Category: UNCATEGORIZED

2021 is going to be another glorious year for e-commerce.

It is that time of the year when most of us are looking back at the “total addressable market” estimates to plan for specific campaigns. Unlike us, if you had your 2021 kick off in Q3, bless your soul. You are an enlightened being.

For the rest of you, for whom e-commerce is a strategic market, I have a question — have you built your total addressable market (TAM) and serviceable addressable market (SAM) estimates for 2021 considering how things evolved in 2020?

For most of us, research is a mind-numbing, repetitive exercise of clicking through links on Google until they all turn purple — at which point we start seeking the simplest possible explanation. For e-commerce, addressable market estimates come in the form of headlines from platforms like Shopify. The company quotes a merchant count number in its earnings calls and that becomes the basis for guesstimating the current TAM of e-commerce companies.

The other, rather simplistic approach is to look at the user-base count from several databases that publish tech platform-level user stats.

In reality, the simplest answer is not the right answer.

Mind the gap

Let’s take e-commerce shopping cart installations. Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and others publish installation numbers that run into millions.

Here is the dichotomy that should frame your TAM discussions.

E-commerce is long-tail heavy. Yes, there are millions of merchants, but e-commerce revenue is a fat-tail phenomenon — meaning, a disproportionate amount of e-commerce revenue comes from a few tens of thousands of companies.

PipeCandy publishes bottom-up TAM estimates with detailed data cuts by technology, logistics and payment system adoptions by firms across revenue tiers across all major markets. One of the common misconceptions we see in how firms misinterpret TAM estimates is that they equate revenue to spend potential.

Coinbase plans to go public by way of a direct listing, the company announced in a blog post today.

The cryptocurrency exchange was founded in 2012 and allows users to buy and trade decentralized tokens like bitcoin and ethereum. The company has raised over $540 million in funding as a private company.

Last month, the company shared that it had confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC, we still haven’t seen those financials but we now know that they have opted out of the traditional IPO process. Direct listings have been slowly gaining popularity and given some of the most recent first day pops from tech IPOs, it’s unsurprising to see a company like Coinbase which is likely flush with cash thanks to recent gains in the cryptocurrency market opt for a path to public markets that involves less fuss.

Direct listings allow companies to skip much of the heavy-lifting of the IPO process by stripping the public debut of a release of new shares, instead giving existing shareholders like VCs and employees a path to just liquidate their equity in the company.

This has been one of the friendliest IPO windows for tech stocks ever with investors racing to back technology companies that are primed for what’s been called the “digital transformation.” Coinbase is in a pretty favorable spot with the public markets and cryptocurrency markets aligned in frothiness. Bitcoin is currently trading near $33,000 just weeks after reaching on all-time-high.

Updating

According to a new report in the WSJ, WeWork, the co-working juggernaut that saw its attempt at a public offering blow up in spectacular fashion in the fall of 2019, might become a publicly traded company by merging with a blank-check company.

Specifically, says the WSJ,  the New York-based outfit has been “weighing offers from a SPAC affiliated with Bow Capital Management LLC and at least one other unidentified acquisition vehicle for several weeks” in a deal that could value WeWork at around $10 billion.

Asked for more information, a spokesperson for the company sent us the same statement that was sent to the Journal: “Over the past year, WeWork has remained focused on executing our plans for achieving profitability. Our significant progress combined with the increased market demand for flexible space, shows positive signs for our business. We will continue to explore opportunities that help us move closer towards our goals.”

The company is also contemplating inbound interest for more private funding, according to a person close to the company.

According to the WeWork spokesperson, WeWork has more than $3.6 billion of cash and unfunded cash commitments, including more than $875 million in available cash and it believes this is “more than sufficient liquidity to weather a prolonged COVID environment.”

WeWork’s CEO Sandeep Manthrani had said last fall that WeWork was on track to turn profitable some time this year and that it hit “profitable growth first” it would “revisit the IPO plan.” Speaking to reports in India over a Zoom call from New York, he added, as reported by Bloomberg, that as of October, WeWork was “100% done with rightsizing” after parting ways with 8,000 employees, or roughly one-third of its headcount.

Manthrani stepped into the role of CEO in February of last year, following the ouster of WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann from the company months earlier on the heels of the company’s pulled IPO.

Mathrani previously spent the last 1.5 years as the CEO of Brookfield Properties’ retail group and as a vice chairman of Brookfield Properties. Before joining the Chicago-based company, he spent eight years as the CEO of General Growth Properties. It was one of the largest mall operators in the U.S. until Brookfield acquired it for $9.25 billion in cash in 2018.

