Year: 2018

In July 2018, the tech sector’s leisure class — venture capitalists — kicked investments into overdrive, at least when it comes to financing supergiant venture rounds of $100 million or more (in native or as-converted USD values).

With 55 deals accounting for just over $15 billion at time of writing, July likely set an all-time record for the number of huge venture deals struck in a single month.

The table below has just the top 10 largest rounds from the month. (A full list of all the supergiant venture rounds can be found here.)

It’s certainly a record high for the past decade. Earlier this month, we set out to find when the current mega-round trend began. We found that, prior to the tail end of 2013, supergiant VC rounds were relatively rare. In a given month between 2007 and the start of the supergiant round era, a $100 million round would be announced every few weeks, on average. And many months had no such deals come across the wires.

Of course, that hasn’t been the case recently.

Why is this happening? As with most things in entrepreneurial finance, context matters.

There are some obvious factors to consider. At the later-stage end of the spectrum, the market is currently awash in money. Billions of dollars in dry powder is in the offing as venture investors continue to raise new and ever-larger venture funds. All that capital has to be put to work somewhere.

But there’s another, and perhaps less obvious, cog in the machine: the changing part VCs play in a company’s life cycle. The current climate presents a stark contrast to the last time the market was this active (in the late 1990s). Back then, companies looking to raise nine and 10-figure sums would typically have to turn to private equity firms or boutique late-stage tech investors, or raise from the public market via an IPO.

Now some venture capital firms are able to provide financial and strategic support from the first investment check a private company cashes to when it goes public or gets acquired. On the one hand, this prolongs the time it takes for companies to exit. But on the other, some venture firms get to double, triple and quadruple down on their best bets.

But as in Newtonian physics, a market that goes up will also come down. The pace of supergiant funding announcements will have to slow at some point. What are some of the potential catalysts for such a slowdown? Keep an eye out for one or more of the following:

• U.S. monetary policy could change. As stultifyingly boring as Federal Reserve interest rate policy is, very low interest rates are a major contributor to the state of the market today. With money so cheap, other interest rate-pegged investment vehicles like bonds perform relatively poorly, which drives institutional limited partners to seek high returns in greener pastures. Venture capital presents that greenfield opportunity today, but that can change if interest rates rise again.
• A sustained public market downtrend for tech companies. While everything was coming up Milhouse in the private market, a few publicly traded tech giants got cut down to size. Facebook, Twitter and Netflix all reported slower than expected growth, leading to a downward repricing of their shares. So far, most of the steepest declines are isolated to consumer-facing companies. But if we start to see disappointing earnings from more enterprise-focused companies, or if asset prices remain depressed for more than just a couple of months, this could slow the pace of large rounds and lower valuations.
• Narrowing or vanishing paths to liquidity. For the past several quarters, the count of venture-backed companies that get acquired has slowly but consistently declined, a trend Crunchbase News has documented in its quarterly reporting. At the same time, though, the IPO market has mostly thawed for venture-backed tech companies. Even companies with ugly financials can make a public market debut these days. But if IPO pipeline flow slows, or if otherwise healthy companies fail to thrive when they do go public, that could spell bad news for investors in need of liquidity.

All this being said, there’s little sign that the market is slowing down. Crunchbase has already recorded four rounds north of $100 million in the first two days of August. Most notably, ride-hailing company Grab snagged another $1 billion in funding (after gulping down $1 billion last month) at a post-money valuation of $11 billion.

If you believe the stereotypes, venture investors are either already on vacation or packing their bags for late summer jaunts to exotic locales at this time of year. But, as it turns out, raising money is always in season. So even though the dog days of summer are upon us, August could end up being just as wild as July.

Orange is the New Black is back for a sixth season, dealing with the fallout from season five and shifting the location to the maximum security wing of Litchfield Prison.

On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by Megan Rose Dickey to discuss the latest developments on one of Netflix’s longest-running shows. Some of us are more on-board with the show than others, but we’re all impressed by the show’s balance between drama and comedy.

We also speculate about whether the story may be winding down, and whether OITNB‘s seventh season might be its last.

