Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Northzone‘s new partner Wendy Xiao Schadeck isn’t new to the firm — she actually joined back in 2015.

Before entering the venture world, Schadeck co-founded co-working and childcare startup CoHatchery. And as a Northzone principal, she’s already been involved in the firm’s investments in Spring Health (mental health), 3box (cloud infrastructure), Livepeer (blockchain-based video transcoding), Magic.link (user authentication) and Main Street (helping companies apply for tax credits).

More broadly, Northzone says Schadeck helped to develop the firm’s investment theses around crypto, consumer technology, health, developer/web 3.0 infrastructure.

“Wendy has already proven herself through very insightful sector-driven thought leadership and has solidified our position in the New York ecosystem,” said General Partner Pär-Jörgen Pärson in a statement. “She has defined and redefined an honest, authentic and inspiring dialogue between herself as an investor and the entrepreneurs she supports.”

Schadeck told me that her interests have “crystallized” around three key areas — “open data, open finance and open community.” And she said that with her promotion to partner, she will be able to work even more closely with founders, a topic she’s become “obsessed” with.

“We’ve all seen this VC meme, ‘How can I be helpful?’ and I’ve sometimes accidentally literally said it,” Schadeck said. “But we mean it: Other than providing capital, first and foremost, on good terms, what other dimensions are there that are becoming more and more important? … How can I customize my approach to provide what the founder needs from me?”

While Schadeck is Northzone’s first New York-based partner (its other partners are in London and Stockholm), she said she will make investments outside the region.

“We’ve tried to do this matrix approach, where we both have sectors that we’re pretty excited about and build expertise and experience in, as well as relationships” she said. “And those relationships are better with local entrepreneurs.”

Last year, ViacomCBS announced its CBS All Access streaming service would soon rebrand as Paramount+, to better reflect the expanded content lineup following the Viacom-CBS merger in 2019. Today, the company says it has set a launch date for Paramount+ in the U.S.: March 4, 2021. It’s also sharing the launch dates for other international markets, including Latin America, Canada and the Nordics.

The service will debut on March 4 in Latin American markets, and will rebrand from CBS All Access to Paramount+ in Canada at the same time. However, Canada won’t receive the expanded lineup until later in 2021. The Nordics region will see the service arrive on March 25, 2021, which is followed by a launch in Australia in “mid-2021.”

The company had been touting its plans for the rebranded service since earlier last year, explaining how the new streaming offering, an expansion of CBS All Access,  would allow it to showcase the company’s biggest franchises and its deep library, while also offering a home to its growing collection of original content, like the multiple “Star Trek” series now streaming on CBS All Access and “The Good Wife” spin-off, “The Good Fight,” among others.

The service will also continue to stream sports, like NFL games and those from other leagues, like the NCAA and PGA, and live stream news from CBSN and local stations.

Last year, ViacomCBS additionally announced other originals it had planned for the new service, including “The Offer,” a scripted limited series about the making of “The Godfather;” CIA spy drama “Lioness,” created by Taylor Sheridan; a reimagined version of MTV’s “Behind the Music,” which will focus on the past 40 years; a true crime docu-series, “The Real Criminal Minds,” based on the fictional TV hit; and a revival of BET’s “The Game.”

There will be expanded children’s programming, too, including a new kids original series “Kamp Koral,” from Nickelodeon’s “Spongebob Squarepants.” And it it will be the subscription video on demand home for the “The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run.”

CBS All Access had already been expanding its lineup ahead of the full rebrand, with the goal of reaching more than 30,000 episodes and movies, by incorporating content from ViacomCBS-owned brands like BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Paramount Pictures.

Despite its plans to make Paramount+ a standalone destination, ViacomCBS has been licensing its content to other streamers, as well. During its first full year as a newly combined company in 2020, ViacomCBS made carriage deals with Comcast, Dish, Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent), Nextstar, Meredith, Cox and Sinclair, and hashed out agreements with YouTube TV and Hulu for incremental revenues. Both YouTube TV and Hulu added over a half dozen ViacomCBS-owned channels to their respective lineups and hiked prices, as a result.

Because Paramount+ is built on CBS All Access’ existing tech platform, it will have the same distribution across platforms (TV, web, and mobile) as its predecessor from day one.