Mathrani also spent eight years as an executive vice president with the publicly traded real estate company Vornado Realty Trust.

Bow Capital Management is run by Vivek Ranadive, the founder of Tibco Software; in July, it registered plans for a $350 million blank-check company that would focus on acquiring a business in the technology, media and telecommunications industries.

Though there’s been much discussion over the years over whether WeWork is a tech company or much more of a pure real estate play, the company has long insisted it is the former.

This story is developing . . .

Twitter only announced its acquisition of newsletter platform Revue two days ago, but the company has already begun to integrate the product into the Twitter.com website. It appears “Newsletters” will soon be the newest addition to Twitter’s sidebar navigation, alongside Bookmarks, Moments, Twitter Ads, and other options. The company is also readying a way to promote the new product to Twitter users, promising them another way to reach their audience while getting paid for their work.

These findings and others were uncovered by noted reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who dug into the Twitter.com website to see what the company may have in store for its newest acquisition.

According to a pop-up promotional message in development she found, Twitter will soon be pitching a handful of Revue benefits, like the ability to compose and schedule newsletters, embed tweets, import email lists, analyze engagement and earn money from paid followers. The messaging was clearly in early testing (it even had a typo!), but it hints at Twitter’s larger plans to tie Revue into the Twitter platform and serve as a way for prominent users to essentially monetize their reach.

Currently, the “Find Out More” button on pop-up message will redirect Twitter users to the Revue website. Wong found.

In addition, Wong noted Twitter was making “Newsletters” a new navigation option on the Twitter sidebar menu. Unfortunately, it was not shown on the top-level menu where you today find options like Explore, Notifications, Messages or Bookmarks, but rather on the sub-menu you access from the three-dot “More” link.

The tight integration between Revue and Twitter’s main platform could potentially give the company an interesting competitive advantage in the newsletters market — especially as Twitter has already dropped hints that its new audio product, Twitter Spaces, will also be used as a way to connect with newsletter subscribers.

In its announcement, Twitter referred to “new settings for writers to host conversations” with their readers. That likely means Twitter users would be able to not just publish newsletters with the new Twitter product, but also monetize their existing follower base, find new readers through Twitter’s built-in features, and then engage their fans on an ongoing basis through audio chats in Spaces. Combined with its lowering of the paid newsletter fee to 5%, many authors are rightly considering the potential Twitter advantages. If anything at all is holding them back, it’s Twitter’s less-than-stellar reputation when it comes to successfully capitalizing on some of its acquisitions.

Twitter declined to comment on Wong’s findings, but we understand these features are currently not live on the website. Wong told us she hasn’t found any indications of Revue integrations in the Twitter mobile apps just yet.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week the team — Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace — recorded a bonus Equity Shot to help our listeners make sense out of the Gamestop trading bonanza happening all over the internet. The story is fast-moving, and news continues to break (twice during our recording, in fact) about how trading apps such as Robinhood are responding to the tear. Still, this type of story is worth a temperature check and timestamp because it feels like it’s a pivotal moment in many ways.

Here’s our coverage on the site so far for people playing catch up:

• How Trading Apps are responding to the Gamestop fustercluck – This piece from yesterday started our coverage of the response from trading apps concerning GameStop
• Gamestop, meme stocks, and the revenge of the retail trader – This piece dug into what the initial story was about, with some jokes
• Could meme stocks like gamestop kill bitcoin’s rise? – This piece looks at what the other side of the stonk coin could be
• Robinhood restricts trading in GameStop after retail brouhaha shakes markets – This piece looked into Robinhood’s moves from this morning, as the larger story went from huge to tectonic
•  And, we gave a shout out to a good post by The Margins, which gave perspective on how the unescapable Gamestop stock crash will have tough, and not meme-y consequences.

Back later in the day with our usual weekly episode, which will not include any of the following phrases: stonks, retail traders, Robinhood, and r/Wallstreetbets. We promise. Talk soon!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

I’m very excited to announce Arlan Hamilton, founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital, will be joining us in a fireside chat at TC Sessions: Justice on March 3.

Backstage Capital has raised more than $12 million to invest in more than 150 companies led by people of color, women and/or LGBTQ founders, including Spora Health, Bitwise, Career Karma, Uncharted Power, Kairos and Zero Grocery. The venture firm is driven by the ethos that these founders represent the biggest opportunities in investment.