Before our review, we recap the week’s streaming and entertainment news, including Netflix’s acquisition of an Andy Serkis-directed version of Animal Farm, its plans for a show about African-American pioneer Madam C.J, Walker starring Octavia Spencer and MoviePass’ ongoing difficulties.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

Another week, another high-profile hack. This week it was (checks notes) Reddit. What makes this one marginally more interesting is that the victims were using two-factor authentication, i.e. SMS codes texted to them to verify their identities when their accounts were accessed — which turned out to be little more than a speed bump for the attackers.

This surprised exactly zero (good) security people. It has long been known that your phone service can be hacked either via SS7, the ancient and insecure system used to interconnect the planet’s phone networks, or by the more old-fashioned but even more effective method of walking into a store and talking a callow undertrained clerk into transferring your number to the attacker’s phone. Phone companies are trying to remediate both of these attack vectors, but you can’t trust them to protect you; not yet, and possibly not ever.

But you have to trust someone to protect all the things you hide behind passwords. You have no real choice but to implicitly trust your network, and your phone’s manufacturer, and the manufacturer of its baseband chip, and the whole basic stack from your BIOS to your browser.

You can choose Apple over Android, or Pixel over third-party Androids. But whichever choice you make, you are basically pledging your trust in all that you hold dear to Apple or Google. It’s sad to say, in an era when the tech giants are already too powerful and growing moreso every day, but from a security perspective, that is, for most people, probably currently the right thing to do.

Google’s security team is probably the best on the block, and its Pixel phones are more secure than other Androids, partly because they get the latest updates first, partly because they’re free of possibly vulnerable or even malicious pre-installed bloatware. I don’t like Apple’s hegemonic attitude towards software, philosophically; but its security people know what they are doing, and its strict gatekeeping of its App Store has very real security benefits.

But wait: this trust in those twin giants probably needs to extend beyond your phones to your computers and your emails, too. We’ve all been told again and again: don’t open email attachments. They’re not safe. And we are all told again and again, probably on a daily basis, by our family and/or co-workers, who may or may not have just been hacked themselves: open this email attachment, it’s something important you need to deal with right now. How to deal with this conundrum? The answer is, essentially: GMail, Google Docs, and Google Drive, on an Apple device or a Chromebook.

The new new security message is: “don’t use SMS authentication.” (Mind you, most Americans have never even heard of two-factor authentication full stop, and SMS two-factor is still better than one-factor, modulo the false sense of security it may instill.) What to do instead? Well, you could buy a Yubikey or a SecurID token, which is insanely, ludicrously, non-starter inconvenient for most people. Or you could use a phone app, such as, most commonly — yep, you guessed it; Google Authenticator.

Over the last few decades the tech industry has built systems so fundamentally insecure, so rotten to their core, that we now have no real choice but to trust its largest and most powerful companies to protect us. I’m all too aware of the grim irony. (Though in fairness the telecom industry has much to answer for too.) Things weren’t supposed to be this way; things didn’t have to be this way; but here we are.

Is the dystopian future of shoestrong budget weaponized drone attacks here already? The BBC and AP are reporting claims by the Venezuela government of an assassination attempt on its president using a couple of drones carrying explosives.

President Nicolás Maduro was giving a speech at a military event in Caracas which was being screened live on television when the incident occurred.

Footage of the speech on the BBC website shows the president, flanked by military generals and with his wife also standing alongside, being interrupted mid-flow by what appears to be a blast from above them.

The people in the shot react by looking startled and looking up. The audio to the video cuts out before the blast can be heard.

Footage of the incident from a different camera angle showing a panorama view of a military parade at a standstill during the speech, does include the sound of a blast. Afterwards people can be seen pushing into and then running into the frame. The soldiers break rank in panic and the sound of screams can be heard.

Venezuela authorities have reported that seven soldiers were injured in the incident and several people were later arrested. Communications minister, Jorge Rodriguez, said two drones loaded with explosives went off near the president’s stand.

In a national address later, Maduro said: “A flying object exploded near me, a big explosion. Seconds later there was a second explosion.”

However there has been no independent verification that explosive-carrying drones were the cause of the blast. And a report by AP cites firefighters at the scene of the blast disputing the government’s version of events.

