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Top News
The European Union today opened a formal antitrust investigation into allegations that Google abuses its leading role in the advertising-technology sector, the most wide-ranging case yet to look at that pillar of the tech giant’s business. The WSJ has more here.
Bitcoin’s brief drop below the symbolic price threshold of $30,000 today has reignited talk of a crypto winter.
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These Forge Founders Just Raised $5 Million for Their New, Still-Stealth Investing Startup
Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam are cofounders who met during Y Combinator’s 2012 summer batch and went on to cofound Forge, which helps accredited investors and institutions buy and sell private company shares and which most recently raised $150 million in new funding in May.
Forge — originally known as Equidate — has taken off as demand for private company shares has ballooned. The company, launched in 2014, has now raised $250 million altogether, including from, Deutsche Börse, Temasek, Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, and Munich Re. It acquired rival SharesPost last year for $160 million in cash and stock. According to the company, it now has more than $14 billion in assets under custody.
Prasad and Ramadurgam — who helped hire Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques back in 2018 — say they’re excited about that success. They still own a stake in the company; they remain non-voting board members.
But after spending 18 months as co-president of Forge at the outset of Rodrigues’s tenure, they left early last year to begin tinkering on a new idea, one that Prasad says is centered around giving a much wider pool of people access to private company shares. Called D/XYZ (pronounced “Destiny”), the idea is to enable any investor — not just the 1% — to invest in startups whose services they use and love.
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Massive Fundings
CommerceIQ, a nine-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based company that aims to optimizes brands’ e-commerce sales, marketing and supply chain operations, has raised $60 million in Series C funding. Insight Partners led the round, joined by earlier investors Trinity Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Madrona Venture Group. More here.
Enveda Biosciences, a two-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based company that has said it's building the “world’s largest database of anthropological, chemical and biological data from medicinal plants,”
has raised $51 million in Series A funding led by Lux Capital. Other participants in the round include Two Sigma Ventures, Hummingbird VC, Catalio Capital, Lifeforce Capital, True Ventures, Wireframe Ventures and Village Global. More here.
Forto, a five-year-old, Berlin-based logistics startup that tracks shipping containers from their point of origin to their destination, has raised $240 million in funding led by SoftBank. The company has now raised $360 million altogether, says Tech.eu. More here.
G2, a nine-year-old, Chicago-based software marketplace that features peer reviews that help simplify the buying process, raised $157 million in Series D funding at a $1.1 billion valuation. Permira led the round, joined by HubSpot Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and earlier backers Accel, Emergence Capital and IVP. TechCrunch has more here.
GoStudent, a five-year-old, Vienna, Austria-based K-12 video tutoring marketplace, has raised €205 million in Series C funding at a post-money valuation of €1.4 billion valuation. DST Global led the round, joined by SoftBank, Tencent, Dragoneer and earlier investors Coatue, Left Lane Capital and DN Capital. TechCrunch has more here.
Insilico Medicine, a seven-year-old, Hong Kong-based drug development and discovery platform, raised $255 million in Series C funding. Warburg Pincus led the round, joined by CPE, OrbiMed, Mirae Asset Capital, B Capital Group, and more than a dozen other firms. TechCrunch has more here.
Mollie, an Amsterdam-based payments integration startup that rivals Stripe in Europe and was founded by Adriaan Mol (he also founded MessageBird, which competes with cloud communications platform Twilio), has raised €665 million in funding at a post-money valuation of €5.4 billion valuation. Blackstone Growth led the round, joined by QT Growth, General Atlantic, HMI Capital, Alkeon Capital and TCV. Per Crunchbase data, Mollie has now raised roughly €780 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.
Oyster, a two-year-old, London-based HR platform for globally distributed companies, has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Stripes, with participation from Avid Ventures and earlier backers Emergence Capital and The Slack Fund. TechCrunch has more here.
Primer, a nearly 12-year-old, Greenbrae, Ca.-based natural language processing platform whose clients include U.S. national security agencies, has raised $110 million in funding led by Addition, with participation from In-Q-Tel. Reuters has more here.
