosts the company’s expected value to about $28 billion when it hits the market this week. The company said today it has upped its IPO price from a broad range of $43 to $50 per share to a much narrower scale of $52 to $54. That’s about a 21% jump from the lower end of its initial range and an 8% gain on the upper end, notes SiliconAngle. More here.
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People
Craig Hanson, who has spent the last several years as a general partner with NextWorld Capital in San Francisco (and who played host to several StrictlyVC events at the firm's gallery, for which we remain grateful), has joined the buzzy revenue intelligence platform Gong as its VP of product strategy. More here.
Ben Mathews, who spent the last five-and-a-half years with Bessemer Venture Partners, first as a senior associate and in recent years as a vice president, has joined Night Ventures as a general partner. Night is a venture firm focused on creators and backed largely by creators. We'd written about its debut fund recently in TechCrunch.
Ali Yahya has been promoted to general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he invests in crypto and was the first full-time member of the crypto team, says his colleague Chris Dixon. Before joining a16z, Yahya was a software engineer and researcher at Google X. Dixon has more here.
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Jobs
Obvious Ventures is looking to bring aboard a new, full-time investor. The team is in San Francisco. More here.
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Essential Reads
On the heels of Clubhouse’s latest fundraise, Reddit today officially unveiled its Clubhouse rival, Reddit Talk, for its own communities. As TechCrunch notes, Reddit’s voice chat experience hasn’t deviated much from Clubhouse’s overall design where speakers sit at the top of the screen in a stage area of sorts, and listeners appear below — all with rounded profile icons, plus tools to react or raise a hand to ask to speak. More here.
Speaking of Clubhouse clones, Facebook is doing more than just building its own take on the audio-based social network; it’s also announcing tools that allow podcast creators to share long-form audio, a new Spotify integration for music, and a brand-new short-form experience called Soundbites. More here.
Parler, the social network popular with conservatives, has been approved by Apple to return to iPhones because the app has agreed to more aggressively patrol what its users post, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times. More here.
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Detours
This also does not seem like the healthiest trend.
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