It reports that three local authorities said there had been a gas tank explosion inside an apartment near the speech and where smoke could be seen streaming out of a window. But AP adds that they provided no further details on how they had reached that conclusion.

There has also been an unverified claim of responsibility for an attack using drones.

The BBC and AP report that a little known group called Soldiers in T-shirts has claimed on social media that it planned to fly two drones loaded with explosives at the president but that government soldiers shot them down before they reached their target.

Both news organizations say the group did not respond to attempts to contact it.

Venezuela’s president has blamed Colombia for the attack — an accusation that has been refuted by the neighboring state as “baseless”.

If you were at Disrupt London four years ago you may remember more than a little awkwardness during an investor panel when two VCs that had invested in European payday loans firm Wonga declined to comment on what had gone wrong at their portfolio company in the wake of a £220M write down.

Yesterday Sky News reported that those same two, Accel Partners and Balderton Capital, are among a group of Wonga investors that have agreed to inject a further £10M (~$13M) into the business to help fund compensation claims related to its past censured practices.

We’ve reached out to Accel and Balderton for comment.

Prior to the latest emergency funding, Wonga had raised a total of around £145.5M, according to Crunchbase. Its 2011 Series C round was backed by investors including Accel, Oak Investment, Meritech Capital, 83North; while a 2009 Series B included Accel, Balderton, Dawn Capital, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and 83North. It was founded in the UK in 2006.

By 2014 rising concern about the rates of interest being charged to vulnerable customers on short term loan products led to a regulatory intervention to clean up the sector, and Wonga agreed to write off the loans of 330,000 customers.

It also agreed to waive the interest and fees for a further 45,000 after admitting its automated checks had failed to adequately assess affordability. The algorithmic technology it had touted as its core IP had been lending money to people who did not have the income to pay it back.

The company was also censured by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for sending fake lawyers’ letters to customers in arrears — and had to pay out a further £2.6M in compensation for that.

Four years later Wonga is still paying the bill for its past conduct — in the form of increasing numbers of individual compensation claims.

In a statement issued to Sky News, a Wonga Group spokesman said there has been a “marked increase” in compensation claims for legacy loans driven by claims management companies.

“Wonga continues to make progress against the transformation plan set out for the business. In recent months, however, the short-term credit industry has seen a marked increase in claims related to legacy loans, driven principally by claims management company activity,” the spokesman said.

“In line with this changing market environment, Wonga has seen a significant increase in claims related to loans taken out before the current management team joined the business in 2014. As a result, the team has raised £10M of new capital from existing shareholders, who remain fully supportive of management’s plans for the business.‎”

According to Sky News, Wonga was on the brink of insolvency when its investors agreed to inject more capital into the business, with CEO Tara Kneafsey‎ warning its institutional shareholders in late May the company risked becoming insolvent without a capital injection.

Following the shredding of its original business model — with the FCA’s cap of 0.8 per cent per day for all high-cost short-term credit loans applying from January 2015 — Wonga has been loss making for the past several years, reporting a £65M loss for 2016 and just over £80M for 2015.

And Sky reports that its latest emergency fundraising took place at valuation of just $30M (£23M) for the business.

This represents a swingeing haircut for a company that, in 2012, had believed it was on a three-year growth path to a £15BN valuation, i.e. off the back of short term loan products that charged annual interests rates as high as 5,853% that were sold to hundreds of thousands of people who couldn’t afford to pay them back.

Wonga’s website now lists as “representative” an APR of 1,460% in an online FAQ — and further claims: “We’ve introduced lots of changes at Wonga to make sure we offer better, fairer loans to customers. We take a responsible approach and lend only to those we believe can reasonably afford to repay.”

As part of this process of ‘transformation’ — i.e. from algorithmic loan sharking to regulatory compliant short term lending — one recent focus for Wonga’s executive team to try to drum up ethical business has been on offering more flexible loan products.

Sky says Wonga’s board has previously expressed confidence it can build a sustainable business, and notes the company had been targeting a return to profitability last year but has yet to report its results for 2017.

According to its sources, Wonga’s cashflow situation has become so tight its board is evaluating the sale of some of its assets in addition to raising more debt.

Already last year wonga sold off its German payments business, BillPay, to Klarna — raising around £60M.