Stronghold Digital Mining, a month-old, Kennerdell, Pa.-based digital asset miner powered by alternative energy, has raised $105 million.The raise comes from two private placements of equity securities, with investors being granted registration rights that require a future public listing, Stronghold told CoinDesk. Investors include MG Capital, various family offices and Greg Beard, a former senior partner at private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Beard is listed as Stronghold’s co-chairman and CEO. Coindesk has more here.
Transmit Security, a seven-year-old, Newton, Ma.-based maker of password-less identity and risk management software, just raised $543 million in Series A funding at a $2.2 billion valuation. Insight Partners and General Atlantic co-led the round, joined by Cyberstarts, Geodesic, SYN Ventures, Vintage and Artisanal Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
Viva Republica, the 10-year-old, Seoul-based fintech company behind Toss, a super app with more than 40 financial services, has raised $410 million at a post-money valuation of $7.4 billion. The new funding was led by Alkeon Capital and included participation from Korea Development Bank, along with earlier backers Altos Ventures and Greyhound Capital. The company, which has now raised more than $940 million in funding altogether, plans to launch a neobank called Toss Bank in September. TechCrunch has more here.
Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings
Aeroseal, an 11-year-old, Dayton, Oh.-based maker of sealant particles that can close up small leaks in heating and cooling ductwork and reduce carbon emissions, has raised $22 million in Series A funding. Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the round, with participation from Energy Impact Partners and Building Ventures. More here.
Majority, a two-year-old, Houston-based startup that's providing mobile banking services to migrants, given that they often struggle to open up a local bank account straightaway, has raised $19 million in seed funding led by Valar Ventures, with participation from Avid Ventures and Heartcore Capital. TechCrunch has more here.
Sporttrade, a four-year-old, Philadelphia, Pa.-based startup aiming to launch the first legal U.S. sports betting exchange, raised $36 million. Jump Capital led the round, joined by Impression Ventures, Hudson River Trading and Tower Research Ventures. Legal Sports Report has more here.
Trella, a nearly three-year-old, Cairo, Egypt-based trucking marketplace that passed through Y Combinator in 2019, has raised $42 million in Series A funding, including $30 million in equity funding and $12 million in debt financing. The equity piece was co-led by Maersk Growth, the corporate venture arm of the massive shipping and logistics company Maersk, and Saudi-based Raed Ventures. Other participants in the round included Algebra Ventures, Vision Ventures, Next Billion Ventures, VentureSouq, Foundation Ventures, and Flexport. The debt financing came from Lendable and some other financial institutions. Menabytes has more here.
Smaller Fundings
Arpio, a three-year-old, Durham, N.C.-based SaaS startup focused on disaster recovery for cloud-native computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services and soon (it says), Microsoft Azure, has raised $2 million in funding led by Valor Ventures. More here.
Code BGP, a months-old, Virginia Beach, Va.-based startup focused specifically on BGP security, visibility, and automation (Border Gateway Protocol is a standardized exterior gateway protocol), has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from the Athens, Greece-based venture firm Marathon. More here.
Holy Grail, a two-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based startup that's prototyping a direct air carbon capture device that is modular and small, has raised $2.7 million in seed funding from LowerCarbon Capital, Goat Capital, and Stripe founder Patrick Collison, along with more than a handful of other new and earlier backers. TechCrunch has more here.
Hydrosat, a nearly four-year-old, Lincolnshire, Il.-based company that makes a surface temperature analytics product, has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Cultivation Capital’s newly launched Geospatial Technologies Fund, with participation by Freeflow Ventures, the Yield Lab, Expon Capital, Techstars, Industrious Ventures, Synovia Capital and the University of Michigan. TechCrunch has more here.
Joyride, a seven-year-old, Toronto-based company that provides white label apps, back-end analytics and multi-modal fleet management for shared micromobility startups, has raised $3.7 million led by Proeza Ventures, Urban Innovation Fund and Craig Miller, the former chief product officer of Shopify. TechCrunch has more here.
