Welcome back to The ProWellTech Exchange, a weekly newsletter from startups and markets. It is largely based on the daily column that appears in Extra Crunch , but free and meant for weekend reading. You can sign up here. First, a big compliment for making it through the week. If you live in the United States, you have just endured one of the wildest weeks ever. Rapid-fire, near-panic headlines have been our fate since last Friday, when the president announced he was positive for COVID-19. We are all very tired. You get points just for surviving.
Second, I wanted to bring you something uplifting this weekend, as you deserve it. Unfortunately, that's not what we're going to talk about.
On Friday, The Exchange covered the new female founders venture capital results data during the third quarter. The dataset was centered on the United States, but we can assume it is illustrative of global trends. Regardless of that nuance, the data was bleak.
In the third quarter, US-based founders and co-founders raised 136 rounds worth $ 434 million, according to data from PitchBook. That was a few more rounds than Q2 2020, but far fewer dollars. And it has been down across the board from Q3 2019. Even more so, as we noted in the piece, the world of aggregate venture capital has done very well.
Here is some data from PwC that underscores this point, and a little more from my old employer Crunchbase. What matters is that founders are worse off when VCs are super active. This will only perpetuate inequalities and inequalities in the startup market.
By the way, here's some more bad news. Vern Howard Jr., the co-founder and CEO of Hallo, a startup that raised nearly $ 2 million, according to Crunchbase, compiled some data on the VC performance of Black's founders in the third quarter. Here's what he set out to do:
[W]We wanted to put the hard numbers behind the promises of so many venture capitalists and create a benchmark for how we can track investments in black founders over time. Then our team pulled a list from Crunchbase of all startups globally with a total funding amount of $ 500,000 - $ 20,000,000 and that raised a round between July 1st and October 1st. There were over 1383 companies here and our team went through them one by one, to see how many black founders there were.
There were 31.
- The OpenDoor-SPAC deal became clearer this week when we got a scratch on its financials. Some figures are approximate. Some are good. But now we can understand the bull's reasons for its future, which helps.
- Affirm announced that it has filed privately to go public, while Root has filed publicly to go public. Read more about Affirm news here and a dig into Root S-1 here.
- Be sure to check out YCharts release for a PE company. The startup told ProWellTech that it will exceed $ 15 million in annual recurring revenue this year. Which should mean it sold for quite a penny.
- Greycroft has raised an ocean of new capital, in the amount of $ 678 million distributed between a fund of $ 310 million for initial checks and a fund of $ 368 million for growing business.
- Why do we care about Greycroft? We don't, per se, but it's worth noting that VCs are still likely to rise during the current crisis. We often talk about how the founders are managing to pick up during COVID, and this is something VCs need to do too.
- ProWellTech delved into the API startup space, talking to both the VCs and the founders of the space and why it's booming in 2020.
- Airbnb's summer was painful, but its recovery could prove to be legendary. The exchange looked at how he managed to recover so quickly.
- And finally, from Market Notes, some must-see rounds: Zira.ai raised $ 3.1 million, Grid AI raised $ 18.6 million to help machine learning developers do more, Instacart raised $ 200 million more with a valuation of nearly $ 18 billion, mmhmm increased $ 21 million in the week round with the best name, Unqork raised $ 207 million and we delved into what that means for the code-free market and GoPuff has raised more $ 380 million in an epic round that values the start of deliveries at $ 3.9 billion.
Now, you could open up your funding ranges to include both smaller and larger funding events, but regardless of the data limitations, the resulting number - just 2.2% of the total - is a shame.
- Continuing our coverage of the savings and investment boom that fintech startups around the world are riding this year, Freetrade, a UK Robinhood if you will, told The Exchange that it surpassed £ 1 billion in September order volume. . Not bad!
- Freetrade also recently launched a paid version of its service, as the order flow payment method to generate revenue that Robinhood is growing is not allowed across the pond.
- Remaining in the fintech world, Yotta Savings is a startup that offers a savings option to its users, plus the chance to win a large cash prize for storing their money with the startup. People have been whispering in the company's ear for a while, but until now I've held off writing about it because it wasn't clear to me if the model was just a gimmick or something that would actually attract customers.
- Well, Yotta has grown from 8,000 accounts to more than 30,000 in the past few weeks and has hit the $ 100 million deposit limit. So, I guess we care now.
- Coinbase has lost one in 20 employees due to its new strategy of remaining neutral during political times on anything its CEO feels unrelated to its core mission, which, as a for-profit company with tectonic financial backing, is making money.
- On the same topic, can he from The margins made a salient point that "no politics is a political position". That's right, and he's very conservative in that.
- Additionally, the CEO of Coinbase made noise about how his company "will work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc. " Like it or not, this is a political position and has nothing to do with the company's stated core mission. And a political struggle was worth it, namely equal access to the workplace.
- I'll put a plug for this piece on the subject from a VC that ProWellTech has posted, and these thoughts from a tech dweller on how to ensure your company gets to the wrong side of the story about essentially everything.
- Wrapping up our carry-on this week, Ping Identity bought ShoCard. Ping is now a public company, so normally his business would have landed outside our wheelhouse. But we worry in this case because ProWellTech has covered ShoCard (2015: "ShoCard is a digital identity card on the Blockchain"), and why the startup does cryptocurrency-related jobs.
- Seeing a public company grab a blockchain startup for real money, on purpose and out loud, doesn't happen every day. Read more here if you want to read the agreement.
Market Notes
Various and various
Wrapping, this newsletter is a lot of fun and I appreciate your reading. It is also a work in progress. So feel free to press, reply and let me know what you want to see more. Or press reply and send me a cute photo of your pet. Or it's okay for me.
Chat soon,
