Year: 2021

Investors placing capital in earlier and earlier tech deals has been a historical trend for the last few years, but this strategy was generally reserved for the traditional, ‘high-growth’ VC arena. VCs needed to snag earlier ad earlier deals otherwise they would be diluted at a later stage. But with startups coming up with models which can book revenues faster, they have increasingly less need for the VC deal which typically leaves founders with less control and less equity than the newly-ensconced VC on their board. That said, capital at this early stage for ‘growth-based’ startups was often hard to come by. Thus, the ‘early growth fund’ has been invented to address this issue.

Now, the latest arrival in this arena is Balderton, one of the Europe’s top VC funds, with may uicorns uder its belt.

Balderton has now launched a $680M ‘early growth’ fund to invest in high-potential tech companies, targeting around 15 companies at the early-growth stage, sector agostic.

It plans to invest between $25m and $50m per company through both primary and secondary investments. The fund will be lead by Bernard Liautaud, David Thévenon, and Rana Yared.

Since its founding in 2000, Balderton has raised $4bn to invest in European startups and backed more than 230 companies, primarily at the Series A stage. Its investments include Depop, GoCardless, Infarm, Revolut, THG, Vestiaire Collective, and Zego. The firm’s ‘Liquidity I’ portfolio also includes Darktrace, Flywire, Graphcore, and Truecaller.

Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner said: “I’ve been an investor at Balderton since 2008, and it has been incredible to see the increasing number of ambitious European founders, and to be able to support them financially through those critical first three to five years with our early stage funds. With this Growth Fund, we can now support them as they scale to become global industry leaders. We predict a $50 billion growth opportunity in Europe in the next three years alone, and we want to be the first choice for those ambitious founders.” 

Rana Yared, General Partner, added: “Our approach for this fund will be ‘one of few’. This means personalised attention from the entire partnership, plus access to Balderton’s leading platform team. We’re looking for fifteen or so really exceptional companies that have the potential to be sector leaders and disrupt global industries.”

We’re digging into the final IPO prices set by fintech unicorn Marqeta and enterprise productivity unicorn Monday.com this morning. Briefly, it’s good news.

A small programming note: The Exchange is off next week. I am taking some time to do nothing other than eat, read books and lose at lawn games. Regular service will resume the week after.

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To catch up on this busy IPO week, Marqeta, Monday.com and two other IPOs are on the docket. The final pair are Zeta Global and 1stDibs, debuts that matter, if a bit less so for our purposes than the others.

We’ll unpack the final price of each, comparing it to its IPO valuation range and drawing a few conclusions about where we stand in the larger unicorn liquidity cycle.

This is familiar ground for us, but given the sheer flow of IPOs we cannot sit back and presume that our knowledge is current; things are happening with enough speed that regular revisions of our market views are key.

And we may have been too conservative before, so we have a bit of clean-up ahead of us.

Strong pricing

Why do we care about IPO pricing? After all, the DoorDash and Airbnb IPOs showed that the value at which a company opens life as a public entity can wildly differ from where bankers estimated it should be valued.

Two quick things: First, IPO pricing sets the terms for the floating company’s fundraise; IPOs are fundraising events that often take the place of one last private round, so their price matters from a dilution perspective. And a lot of the hottest IPOs from the last six months have given back some of their early gains, making their official IPO price relevant.

DoorDash, for example, priced at $102 before soaring as high as $256 per share after its debut. Today, the company is worth $135.50 in pre-market trading. That’s a lot closer to its IPO price than we might have anticipated after watching its first days as a floating stock.

So, this stuff really does matter, and the numbers that we see below will help private companies price their next venture rounds. Furthermore, strong public market pricing could help keep alive the current game of wealthy private groups like Tiger hunting ever-earlier-stage startups with promising — if nascent — growth rates.

Waymo will be moving freight for a major customer of transportation logistics company J.B. Hunt Transport Services under what the two companies are calling a “test run” that will take place in one of the country’s busiest trade corridors.

Waymo Via, the company’s trucking and cargo transportation service, will transport goods along Interstate 45 between Houston and Fort Worth, Texas. The trucks will be powered by the Waymo Driver autonomous platform, though a Waymo “autonomous specialists,” a commercially-licensed truck driver and a software technician will be riding in each truck to monitor the operations.

This is not the first time J.B. Hunt and Waymo, an Alphabet subsidiary, have worked together. It seems the companies have been preparing for a trial deployment of autonomous trucks for some time.

