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July 16, 2021
Friday! We mentioned this on Monday, but in case you missed our news bulletin: we're turning this thing off for a couple of weeks beginning this Monday so can max and relax with the interns and return fully recharged.⚡(Right now, we're running at 30%.)
Before we put our equipment away, we leave you with this week's StrictlyVC Download, featuring guest Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, Crunchbase, and the crypto-focused firm Arrington Capital, who made the move to Miami this year and caught us up on his new life there, his fund's near-death experience (and rebound), and where he's placing his bets at the moment. (He's definitely managing more capital than we'd realized.) We also talked about that series of tweets by Dogecoin cofounder Jackson Palmer. We really enjoyed this one; we hope'll you enjoy hearing from him, too.
Giant thanks for this episode's sponsor, Founder Shield, which says it works with more venture-backed companies than any brokerage in the world. If you’re not happy with your current broker or want to benchmark your current policies check out foundershield.com/strictlyvc to schedule a free risk assessment today.
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“It went so fast. You tried to do something, and it was already too late.” (Above: an aerial view over Erftstadt, Germany, at left, and the same area on July 16 at right. (Landsat/Copernicus/Google Earth and Handout/AFP/Getty Images.)
President Joe Biden today said platforms like Facebook are "killing people" by allowing Covid-19 vaccine misinformation on their services. "The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet," a Facebook spokesperson said in response.
Anthony Di Iorio, a co-founder of the Ethereum network, says he's done with the cryptocurrency world, partially because of personal safety concerns. Di Iorio, 48, has had a security team since 2017, with someone traveling with or meeting him wherever he goes. The industry has "got a risk profile that I am not too enthused about,” said Di Iorio tells Bloomberg, while declining to disclose his cryptocurrency holdings or net worth. “I don’t feel necessarily safe in this space."
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Crypto Investors Like Terraform Labs So Much, They're Investing $150 Million in Its Ecosystem
There are many blockchain platforms competing for investors’ and developers’ attention right now, from the big daddy of them all, Ethereum, to so-called “Ethereum Killers” like Solana, which we wrote about in May.
Often, these technologies are seen as so promising that investors are willing to fund not only the blockchains but an ecosystem of products and projects that are built on their blockchain networks. On Wednesday, for example, Phantom, a digital wallet that resides on the Solana blockchain network, announced $9 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (which in June also splashed out a lot of money for Solana’s digital tokens).
Similarly, a syndicate of investors today is casting their votes for Terraform Labs, a three-year-old platform that originally set out to mint different so-called stablecoins for e-commerce that mimic the value of various fiat currencies and has since expanded its offerings.
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Massive Fundings
Netradyne, a six-year-old, San Diego-based startup that uses cameras and edge computing to improve commercial driver safety, has raised $150 million in Series C funding. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the round, joined by Point72 Ventures and M12. TechCrunch has more here.
Shopmonkey, a five-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based maker of process management software designed for auto repair shops, has raised $75 million in Series C funding. Bessemer Venture Partners and Index Ventures co-led the round, joined by Iconiq Growth and earlier backers Headline and I2BF. TechCrunch has more here.
Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings
Daloopa, a three-year-old, New York-based startup that's developing data extraction tech for financial institutions, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Credit Suisse Asset Management. TechCrunch has more here.
Play2Pay, a six-year-old, Miami, Fla.-based bill payment startup, has raised $13 million in Series A funding led by Telesoft Partners, with participation from Harbor Spring Capital and numerous individual investors. TechCrunch has more here.
Stemson Therapeutics, a three-year-old, San Diego-based startup aiming to create a hair loss treatment that makes net-new hair follicles, ha raised $15 million in Series A funding. DCVC led, and was joined by AbbVie Ventures and Genoa Ventures. FierceBiotech has more here.
Verve Motion, a year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based developer of exo-suits for grocery workers (to prevent back injuries, among other things), raised $15 million in Series A funding. Construct Capital led the round, joined by Founder Collective, Pillar VC, Safar Partners and OUP. TechCrunch has more here.