“I am into things that promote sustainability, that are clever,” Hamilton said in an Extra Crunch survey in June. “I like the senior care industry, but also pushing that a little further into senior activity and thriving entrepreneurship, et cetera. And media. I think media has a really interesting, exciting opportunity right now because of the way representation is so important, has always been, but it’s even more now. I’m seeing more and more interesting and unique media options rather than the status quo.”

Backstage has gone on to launch an accelerator in four cities to support underrepresented founders, as well as a syndicate, called Backstage Crowd. Within the first three months of its relaunch in 2020, Backstage Crowd raised $1 million, according to the firm’s impact report.

Hamilton is also the author of “It’s About Damn Time,” a book geared toward providing tactical advice for founders and aspiring investors.

At TC Sessions: Justice, we’ll plan to chat with Hamilton about the state of venture capital, investing in underestimated and underfunded founders and more.

Be sure to snag your tickets here for just $5 here.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has urged Europe to step up privacy enforcement in a keynote speech to the CPDP conference today — echoing many of the points he made in Brussels in person two years ago when he hit out at the ‘data industrial complex’ underpinning the adtech industry’s mass surveillance of Internet users.

Reforming current-gen adtech is now a humanitarian imperative, he argued in a speech that took a bunch of thinly-veiled swipes at Facebook.

“As I said in Brussels two years ago, it is certainly time, not only for a comprehensive privacy law here in the United States, but also for worldwide laws and new international agreements that enshrine the principles of data minimization, user knowledge, user access and data security across the globe,” said Cook.

The message comes at a critical time for Apple as it prepares to flip a switch that will, for the first time, require developers to gain opt-in user consent to tracking.

Earlier today Apple confirmed it would be enabling the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature in the next beta release of iOS 14, which it said would roll out in early spring.

The tech giant had intended to debut the feature last year but delayed to give developers more time to adapt.

Adtech giant Facebook has also been aggressively briefing against the shift, warning of a major impact on publishers who use its ad network once Apple gives its users the ability to refuse third party tracking.

Reporting its Q4 earnings yesterday, Facebook also sounded a warning over “more significant advertising headwinds” impacting its own bottom line this year — naming Apple’s ATT as a risk (as well as what it couched as “the evolving regulatory landscape”).

In the speech to a data protection and privacy conference which is usually held in Brussels (but has been streamed online because of the pandemic), Cook made an aggressive defence of ATT and Apple’s pro-privacy stance in general, saying the forthcoming tracking opt-in is about “returning control to users” and linking adtech-fuelled surveilled of Internet users to a range of harms, including the spread of conspiracy theories, extremism and real-world violence.

“Users have asked for this feature for a long time,” he said of ATT. “We have worked closely with developers to give them the time and resources to implement it and we’re passionate about it because we think it has great potential to make things better for everybody.”

The move has attracted a competition challenge in France where four online advertising lobbies filed an antitrust complaint last October — arguing that Apple requiring developers ask app users for permission to track them is an abuse of market power by Apple. (A similar complaint has been lodged in the UK over Google’s move to depreciated third party tracking cookies in Chrome — and there the regulator has opened an investigation.)

The Information also reported today that Facebook is preparing to lodge an antitrust lawsuit against Apple — so the legal stakes are rising. (Though the social media giant is itself being sued by the FTC which alleges it has maintained a social networking monopoly via years of anti-competitive conduct… )

In the speech Cook highlighted another recent pro-privacy move made by Apple to require iOS developers to display “privacy nutrition” labels within the App Store — providing users with an overview of their data collection practices. Both the labels and the incoming ATT apply in the case of Apple’s own apps (not just third parties), as we reported earlier.

Cook said these moves align with Apple’s overarching philosophy: To make technology that “serves people and has their well-being in mind” — contrasting its approach with a rapacious ‘data industrial complex’ that wants to aggregate information about everything people do online to use against them, as a tool of mass manipulation.

“It seems no piece of information is too private or personal to be surveilled, monetized and aggregated into a 360 degree view of your life,” Cook warned. “The end result of all of this is that you are no longer the customer; you are the product.

“When ATT is in full effect users will have a say over this kind of tracking. Some may well think that sharing this degree of information is worth it for more targeted ads. Many others, I suspect, will not. Just as most appreciated it when we built this similar functionality into Safari limiting web trackers several years ago,” he went on, adding that: “We see developing these kinds of privacy-centric features and innovations as a core responsibility of our work. We always have, we always will.”