Time is running out for the best entrepreneurial tech minds and makers across the Middle East and North Africa to compete in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018, which takes place in Beirut, Lebanon on October 3 at the Beirut Digital District. Applications to our premier startup-pitch competition close in just 24 hours. We’ve been traveling around the Middle East and North Africa meeting incredible entrepreneurs in the regional ecosystem and are excited to shine a light on the brilliant innovation happening there.

If you think your pre-Series A startup has what it takes to be named “the Middle East and North Africa’s Most Promising Startup,” don’t waste another minute. Apply right here, right now before the 24-hour clock runs out.

Why should you apply? Well, for starters, the winning team receives US$25,000 in no-equity cash and a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

Then there’s the priceless exposure that comes from placing your startup smack dab in front of influential technologists, VCs and media. The life-changing potential is very real.

Plus, all participating founders — not just the ultimate winners — become part of the Startup Battlefield alumni network. This community consists of almost 750 companies that have collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits. Names like Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, TripIt, Getaround and Cloudflare. That’s some prime networking territory.

Here’s how the competition works. Our TechCrunch editors — who have a knack for identifying high-potential startups — will review all eligible applications, then select 15 pre-Series A startups to compete (more on eligibility in a minute). The founders of each Battlefield team receive free, expert pitch coaching from TechCrunch editors, so they’ll be prepared to step onstage and face a panel of four judges — consisting of top entrepreneurs, technologists and investors with relevant experience in each tech category.

Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 begins with three preliminary rounds — five startups per round will each have six minutes to pitch and present their live demo. The judges have six minutes following each pitch to ask rigorous questions. Thanks to all that free pitch coaching, you’ll be ready to answer them.

The judges choose five startups to go to the semi-finals for a second round of pitching to a different set of judges. The judges will confer and choose one winner to be the first Startup Battlefield MENA champion. Let the celebration begin!

Let’s talk eligibility. Here are the basic requirements that founders must meet:

• Have an early-stage company in “launch” stage
• Be headquartered in one of these eligible countries: Algeria, Armenia, Bahrain, Egypt, Georgia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, UAE, Yemen
• Have a fully working product/beta reasonably close to, or in, production
• Have received limited press or publicity to date
• Have no known intellectual property conflicts
• Apply by August 6, 2018, at 9 p.m. PST

If you’re detail-oriented, read our Startup Battlefield MENA FAQ.

TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 takes place in Beirut, Lebanon on October 3. You have nothing to lose and so much to gain. But you have only 24 hours left to apply. Time runs out on August 6 at 9 p.m. PST. Apply here today.

Did you ever think Patrick Stewart would return to the role of Jean-Luc Picard? Neither did he.

But he will! Sir Pat Stew himself just announced the news on Instagram, timed to line up with an on-stage announcement at the Star Trek Las Vegas 2018 convention:

I will always be very proud to have been a part of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but when we wrapped that final movie in the spring of 2002, I truly felt my time with Star Trek had run its natural course. It is, therefore, an unexpected but delightful surprise to find myself excited and invigorated to be returning to Jean-Luc Picard and to explore new dimensions within him. Seeking out new life for him, when I thought that life was over.

During these past years, it has been humbling to hear stories about how The Next Generation brought people comfort, saw them through difficult periods in their lives or how the example of Jean-Luc inspired so many to follow in his footsteps, pursuing science, exploration and leadership. I feel I’m ready to return to him for the same reason – to research and experience what comforting and reforming light he might shine on these often very dark times. I look forward to working with our brilliant creative team as we endeavor to bring a fresh, unexpected and pertinent story to life once more.

The official account for the new (but separate) Star Trek Discovery series sheds light on a few more details: the story will focus on the “next chapter” of Picard’s life (after Next Generation, presumably), and will be made available on CBS’ online subscription/original content service, CBS All Access.

Stewart shared a few more details at the Las Vegas convention, noting that it was still early days and they’re still working out what it’ll all look like:

He may not… be a captain anymore. He may not be the Jean-Luc that you recognize and know so well. It may be a very different individual; someone who has been changed by his experiences. Twenty years will have passed — more or less exactly the time between the last movie (Nemesis) and today.