Moderne, an 11-month-old, Seattle-base code automation company, has raised $4.7 million in initial funding led by True Ventures and included participation from Mango Capital, Overtime.vc, Github CTO Jason Warner, Datadog co-founder and CEO Olivier Pomel, and Coverity co-founder and former CTO Andy Chou. More here.
Vantage, a 10-month-old, New York-based service that helps businesses analyze and reduce their AWS costs, just raised $4 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from numerous angel investors. TechCrunch has more here.
Vero, a 20-month-old, New York-based startup that automates residential applicant screening and leasing, has raised $5 million in Series A funding co-led by Eleven Capital and Bienville Capital. Strategic investors, including LeFrak and A&E, also joined the round. More here.
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New Funds
Ubiquity Ventures, a four-year-old, seed-stage firm founded by Sunil Nagaraj (he previously spent six years with Bessemer Venture Partners), has closed its second fund with $51.2 million, shows an SEC filing. We talked with Nagaraj when he first struck out on his own. More here.
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Going Public
Couchbase, an 11-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based NoSQL database, registered paperwork yesterday for an IPO. The not-yet-profitable company has raised nearly $300 million over the years, including from Accel, which owns the biggest pre-IPO stake of its backers with 20.9% of its shares. SiliconAngle has more here.
Quanergy Systems, a nine-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based lidar company, said today it has agreed to merge with special purpose acquisition fund CITIC Capital Acquisition Corp., a Chinese blank-check firm affiliated with the country’s largest state-owned investment conglomerate. The deal, which assigns Quanergy an implied valuation of $1.4 billion, is expected to close in the second half of 2021. TechCrunch has more here.
Sprinklr, an 11-year-old, New York-based customer experience software maker, raised $266 million after pricing its U.S. initial public offering below a marketed range and cutting the number of shares sold. The company priced 16.6 million shares today at $16 each after marketing 19 million shares for $18 to $20 apiece, according to a statement. Bloomberg has more here.
Eyeglass brand Warby Parker said today it has confidentially filed for a stock market listing in the U.S. The New York-based company said in a press release that its public listing is expected to take place after the SEC completes its review process, which is still subject to market conditions. Warby Parker raised $120 million in its most recent 2020 funding round, giving it a value of $3 billion, according to PitchBook data. CNBC has more here.
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People
A Q&A with Marc Andreessen.
Frontline Ventures, a Dublin, Ireland-based venture firm that backs busienss-to-business startups on both sides of the Atlantic, announced today that David Clarke, former CTO of Workday and Founder of CapeClear, has joined as venture partner. The firm also announced that Finn Murphy has been promoted to partner from principal. Both are focused on early-stage European B2B tech.
Several top executives at Lordstown Motors, including its president and former CFO, sold off chunks of stock in the electric-truck startup ahead of reporting financial results in February, according to regulatory filings disclosing the transactions. The WSJ has more here.
NEA announced some promotions today, including promoting Tony Florence to the role of Managing General Partner, technology, and Mohamad Makhzoumi to Managing General Partner, healthcare. Meanwhile, Jess Ou, who joined NEA in 2018, has been promoted to senior associate. Ou works out of the firm's Menlo Park and San Francisco offices. And Andrew Schoen, who joined NEA as an associate in 2014, has been promoted to partner with the firm. Schoen is based in Denver. You can find the full list here.
"Black Swan" author Nassim Taleb has doubled down on his criticism against bitcoin - this time, saying in a new paper that the cryptocurrency is worth exactly zero, and that there is no evidence that blockchain is a useful technology. Business Insider has more here.
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Data
Automation has powered up to 70% of U.S. middle class erosion in recent decades, according to a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The median existing-home sales price in the U.S. last month topped $350,000 for the first time, the National Association of Realtors said today. The figure was nearly 24% higher than a year ago, the biggest year-over-year price increase NAR has recorded in data going back to 1999.
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Detours
Netflix gives Formula 1 a boost.
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Sponsored By ...
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