CB Insights - NFT grift

Hi there,

Here is this week in charts.

NFTs gone wild. Daily trading volumes on OpenSea — the biggest NFT marketplace — are down 80% in March from their peak in February. The average selling price of NFTs and number of accounts buying and selling NFTs weekly have also dropped, according to NonFungible. The market’s slump is raising questions about the long-term outlook for NFTs, which saw $41B in sales and an explosion of VC investment in 2021.

Down, down, do your dance. About one-third of US tech companies that went public in the last 4 years are trading below their pre-IPO private round valuations today. As investors recalibrate, fears of inflated valuations for privately held companies are rising. Down rounds (when a private company raises additional funding at a lower valuation than it had during a previous round of funding) could be on the horizon.  

Future factory. Manufacturing remains an area of relatively low digitization. But forces from globalization to reshoring are pushing manufacturers to new technologies that can increase productivity. This is translating to record levels of investment in manufacturing tech companies. Over the past 5 years, equity funding to the sector has nearly tripled to reach $6.8B in 2021.

10% luck, 20% skill...100% reason to call this a mistake. 

I love you.