We have no scripts, as yet. We’re just talking, talking, talking storylines.

It will be, I promise, I guarantee, something very, very different. But it will come to you with the same passion, and determination, and love of the material, and love of our followers and fans… exactly as we had it before.

Alas, just about everything else about the show is still a mystery for now, presumably because it’s not all totally finalized yet. Name? Unknown. How many episodes? Who knows!

Maybe what the world needs right now is some Star Trek. Not the flashy, snappy JJ Abrams Trek — just good ol’ Picard out there getting his Prime Directive on.

Here’s Patrick Stewart’s surprise Star Trek convention visit in full, as uploaded by Jaime Bastidas (the announcement comes in at 9:20):

Data sovereignty is on the rise across the world. Laws and regulations increasingly require that citizen data be stored in local data centers, and often restricts movement of that data outside of a country’s borders. The European Union’s GDPR policy is one example, although it’s relatively porous. China’s relatively new cloud computing law is much more strict, and forced Apple to turn over its Chinese-citizen iCloud data to local providers and Amazon to sell off data center assets in the country.

Now, it appears that India will join this policy movement. According to Aditya Kalra in Reuters, an influential cloud policy panel has recommended that India mandate data localization in the country, for investigative and national security reasons, in a draft report set to be released later this year. That panel is headed by well-known local entrepreneur Kris Gopalakrishnan, who founded Infosys, the IT giant.

That report would match other policy statements from the Indian political establishment in recent months. The government’s draft National Digital Communications Policy this year said that data sovereignty is a top mission for the country. The report called for the government by 2022 to “Establish a comprehensive data protection regime for digital communications that safeguards the privacy, autonomy and choice of individuals and facilitates India’s effective participation in the global digital economy.”

It’s that last line that is increasingly the objective of governments around the world. While privacy and security are certainly top priorities, governments now recognize that the economics of data are going to be crucial for future innovation and growth. Maintaining local control of data — through whatever means necessary — ensures that cloud providers and other services have to spend locally, even in a global digital economy.

India is both a crucial and an ironic manifestation of this pattern. It is crucial because of the size of its economy: public cloud revenues in the country are expected to hit $2.5 billion this year, according to Gartner’s estimates, an annual growth rate of 37.5%. It is ironic because much of the historical success of India’s IT industry has been its ability to offer offshoring and data IT services across borders.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made development and rapid economic growth a top priority of his government. (Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

India is certainly no stranger to localization demands. In areas as diverse as education and ecommerce, the country maintains strict rules around local ownership and investment. While those rules have been opening up slowly since the 1990s, the explosion of interest in cloud computing has made the gap in regulations around cloud much more apparent.

If the draft report and its various recommendations become law in India, it would have significant effects on public cloud providers like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Alibaba, all of whom have cloud operations in the country. In order to comply with the regulations, they would almost certainly have to expend significant resources to build additional data centers locally, and also enforce data governance mechanisms to ensure that data didn’t flow from a domestic to a foreign data center accidentally or programmatically.

I’ve written before that these data sovereignty regulations ultimately benefit the largest service providers, since they’re the only ones with the scale to be able to competently handle the thicket of constantly changing regulations that govern this space.

In the India case though, the expense may well be warranted. Given the phenomenal growth of the Indian cloud IT sector, it’s highly likely that the major cloud providers are already planning a massive expansion to handle the increasing storage and computing loads required by local customers. Depending on how simple the regulations are written, there may well be limited cost to the rules.

One question will involve what level of foreign ownership will be allowed for public cloud providers. Given that several foreign companies already exist in the marketplace, it might be hard to completely eliminate them entirely in favor of local competitors. Yet, the large providers will have their work cut out for them to ensure the market stays open to all.

The real costs though would be borne by other companies, such as startups who rely on customer datasets to power artificial intelligence. Can Indian datasets be used to train an AI model that is used globally? Will the economics be required to stay local, or will the regulations be robust enough to handle global startup innovation? It would be a shame if the very law designed to encourage growth in the IT sector was the one that put a dampener on it.