Apple’s CEO pointed out that advertising has flourished in the past without the need for privacy-hostile mass surveillance, arguing: “Technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it. And we’re here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.”

He also made some veiled sideswipes at Facebook — avoiding literally naming the adtech giant but hitting out at the notion of a business that’s built on “surveilling users”, on “data exploitation” and on “choices that are no choices at all”.

Such an entity “does not deserve our praise, it deserves reform”, he went on, having earlier heaped praise on Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for its role in furthering privacy rights — telling conference delegates that enforcement “must continue”. (The GDPR’s weak spot to date has been exactly that; but 2.5 years in there are signs the regime is getting into a groove.)

In further sideswipes at Facebook, Cook attacked the role of data-gobbling, engagement-obsessed adtech in fuelling disinformation and conspiracy theories — arguing that the consequences of such an approach are simply too high for democratic societies to accept.

“We should not look away from the bigger picture,” he argued. “At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement, the longer the better. And all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible.

“Too many are still asking the question how much can we get away with? When they need to be asking what are the consequences? What are the consequences of prioritizing conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of the high rates of engagement? What are the consequences of not just tolerating but rewarding content that undermines public trust in lifesaving vaccinations? What are consequences of seeing thousands of users join extremist groups and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more,” he went on — sketching a number of scenarios of which Facebook’s business stands directly accused.

“It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn’t come with a cost. Of polarization. Of lost trust. And — yes — of violence. A social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe,” he added, rebranding ‘The Social Network’ at a stroke.

Apple has reason to appeal to a European audience of data protection experts to further its fight with adtech objectors to its ATT, as EU regulators have the power to take enforcement decisions that would align with and support its approach. Although they have been shy to do so so far.

Facebook’s lead data protection supervisor in Europe, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), has a backlog of investigations into a number of aspects of its business — including its use of so-called ‘forced consent’ (as users are not given any choice over being tracked for ad targeting if they wish to use its services).

That lack of choice stands in stark contrast to the change Apple is driving on its App Store, where all entities will be required to ask users if they want to be tracked. So Apple’s move aligns with the principles of European data protection law (which, for example, requires that consent for processing people’s data be freely given in order to be legally valid).

Equally, Facebook’s continued refusal to give users a choice stands in direct conflict with EU law and risks GDPR enforcement. (The kind Cook was urging in his speech.)

2021 looks like it could be a critical year on that front. A long running DPC investigation into the transparency of data-sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook is headed for enforcement this year — after Ireland sent a draft decision to the other EU data protection agencies at the back end of last year.

Last week Politico reported WhatsApp could be on the hook for a fine of between €30M and €50M in that single case. More pertinently for the tech giant — which paid a $5BN fine to the FTC in 2019 to settle charges related to privacy failings (but was not required to make any material changes to how it operates its ad business) — WhatsApp could be ordered to change how it handles user data.

A regulatory order to stop processing certain types of user data — or mandating it ask users for consent before it can do so — could clearly have a far greater impact on Facebook’s business empire.

The tech giant is also facing a final verdict later this year on whether it can continue to legally transfer European users’ data out of the bloc.

If Facebook is ordered to suspend such data flows that would mean massive disruption to a sizeable chunk of its business (in 2019 it reported 286M DAUs in the region in Q1).

So — in short — the regulatory conditions around Facebook’s business are certainly ‘evolving’.

The data industrial complex’s fight back against the looming privacy enforcement at Apple’s platform level involves ploughing legal resource into trying to claim such moves are anti-competitive. However EU lawmakers seem alive to this self-interested push to appropriate ‘antitrust’ as a tool to stymie privacy enforcement.

(And it’s notable that Cook referred to privacy “innovation” in the speech. Including this ask: “Will the future belong to the innovations that make our lives better, more fulfilled and more human?” — which is really the key question in the privacy vs competition regulation ‘debate’.)

Last month Commission EVP and competition chief, Margrethe Vestager told the OECD Global Competition Forum that antitrust enforcers should be “vigilant so that privacy is not used as a shield against competition”. However her remarks had a sting in the tail for the data industrial complex — as she expressed support for a ‘superprofiling’ case against Facebook in Germany.

That case (which is continuing to be litigated by the German FCO) combines privacy and competition in new and interesting ways. If the regulator prevails it could result in a structural separation of Facebook’s social empire at the data level — in a sort of regulatory equivalent of moving fast and breaking things.