Smaller Fundings
Halla, a five-year-old, New York-based startup that says its "taste intelligence" tech can accurately predict shopper intent and recommend the grocery item a person will want to buy, has $4.5 million in funding from Food Retail Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.
Visualping, a five-year-old, Vancouver, Canada-based service that can users monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million seed round it announced earlier this year. The round was led by Seattle-based FUSE, a relatively new firm with investors who spun out of Ignition Partners last year. Prior investors Mistral Venture Partners and N49P also participated. TechCrunch has more here.
Taager, a two-year-old, Egypt-based social e-commerce startup, has raised $6.4 million in funding from led by Pan-African focused VC 4DX Ventures. It also included participation from Raed Ventures, Beco Capital, Breyer Capital and some private investors, including Magnus Olsson, co-founder of Careem. TechCrunch has more here.
Yummy, an 18-month-old, San Francisco-based delivery app on a mission to create the super app for Venezuela, has raised $4 million in funding to expand its dark store delivery operations across Latin America. Funding backers included Y Combinator, Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, Canary, Hustle Fund, Necessary Ventures and the co-founders of TaskUs. The total investment includes pre-seeding capital raised in 2020. TechCrunch has more here.
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New Funds
General Atlantic is raising $4 billion for a growth equity fund focused on climate technologies called BeyondNetZero. Axios says the firm intends to raise $3 billion in capital commitments from outside investors, while $1 billion will come from its existing managed accounts. More here and here.
Lerer Hippeau, the 11-year-old, New York-based early-stage venture firm, appears to have closed its seventh fund with $130 million in capital commitments, judging by a new SEC filing. The outfit closed its sixth early-stage fund in May 2018 with $122 million. At the time, it also announced a $60 million "select" fund to focus on later-stage deals; there could be another select funds in the works, but there's no related filing as of yet. More here.
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Exits
Indian retail giant Reliance Retail said today that it's acquired a controlling stake in the 25-year-old Indian search and discovery firm Just Dial for $469 million. Just Dial offers local search and e-commerce services through its website, mobile apps and telephone line. Users in India can inquire about local plumbers, details for hotels and housekeeping services among other things by just dialing 8888888888. Reliance is receiving 41% of the publicly listed company in exchange for its investment and will reportedly make an offer to acquire an additional 26% stake later on. TechCrunch has more here.
Pocket Casts has a new owner. Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and recently purchased Tumblr, announced today that it’s acquired Pocket Casts, the well-regarded podcast app. The blog post announcing the purchase didn’t offer much in the way of a preview, but it did tease potential future integrations. The Verge has more here.
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Going Public
Shares of nine-year-old, San Francisco-based Blend Labs opened 11% above their offer price today, giving the digital banking platform a valuation of about $4.4 billion in its stock market debut. At its current market cap, the company, which is focused on mortgage-lending, is at least 33% more than the $3.3 billion it was valued at after a funding round in January. Reuters has more here.
Electric-truck startup Lordstown Motors Corp. confirmed the Justice Department is probing its business, investigating matters related to its reverse merger deal last year and preorders for its forthcoming pickup truck, the Endurance. The federal probe adds to the challenges facing the Ohio-based startup as it works to launch its first model, an all-electric pickup that executives have said will begin limited production in September. The WSJ has more here.
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People
Sudip Chakrabarti has joined Decibel Partners as a partner. He was most recently a partner focused on enterprise software at Madrona Venture Group. He also logged a couple of years with Lightspeed Venture Partners and with Andreessen Horowitz. Decibel is a three-year-old venture firm whose anchor investor is Cisco Systems. More here.
As Apple continues its work on self-driving car technology, it’s shifting one of its best-known executives to the Project Titan team. According to a report from Insider, Kevin Lynch, Apple's VP of technology has been tapped to join the team working on the car project.
Section 32 founder and Google Ventures founder Bill Maris discusses his concerns over bioterrorism, the threat of another pandemic and what investments need to be made in order to prevent it from happening.
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Essential Reads
What ever happened to IBM's Watson?
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Detours
We don't care for this study. But also this is gross.
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