India’s chief objective is to ensure that Indian data benefits Indian citizens. That’s a laudable goal on the surface, but deeply complicated when it comes time to write these sorts of regulations. Ultimately, consumers should have the right to park their data wherever they want — with a local provider or a foreign one. Data portability should be key to data sovereignty, since it is consumers who will drive innovation through their demand for best-in-class services.

Boston has regained its longstanding place as the second-largest U.S. startup funding hub.

After years of trailing New York City in total annual venture investment, Massachusetts is taking the lead in 2018. Venture investment in the Boston metro area hit $5.2 billion so far this year, on track to be the highest annual total in years.

The Massachusetts numbers year-to-date are about 15 percent higher than the New York City total. That puts Boston’s biotech-heavy venture haul apparently second only to Silicon Valley among domestic locales thus far this year. And for New England VCs, the latest numbers also confirm already well-ingrained opinions about the superior talents of local entrepreneurs.

“Boston often gets dismissed as a has-been startup city. But the successes are often overlooked and don’t get the same attention as less successful, but more hypey companies in San Francisco,” Blake Bartlett, a partner at Boston-based venture firm OpenView, told Crunchbase News. He points to local success stories like online prescription service PillPack, which Amazon just snapped up for $1 billion, and online auto marketplace CarGurus, which went public in October and is now valued around $4.7 billion.

Meanwhile, fresh capital is piling up in the coffers of local startups with all the intensity of a New England snowstorm. In the chart below, we look at funding totals since 2012, along with reported round counts.

In the interest of rivalry, we are also showing how the Massachusetts startup ecosystem compares to New York over the past five years.

Who’s getting funded?

So what’s the reason for Boston’s 2018 successes? It’s impossible to pinpoint a single cause. The New England city’s startup scene is broad and has deep pockets of expertise in biotech, enterprise software, AI, consumer apps and other areas.

Still, we’d be remiss not to give biotech the lion’s share of the credit. So far this year, biotech and healthcare have led the New England dealmaking surge, accounting for the majority of invested capital. Once again, local investors are not surprised.

“Boston has been the center of the biotech universe forever,” said Dylan Morris, a partner at Boston and Silicon Valley-based VC firm CRV. That makes the city well-poised to be a leading hub in the sector’s latest funding and exit boom, which is capitalizing on a long-term shift toward more computational approaches to diagnosing and curing disease.

Moreover, it goes without saying that the home city of MIT has a particularly strong reputation for so-called deep tech — using really complicated technology to solve really hard problems. That’s reflected in the big funding rounds.

For instance, the largest Boston-based funding recipient of 2018, Moderna Therapeutics, is a developer of mRNA-based drugs that raised $625 million across two late-stage rounds. Besides Moderna, other big rounds for companies with a deep tech bent went to TCR2, which is focused on engineering T cells for cancer therapy, and Starry (based in both Boston and New York), which is deploying the world’s first millimeter wave band active phased array technology for consumer broadband.

Other sectors saw some jumbo-sized rounds too, including enterprise software, 3D printing and even apparel.

Boston also benefits from the rise of supergiant funding rounds. A plethora of rounds raised at $100 million or more fueled the city’s rise in the venture funding rankings. So far this year, at least 15 Massachusetts companies have raised rounds of that magnitude or more, compared to 12 in all of 2017.

Exits are happening, too

Boston companies are going public and getting acquired at a brisk pace too this year, and often for big sums.

At least seven metro-area startups have sold for $100 million or more in disclosed-price acquisitions this year, according to Crunchbase data. In the lead is online prescription drug service PillPack . The second-biggest deal was Kensho, a provider of analytics for big financial institutions that sold to S&P Global for $550 million.

IPOs are huge, too. A total of 17 Boston-area venture-backed companies have gone public so far this year, of which 15 are life science startups. The largest offering was for Rubius Therapeutics, a developer of red cell therapeutics, followed by cybersecurity provider Carbon Black.

Meanwhile, many local companies that went public in the past few years have since seen their values skyrocket. Bartlett points to examples including online retailer Wayfair (market cap of $10 billion), marketing platform HubSpot (market cap $4.8 billion) and enterprise software provider Demandware (sold to Salesforce for $2.8 billion).