So it’s notable Vestager dubbed that piece of regulatory innovation “inspiring and interesting”. Which sounds more of a vote of confidence than condemnation from Europe’s digital policy and competition chief.

Aditya Vishwanath, the founder of Inspirit, wants to bring the creativity associated with Minecraft to the day-to-day schoolwork of students around the world.

“These students are coming from TikTok and playing Roblox games [that are] highly interactive and highly engaging,” he said. “Then, they’re coming to the classroom and watching a 20-minute lecture from a person.” As a solution to this staleness, he and his co-founder, Amrutha Vasan, built a solution.

The virtual science platform lets students and teachers create and experience STEM simulations, from DNA replication to projectile motion experiments. Similar to how Minecraft empowers users to create their own worlds, Inspirit wants to empower users to low-code their way into personalized science experiments and learning worlds. The core technology is a 3D platform built atop Unity, a game engine used for editing games and creating interactive content.

The startup is starting with complete control over creation to understand how users naturally gravitate toward certain materials. Teachers can currently build lessons on top of pre-made tracks, such as an exploration of the moon or a eukaryotic cell, and add in annotations, quiz questions and voice-overs.

The company is starting off with this microlesson approach, but Vishwanath sees the real potential in building a Minecraft for educational purposes. The underlying belief powering Inspirit is that students across different stages in their lives want a self-directed, engaging way to learn to supplement in-school learning.

While the tool is not yet technically using virtual reality technology, the first priority is going hardware-agnostic to find product-market fit and get the biggest base of users. It is experimenting with integrations to Oculus Quest, but hasn’t yet made the option accessible on widespread basis.

After launching a waitlist in September, Inspirit had 50,000 users within the K-12 world sign up for access to the private beta.

A gamified, VR-based approach to learning has long been used in edtech to increase engagement and excitement around learning. The startup, which has not yet launched publicly, has a fair share of competitors. Labster, a well-funded Copenhagen startup, was founded in 2011 to provide lab simulations to replace science class. The startup recently expanded its lab software to Asia, after usage on the platform surged. Vishwanath thinks that Inspirit differentiates from Labster because it urges kids to become creators, instead of users.

Another recent example of edtech merging with virtual reality is Transfr, which raised $12 million to upskill workforces. Transfr is selling to an entirely different market than Inspirit by targeting trade workers, but it similarly has invested in creating a library of modules to help scale its curriculum faster.

The biggest test for Inspirit will be if it can truly recreate the spontaneity and magic of Minecraft. Will students feel inspired to create on the platform? More importantly, will they come back over and over again? The dynamic here to think about is that Inspirit is a supplement to school, which currently relies heavily on curriculum-based learning to teach. If a student wants to use Inspirit for comprehension, the possibilities aren’t exactly endless, but instead are bookended by a mandatory set of rules.

It’s the dividing line between what makes a game and what makes an interactive simulation.

“I have a strong feeling and reason to believe even the early science of engagement; the drivers of Inspirit are not going to be teachers,” Vishwanath said. One 12-year-old student used Inspirit to build a Quantum funnel using pre-made modules, he explained.

Amrutha Vasan and Aditya Vishwanath, Inspirit co-founders. Image Credits: Inspirit

Beyond that, the startup will need to prove outcomes and efficiency before it can ethically sell to end users. It’s clear that virtual reality has a huge potential to help people comprehend complex topics, but bite-sized bits of the technology used once in a while might not.

Long term, Vishwanath thinks that edtech will shift to focus on creation, instead of simply consumption. He’s already convinced a number of investors on that vision. The startup announced today that it has raised seed financing to pursue its lofty goal. The $3.6 million round was led by Sierra Ventures. Other investors include Unshackled Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, January Ventures, Edovate Capital, Redhouse Education and Roble Ventures.

The money will be used to figure out a business model and monetization plans, as well as hire a team. The blending of edtech and gaming, Vishwanath thinks, will be able to save them from becoming “another graveyard education company out there that has hypergrowth and doesn’t know how to make money.”

Urban-X, the accelerator launched by the venture capital fund Urban US and BMW’s MINI subsidiary to invest in companies that primarily address sustainable and resilient living in the cities of the future, has launched its latest cohort.

This ninth cohort of companies are coming to market at a time when the world’s largest investors are embracing the thesis that Urban-X and its parent firm have espoused for years. Put simply: the climate is changing and there will need to be technological solutions that allow people to adapt to the changing environment.

“It feels good to be a 2014 climatetech investor in 2021,” says Urban US co-founder Stonly Baptiste Blue. “You can get the sense that sustainability and climate change startups have never had better tailwinds than right now.”