“We’ve also worked closely with J.B. Hunt for some time now on operational and market studies and will continue to do so as we roll out autonomous driving technology,” Waymo said in a blog post. “We’ve explored topics such as best practices for regular maintenance, what future facility layouts will look like, and which lanes are best suited for autonomous driving technology, to help ensure long-term preparedness on both sides.”

Waymo declined to share with TechCrunch the specific number of trucks that will be used for the test run, but a spokesperson said that it will be a limited duration pilot “with the goal of jointly developing a long term plan for how our companies can work together.”

Waymo Driver is a Level 4 platform, meaning that it could theoretically operate without a human safety driver behind the wheel, but only under certain conditions (like clear weather).

The autonomous driving company has also partnered with Daimler Trucks to equip Daimler freightliners with the Waymo Driver. That’s in addition to partnerships with Volvo to develop electric robotaxis, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles for autonomous cargo vans.

Fixed-term-funds (FTFs) have historically been a bank-to-bank market. FTF products allow for investing into some of the safest assets including, UK Government bonds, US Government bonds and highly-rated corporations. They allow holders of large amounts of cash (such as charities, private funds, family offices etc) to reduce and diversify their risk, but also increasing returns.

TreasurySpring is a fintech startup that is aiming to opening up access to this area of financial markets, by creating a Fixed-Term Fund platform. It’s now raised a $10 million Series A investment round co-led by MMC Ventures and Anthemis Group. Existing investors, including ETFS Capital, participated, taking the total its raised to $15 million.

TreasurySpring says its FTF platform gives holders of large cash balances online access to a menu of proprietary cash investments on a daily basis. This gives them access to an asset class that is usually only available to major financial institutions.

Founded in 2016 by Kevin Cook (CEO), Matthew Longhurst and James Skillen, Cook said in a statement: “Following a break-out 12 months in which we increased AUM by 10x, we wanted to bring in the best possible investment partners to support our ambitious growth plans. We have long admired both Anthemis Group and MMC, so I am delighted that they co-led the round and we are excited to work with Sean, Ollie and their respective teams, as we move into the next phase of our journey to redefine cash investment and front-office treasury.”

Given the current low and negative interest rates and an uncertain global financial outlook, TreasurySpring says its platform is likely to appeal as an alternative to traditional bank deposits and money market funds. It says it’s now issued more than $9B of FTFs to a client base which includes FTSE 100 and other listed companies, fund managers, large private companies, charities, and family offices.

Yann Ranchere, partner at Anthemis Group said: “With its ambitious and mission-driven team, TreaurySpring is opening the traditional money market industry to a whole new pool of participants.”

Oliver Richards, partner at MMC Ventures added: “Having worked with the team at TreasurySpring for the last two years, we have absolute confidence in their ability to deliver on their unique vision to level the playing field in cash investing and short-term funding, through a platform that not only brings value to its clients and issuers but also enhances the diversification and systemic stability of the money markets as a whole.”

Does TreasurySpring have any direct competitors? The compay sdays not. That said, bank deposits and money market funds are still the only tools available to most holders of large cash balances, so the banks and asset managers that offer these products are competitors, “to an extent” admits the firm. Howeverr, they are also “collaborators in many instances.”

Cook said: “Adoption of the platform is being driven by a realisation that the risks and returns of the traditional [deposit and MMF] options are becoming ever less attractive, whilst building out the infrastructure to do anything else is complex, cumbersome, time consuming and expensive.”

RSA Security has spun out its fraud and risk intelligence business into a standalone company called Outseer that will double down on payment security tools amid an “unprecedented” rise in fraudulent transactions.

Led by CEO Reed Taussig, who was appointed head of RSA’s Anti-Fraud Business Unit last year after previously serving as CEO of ThreatMetrix, the new company will focus solely on fraud detection and management and payments authentication services.

Outseer will continue to operate under the RSA umbrella and will inherit three core services, which are already used by more than 6,000 financial institutions, from the company: Outseer Fraud Manager (formerly RSA Adaptive Authentication), a risk-based account monitoring service; 3-D Secure (formerly Adaptive Authentication for eCommerce), a card-not-present and digital payment authentication mapping service; and FraudAction, which detects and takes down phishing sites, dodgy apps and fraudulent social media pages.

Outseer says its product portfolio is supported by deep investments in data and science, including a global network of verified fraud and transaction data, and a risk engine that the company claims delivers 95% fraud detection rates.

Commenting on the spinout, Taussig said: “Outseer is the culmination of decades of science-driven innovation in anti-fraud and payments authentication solutions. As the digital economy continues to deepen, the Outseer mission to liberate the world from transactional fraud is essential. Our role as a revenue enabler for the global economy will only strengthen as every digital business continues to scale.”