New England heats up

Recollections of a frigid April sojourn in Massachusetts are too fresh for me to comfortably utter the phrase “Boston is hot.” However, speaking purely about startup funding, and putting weather aside, the Boston scene does appear to be seeing some real escalation in temperature.

Of course, it’s not just Boston. Supergiant venture funds are surging all over the place this year. Morris is even bullish on the arch-rival a few hours south: “New York and Boston love to hate each other. But New York’s doing some amazing things too,” he said, pointing to efforts to invigorate the biotech startup ecosystem.

Still, so far, it seems safe to say 2018 is shaping up as Boston’s year for startups.

Some companies keep products a closely guarded secret, like they were nuclear codes or ingredients to a popular cola. Others seem less concerned about the whole thing, as long as it keeps people talking. Based on all we’ve seen from the Galaxy Note 9 to date, it seems that Samsung falls firmly into the latter camp.

Of course, it’s key to point out that we won’t really know what the new handset is all about until its big reveal at Unpacked on Thursday. But also, we really know what it’s all about because, I mean, look at all these leaks.

That said, there’s probably still plenty of reason to pay attention to the event. Given the fact that the company opted not to wait to announce the Galaxy Tab S4 could point to even more big product announcements in the coming months.

There have been various other rumors swirling around these past few weeks and months, including a lot of speculation around a new Samsung Gear watch that could make its debut at the same event.

The Note 9, on the other hand, has all but stood up and announced its presence. In addition to your standard array of rumors, there have been a few egregious leaks on Samsung’s part, including a top executive using the new device in public and Samsung posting a promo video to YouTube.

Here’s what we know so far about the upcoming phablet.

Design/Display

By all accounts, the design language hasn’t changed much since the last generation device — in fact, that’s likely the reason DJ Koh thought he could go unnoticed using the phone. There is, however, one major tell that tipped off viewers to the fact that the executive was using something new.

Originally rumored to be located under screen, the fingerprint sensor has, indeed, been moved. This time, out, however, it’s under the camera, rather than beside it — addressing a key complaint with the Note 8’s design, which found users fumbling with the camera lens when attempting to unlock the device.

The dimensions are reportedly roughly the same here, as well. At 161.9 x 76.3 x 8.8mm, the device is marginally shorter than its predecessors, due perhaps in part to thinner bezels on the top and bottom. The display, meanwhile, is the ever so slightly larger at 6.4-inches to the 8’s 6.3.

Battery/Storage/Performance

Samsung’s made it pretty clear from the start that battery life is a primary focus for the new device. The company appeared to confirm early rumors that the handset would be sporting a 4,000mAh battery in an early teaser that openly mocked the iPhone’s relatively small offering (as is Samsung’s M.O. these days).

That’s a 700mAh jump over the Note 8’s offering, and puts the forthcoming handset toward the top of the phone battery heap. It also bucks Samsung’s recent trend of battery modesty, in the wake of the ongoing Note 7 fiasco. The company apologized profusely, instituted strict testing guidelines, and the phone buying public appears to have mostly forgiven and forgotten the whole kerfuffle.

Subsequent teasers, meanwhile, have focused on additional storage and performance enhancements. A massive 512GB version is rumored to be on tap and will no doubt cost a pretty penny. That can be augmented by up to a terrabyte, courtesy of the microSD slot.

Cameras

This is a no-brainer. Camera updates have been the focus of virtually every flagship phone release. That said, this is one of the few pieces of the phone that’s still a relative mystery.

S-Pen

The company’s beloved stylus was clearly a focus from the outset. In fact, the Unpacked invitation shows a closeup of the S-Pen’s button on a yellow background. The new leaked video confirms the vibrant new color scheme, which, at the very least, should make it a bit harder to lose.

The company has also strongly hinted that S-Pen improvements will be a focus for the new phone, but these have mostly managed to stay under wraps. Suggested functionality includes non-drawing controls for things like music playback and remote unlock.

Headphone Jack

Yep, still here. After all, it was only a few weeks ago that the company was mocking Apple for what it perversely deemed a “double-dongle” required to listen to music and charge the phone at the same time. It remains a key differentiator between Samsung’s handsets and the iPhone, and as such, is likely sticking around for a wwhile. All of the leaks thus far appear to confirm this.