Mis-Bets or Blips, Afro Youth & Mental Health Exits🧠

Result: A funnel of $5.5 billion toward mental health tech startups globally in 2021, according to data from CB Insights.

That’s up 139% from the previous year. What’s more? Almost 70% of those deals were early-stage. And the US appears to be leading the pack, accounting for $4.5 billion of those global funding dollars.

But while funding has increased, so have exits. 

There were 43 exits among mental health startups in 2021, including mergers and acquisitions, SPACs and IPOs. That’s up 87% from the previous year.

There are a host of startups in the NFT space and an ocean of venture capital and private-market equity floating in NFT projects. The startup bet on NFTs becoming big deals in near future and staying that way, is enormous. Even companies drastically different from the crypto industry are getting their feet wet in the space.

Despite all this craze, the market for NFTs may be slowing down after all.

When we think about NFT volumes, OpenSea comes to mind. The funded unicorn startup with a commanding market share can give us a strong indication of where the NFT market is itself.

So are the above declines a mere blip in the road or an early sign of eventual crash? 

To answer this, we need to understand the underlying impact of slumping NFT trading activity. 

OpenSea, and many other startups in the space, have a very straightforward business model — the company charges a fee for trades it executes. Meaning, falling daily trading numbers directly translates to falling revenues. Therefore, the chart of NFT data above is akin to an early-warning signal that big baddies like OpenSea and Coinbase’s valuation isn’t climbing at the moment.

Apart from trade and revenue, we can also look at other data points, such as, Monthly Active Users (MAUs), Google Trends and new accounts creations, to determine the direction of the NFT market. 

The next graph indicates that MAUs at NFT markets SuperRare and Rarible have been steeply declining for most months in the last two quarters.

Google Trends show consumer interest in the term “NFT” in steady decline from mid-January.

And play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, which has NFTs as part of its core gaming mechanics, has seen new account creation decline sharply since highs set last year. 

African cultures have long inspired the world through their unique music and films. In fact, Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, is currently the most prolific film industry in the world. It is only now, though, that investors, international companies, and social media platforms have started showing a huge appetite for the space in Africa. This is thanks to the continent’s youthful demographic and their bubbling social media presence, expanded internet connectivity, and high mobile usage. As a result, African entertainment startups had their best funding year on record last year, according to a new report by Disrupt Africa. 

Here’s a rundown of how funding to the nascent space has changed in the past few years:

• 2018: Less than $1 million invested by local and foreign venture capital firms into African entertainment.
• 2019: That figure remained somewhat the same
• 2020: It spiked to $13.9 million
• 2021: Slightly lower at $11.6 million

This huge growth, however, reflects the success of only a handful of companies and not of the entire sector. This year, all the funding went to just 10 firms, according to the report.

The main funding recipient was Kenya’s Mdundo, a music streaming platform that raised $6.4 million through its oversubscribed IPO on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market Denmark.

Other startups that secured funding include; 

• Carry1st - South African developer of mobile games and content apps -  funding: $2.5 million
• Sea Monster - Game and animation creator - funding: $1 million 
• StarNews Mobile - A video-on-demand startup - funding: $1.8 million

47% of Black homeowners were approved for a mortgage refinancing with Wells Fargo in 2020, compared with 72% of White homeowners. 

Many Black homeowners who sought to refinance with Wells Fargo during the pandemic were middle class and had good credit scores. Still, a Bloomberg News investigation found that among major mortgage lenders, Wells Fargo was alone in rejecting more Black homeowners than it accepted.