RSA, meanwhile, will continue to focus on integrated risk management and security products, including Archer for risk management, NetWitness for threat detection and response, and SecureID for identity and access management (IAM) capabilities.

The spinout comes less than a year after private equity firm Symphony Technology Group (STG), which recently bought FireEye’s product business for $1.2 billion, acquired RSA Security from Dell Technologies for more than $2 billion. Dell had previously acquired RSA as part of its purchase of EMC in 2016.

It also comes amid a huge rise in online fraud fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Federal Trade Commission said in March that more than 217,000 Americans had filed a coronavirus-related fraud report since January 2020, with losses to COVID-linked fraud totaling $382 million. Similarly, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fielded 542,300 fraud complaints in 2020, a 54% increase over 2019.

RSA said that with the COVID-19 pandemic having fueled “unprecedented” growth in fraudulent transactions, Outseer will focus its innovation on payments authentication, mapping to the EMV 3-D Secure 2.x payment standard, and incorporating new technology integrations across the payments and commerce ecosystem. 

“Outseer’s reason for being isn’t just focused on eliminating payments and account fraud,” Taussig added. “These fraudulent transactions are often the pretext for more sinister drug and human trafficking, terrorism, and other nefarious behavior. Outseer has the ability to help make the world a safer place.”

Valuation information for Outseer was not disclosed, nor were headcount figures mentioned in the spinout announcement. Outseer didn’t immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for more information. 

One clear outcome of the pandemic was pushing more people to do their shopping online, and that was as true for B2B as it was for B2C. Knowing which of your B2B customers are most likely to convert puts any sales team ahead of the game. Slintel, a startup providing that kind of data, announced a $20 million Series A today.

The company has attracted some big-name investors with GGV leading the round and Accel, Sequoia and Stellaris also participating. The investment brings the total raised to over $24 million including a $4.2 million seed round from last November.

That’s a quick turnaround from seed to A, and company founder and CEO Deepak Anchala, says that while he had plenty of runway left from the seed round, the demand was such that it seemed prudent to take the A money sooner than he had planned. “So we had enough cash in the bank, but investors came to us and we got a pretty good valuation compared to the previous round, so we decided to take it and use that money to go faster,” Anchala said.

Certainly the market dynamics were working in Slintel’s favor. Without giving revenue details, Anchala said that revenue grew 5x last year in the middle of the worst of the pandemic. He says that meant buyers were spending less time with sales and marketing folks to understand products and more time online researching on their own.

“So what Slintel does as a product is we mine buyer insights. We understand where the buyers are in their journey, what their pain points are, what products they use, what they need and when they need it. So we understand all of this to create a 360 degree view of the buyer that you provide these insights to sales and marketing teams to help them sell better,” he said.

After growing at such a rapid clip last year, the company expected more modest growth this year at perhaps 3x, but with the added investment, he expects to grow faster again. “With the funding we’re actually looking at much bigger numbers. We’re looking at 5x in our revenue this year, and also trying for 4x revenue next year.”

He says that the money gives him the opportunity to improve the product and put more investment into marketing, which he believes will contribute to additional sales. Since the round closed 6 weeks ago, he says that he has increased his advertising budget and is also hopes to attract customers via SEO, free tools on the company website and events.

The company had 45 employees at the time of its seed round in November and has more than doubled that number in the interim to 100 spread out across 10 cities. He expects to double again by this time next year as the company is growing quickly. As a global company with some employees in India and some in the U.S., he intends to be remote first even after offices begin to reopen in different areas. He says that he plans to have company gatherings each quarter to let people gather in person on occasion.

In June of last year, Alexis Ohanian announced that he was leaving Initialized Capital, the venture firm he co-founded alongside Garry Tan in 2011. Nearly a year later, he’s announcing that his new venture firm, Seven Seven Six, has raised $150 million for its first fund.

Seven Seven Six is named for the year of the first Olympics, when a cook from nearby village ended up winning the Stadion race. Ohanian’s idea with the name stems from the fact that the cook was likely a fantastic athlete, but not necessarily the best athlete out there; many people were excluded from the first Olympic games, from athletes outside of Greece to those who didn’t have the means to show up to women, who weren’t even allowed to watch the games.

“When I thought about that track record, and all the things that I’ve been proud of as an entrepreneur and investor, I couldn’t help but feel like I was celebrating the cook,” said Ohanian. “I’m still very proud of that track record, but I know that I could have done better. I want the idea that we’re always on the first starting line trying to do better in pursuit of greater returns.”