Of course, Urban-X is about more than just climate and resiliency, but increasingly those are the startups that are going to be getting funding in the next few years and generating big returns for investors.

“We’re talking about a multi-hundred trillion dollar wave in the climate markets,” said Baptiste-Blue. “There’s a lot of evidence that we’re in the climate decade.”

And as Baptiste Blue thinks about the future, there’s still a lot of opportunity for enterprising entrepreneurs to build large new businesses.

“There are a lot of things that we’re trying to cover that touch on this next wave of climatetech investing from disaster risk to outage intelligence, community building so we have resilience and communication between folks as things get stickier and disasters become more common,” said Baptiste Blue.  

Some of the companies that Urban-X worked with on its latest cohort definitely fit that bill. These are businesses like Domatic, which makes a product to centralize AC/DC conversion for solar power; OneRoof which is building a communications platform for resilient platform, and Dorothy, a machine learning platform improving disaster risk.

To date, the accelerator has an IRR of around 29%, according to documents viewed by TechCrunch.

The full list of the companies in the accelerator’s current batch are here:

• Builders Patch: data platform and marketplace for affordable and multifamily housing

• Domatic: product that centralizes AC/DC conversion at the source to pave the way for widespread solar-powered future that relies on DC

• Dorothy: machine learning platform improving disaster risk analysis at the property level

• OneRoof: a community building and resilience communications platform

• Oonee: protected bike parking operator and ecommerce platform for micromobility related services 

• Origen Hydrogen: low-cost hardware for green hydrogen production for heavy-duty vehicles, industry, and for long-term back-up power.

• Singularity: AI- and data-powered carbon intelligence and forecasting platform 

• Urbio: software empowering cities and utilities to plan for and design the energy transition

GGV Capital, the now 20-year-old venture firm that has long invested primarily in the U.S. and China, just closed on a whopping $2.52 billion in fresh capital commitments across four new funds, it announced this morning.

Much of the money will be invested through the firm’s eighth flagship fund, which has $1.5 billion to plug into startups across all stages. It also closed on $366 million for an opportunity fund to double down on breakout investments (GGV Capital VIII Plus); $80 million for a fund that invites the founders in its network to invest alongside GGV; and a “discovery” fund that closed with $610 million and aims to fund founders around the globe at the earliest stage of their startups’ development.

GGV also recently held a close on its second RMB fund with RMB 3.4 billion, $525 million.

The capital collectively brings assets under management at the firm to $9.2 billion across 17 funds (and by the way, that RMB fund is likely to get a lot bigger, judging from GGV’s first RMB fund, which closed in 2018 with the equivalent of $1.5 billion).

Given the state of venture investing right now, GGV’s haul isn’t a surprise. Money has continued to flood into the asset class fueled partly by low interest rates (institutions are trying to find “alpha”) and the overall growth of the private market over the last decade. Because companies have remained private for so long, VCs have enjoyed much of the upside of their growth and benefited from huge leaps when many of these same companies have gone public.

Of course, not all funds get a sizable piece of the right companies. GGV appears to be fairly adept at writing meaningful checks into startups that matter.

Though it owned less than 5% of some of its portfolio companies, as evidenced in their S-1 filings (Affirm, Airbnb, Peloton, Slack, Square, Zendesk), it has amassed big positions in others, including Opendoor (5%), Poshmark (7.9%), and Wish (6.2%),

GGV, which also invests n Latin American, India, Southeast Asia and Israel, has bets in many still-private companies that are very highly valued, too. Among these is the infrastructure automation company Hashicorp, which raised money at a $5.1 billion valuation last year; the online education company Zuoyeban, which was reportedly valued at $6.5 billion in a round that closed in December; and in StockX, the online resale marketplace that was assigned a $2.8 billion valuation in December when it closed its newest round.

Either way, the announcement seems to underscore that, for now at least, there’s still no end in sight of a years-long trend of big funds growing exponentially bigger.

Just yesterday, the 25-year-old investment firm TCV unveiled a record $4 billion fund. Late last year, Andreessen Horowitz closed a pair of funds totaling $4.5 billion. Insight Partners also closed its biggest fund to date by a lot last year, a $9.5 billion growth equity vehicle.

One of the few top venture firms to consistently buck the trend has been Benchmark Capital. Last year, it quietly closed on a $425 million fund, which is roughly the same size as most of its previous nine earlier funds.