He added that this pursuit, to leave no entrepreneurial rock unturned, is not necessarily something he wants to do because he enjoys it and it feels good, but because “it will make more money, it’s more successful and more effective.”

Equity and inclusion, then, is built into the DNA of Seven Seven Six. Half of the firm’s limited partners are women, and 15 percent are black or indigenous people.

Alongside Ohanian, Katelyn Holloway and Lissie Garvin are taking founding positions at Seven Seven Six. Both worked with Ohanian at Initialized and Reddit.

One other unique piece of Seven Seven Six is that it is introducing a 2% “Growth and Caregiving Commitment.” Ohanian explained that, when he was going through Y Combinator, he was going through a rough time in his personal life. His mother was suffering from an illness, and his girlfriend (at the time) had been in an accident abroad.

So, as he was establishing a business, he was also traveling to see the people he loved who needed him. The financial burden added even more complexity to his life, and an incalculable level of stress.

The 2% commitment sets aside an extra two percent of an investment Seven Seven Six makes into a particular company, to offer financial support to founders for whatever they might need, from childcare to travel to surfing lessons, if that’s what it takes to help a founder perform in a healthy, balanced way.

Transparency is also a key part of Seven Seven Six’s philosophy. The firm plans to report on the spending out of this 2% commitment, as well as the diversity and inclusion breakdown of its investments each year.

Thus far, the VC firm has made 17 investments. From the release:

• Lolli, a bitcoin-back rewards program leading the charge of mainstream adoption by giving shoppers free bitcoin

• Pipe, a global trading platform for recurring revenue streams which just announced a $2B valuation in under one year

• QuickNode, a leading Web3 developer platform for building and operating blockchain-powered applications

• Alt, a platform where users can buy and sell alternative assets such as trading cards, the same way you would with stocks

• Pearpop, a company revolutionizing the ever-expanding creator economy

• Itsme, an Avatar-based social platform

• Gloria, a company building the home of football online

• Riverside.fm, a next generation video recording platform

• Stoke, a company working to reimagine space exploration with reusable rockets

Seven Seven Six primarily wants to invest in seed rounds, and lead those rounds as much as possible. The fund joins a host of others that have raised this year as VCs continue to enjoy a low interest-rate environment that is helping bring cash to their investment firms.

Threat intelligence company Recorded Future is launching a $20 million fund for early-stage startups developing novel data intelligence tools.

The Intelligence Fund will provide seed and Series A funding to startups that already have venture capital funding, Recorded Future says, as well as equip them with resources to help with the development and integration of intelligence applications in order to accelerate their go-to-market strategy. 

Recorded Future, which provides customers with information to help them better understand the external cyber threats they are facing, will invest in startups that aim to tackle significant problems that require novel approaches using datasets and collection platforms, which the company says could be anything from technical internet sensors to satellites. It’s also keen to invest in startups building intelligence analysis toolsets that make use of technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as intelligence-driven applications that can be integrated into its own Intelligence Platform and ecosystem.

Recorded Future co-founder and chief executive Christopher Ahlberg said: “In a world of aggressive uncertainty, intelligence is the only equalizer. With the launch of the Intelligence Fund, we are investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs who share our vision for securing the world with intelligence.” 

So far, the Intelligence Fund has invested in two companies, the first being SecurityTrails, which provides customers with a comprehensive overview of current and historical domain and IP address data. The second investment went to Gemini Advisory, a fraud intelligence platform specializing in finding compromised data on the dark web, which Recorded Future went on to acquire earlier this year for $52 million in a bid to bolster its own threat intelligence capabilities. 

Recorded Future told TechCrunch that future investments could also be made with an eye to acquiring, but added that funding could also be given purely on the basis that the startup would make a good business or technology partner. Recorded Future was itself acquired by private equity firm Insight Partners back in 2019 for $780 million. The acquisition effectively bought out the company’s earlier investors, including Google’s venture arm GV, and In-Q-Tel, the non-profit venture arm of the U.S. intelligence community.

Commenting on the launch of the fund, Michael Triplett, managing partner at Insight Partners, said: “Cyberattacks continue to impact global enterprises across the globe, and we’re excited to see Recorded Future invest in intelligence startups tackling the business-critical issues that organizations face today. 

“The Intelligence Fund will provide the resources needed by entrepreneurs to build applications with data and mathematics at the core.” 

Just over three months after its last funding round, European fintech giant Klarna is announcing today that it has raised another $639 million at a staggering post-money valuation of $45.6 billion.

Rumors swirled in recent weeks that Klarna had raised more money at a valuation north of $40 billion. But the Swedish buy now, pay later behemoth and upstart bank declined to comment until now.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 led the latest round, which also included participation from existing investors Adit Ventures, Honeycomb Asset Management and WestCap Group. The new valuation represents a 47.3% increase over Klarna’s post-money valuation of $31 billion in early March, when it raised $1 billion, and a 330% increase over its $10.6 billion valuation at the time of its $650 million raise last September. Previous backers include Sequoia Capital, SilverLake, Dragoneer and Ant Group, among others.

The latest financing cements 16-year-old Klarna’s position as the highest-valued private fintech in Europe.

In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Klarna CEO and founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company has seen explosive growth in the U.S. and plans to use its new capital in part to continue to grow there and globally.

In particular, over the past year, the fintech has seen “massive momentum” in the country, with more than 18 million American consumers now using Klarna, he said. That’s up from 10 million at the end of last year’s third quarter, and up 118% year over year. Klara is now live with 24 of the top 100 U.S. retailers, which it says is “more than any of its competitors.”

Overall, Klarna is live in 20 markets, has more than 90 million global active users and more than 2 million transactions a day conducted on its platform. The company’s momentum can be seen in its impressive financial results. In the first quarter, Klarna notched $18.1 billion in volume compared to $9.9 billion in the prior year first quarter. In all of 2020, it processed $53 billion in volume. To put that into context; Affirm’s financial report in May projected it would process $8.04 billion in volume for the entire fiscal year of 2021 and Afterpay is projecting $16 billion in volume for its entire fiscal year. 

March 2021 also represented a record month for global shopping volume with $6.9 billion of purchases made through the Klarna platform.

Meanwhile, in 2020, Klara hit over a billion in revenue. While the company was profitable for its first 14 years of life, it has not been profitable the last two, according to Siemiatkowski, and that’s been by design.

“We’ve scaled up so massively in investments in our growth and technology, but running on a loss is very odd for us,” he told TechCrunch. “We will get back to profitability soon.”

Klarna has entered six new markets this year alone, including France and New Zealand, where it just launched this week. It is planning to expand into a number of new markets this year. The company has about 4,000 employees with several hundred in the U.S. in markets such as New York and Los Angeles. It also has offices in Stockholm, London, Manchester, Berlin, Madrid and Amsterdam. 

While Klarna is partnered with over 250,000 retailers around the world (including Macy’s, Ikea, Nike, Saks), its buy now, pay later feature is also available direct to consumers via its shopping app. This means that consumers can use Klarna’s app to pay immediately or later, as well as manage spending and view available balances. They can also do things like initiate refunds, track deliveries and get price-drop notifications.

“Our shopping browser allows users to use Klarna everywhere,” Siemiatkowski said. “No one else is offering that, and are rather limited to integrating with merchants.”

Other things the company plans to do with its new capital is focus on acquisitions, particularly acqui-hires, according to Siemiatkowski. According to Crunchbase, the company has made nine known acquisitions over time — most recently picking up Los Gatos-based content creation services provider Toplooks.ai.

“We’re the market leader in this space and we want to find new partners that want to support us in this,” Siemiatkowski told TechCrunch. “That gives us better prerequisites to be successful going forward. Now we have more cash and money available to invest further in the long term.”

Klarna has long been rumored to be going public via a direct listing. Siemiatkowski said that the company in many ways already acts like a public company in that it offers stock to all its employees, and reports financials — giving the impression that the company is not in a hurry to go the public route.

“We report quarterly to national authorities and are a fully regulated bank so do all the things you expect to see from public companies such as risk control and compliance,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re reaching a point for it to be a natural evolution for the company to IPO. But we’re not preparing to IPO anytime soon.”

At the time of its last funding round, Klarna announced its GiveOne initiative to support planet health. With this round, the company is again giving 1% of the equity raised back to the planet.

Naturally, its investors are bullish on what the company is doing and its market position. Yanni Pipilis, managing partner for SoftBank Investment Advisers, said the company’s growth is “founded on a deep understanding of how the purchasing behaviors of consumers are changing,” an evolution SoftBank believes is only accelerating. 

Eric Munson, founder and CIO of Adit Ventures, said his firm believes the “best is yet to come as Klarna multiplies their addressable market through global expansion.” 

For Siemiatkowski, what Klarna is trying to achieve is to compete with the $1 trillion-plus credit card industry.

“We really see right now all the signs are there. True competition is coming to this space, this decade,” he said. “This is an opportunity to genuinely disrupt the retail banking space.”