Today, CBS All Access is estimated to have around 8 million subscribers, which makes it far smaller than other newer rivals like Disney+ (73M+) and HBO Max (12.6M “activated users”).

Last year, ViacomCBS announced its CBS All Access streaming service would soon rebrand as Paramount+, to better reflect the expanded content lineup following the Viacom-CBS merger in 2019. Today, the company says it has set a launch date for Paramount+ in the U.S.: March 4, 2021. It’s also sharing the launch dates for other international markets, including Latin America, Canada and the Nordics.

The service will debut on March 4 in Latin American markets, and will rebrand from CBS All Access to Paramount+ in Canada at the same time. However, Canada won’t receive the expanded lineup until later in 2021. The Nordics region will see the service arrive on March 25, 2021, which is followed by a launch in Australia in “mid-2021.”

The company had been touting its plans for the rebranded service since earlier last year, explaining how the new streaming offering, an expansion of CBS All Access,  would allow it to showcase the company’s biggest franchises and its deep library, while also offering a home to its growing collection of original content, like the multiple “Star Trek” series now streaming on CBS All Access and “The Good Wife” spin-off, “The Good Fight,” among others.

The service will also continue to stream sports, like NFL games and those from other leagues, like the NCAA and PGA, and live stream news from CBSN and local stations.

Last year, ViacomCBS additionally announced other originals it had planned for the new service, including “The Offer,” a scripted limited series about the making of “The Godfather;” CIA spy drama “Lioness,” created by Taylor Sheridan; a reimagined version of MTV’s “Behind the Music,” which will focus on the past 40 years; a true crime docu-series, “The Real Criminal Minds,” based on the fictional TV hit; and a revival of BET’s “The Game.”

There will be expanded children’s programming, too, including a new kids original series “Kamp Koral,” from Nickelodeon’s “Spongebob Squarepants.” And it it will be the subscription video on demand home for the “The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run.”

CBS All Access had already been expanding its lineup ahead of the full rebrand, with the goal of reaching more than 30,000 episodes and movies, by incorporating content from ViacomCBS-owned brands like BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Paramount Pictures.

Despite its plans to make Paramount+ a standalone destination, ViacomCBS has been licensing its content to other streamers, as well. During its first full year as a newly combined company in 2020, ViacomCBS made carriage deals with Comcast, Dish, Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent), Nextstar, Meredith, Cox and Sinclair, and hashed out agreements with YouTube TV and Hulu for incremental revenues. Both YouTube TV and Hulu added over a half dozen ViacomCBS-owned channels to their respective lineups and hiked prices, as a result.

Because Paramount+ is built on CBS All Access’ existing tech platform, it will have the same distribution across platforms (TV, web, and mobile) as its predecessor from day one.

Today, CBS All Access is estimated to have around 8 million subscribers, which makes it far smaller than other newer rivals like Disney+ (73M+) and HBO Max (12.6M “activated users”).

Rivian has raised $2.65 billion as it prepares to begin production this summer of its all-electric pickup truck.

The round, which was led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., also included Fidelity Management and Research Company, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Coatue and D1 Capital Partners as well as several other existing and new investors.

Rivian is now valued at $27.6 billion, according to a person familiar with the investment round.

The capital comes at a critical time for Rivian, which is undertaking the design, development, production and delivery of two consumer vehicles — the R1T pickup truck the R1S SUV — build out of its electric vehicle charging network as well as fulfilling an order for 100,000 commercial delivery vans for Amazon.

“The support and confidence of our investors enables us to remain focused on these launches while simultaneously scaling our business for our next stage of growth,” Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said in a statement.

This latest round follows two years of heavy investment activity that began in earnest after the company unveiled its electric SUV and pickup truck at the 2018 LA Auto Show.

Just months after that reveal, Rivian announced a $700 million funding round led by Amazon. More deals and investments would follow, including a $500 million investment from Ford — along with a promise to collaborate on a future EV program — and a $350 million investment by Cox Automotive in September 2019. The company closed the year with an announcement that it had raised a $1.3 billion round led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. with additional participation from Amazon, Ford Motor Company and funds managed by BlackRock.

The stream of capital didn’t stop in 2020. Rivian announced in July it had raised $2.5 billion in a round led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. New investors Soros Fund Management LLC, Coatue, Fidelity Management and Research Company and Baron Capital Group along with existing shareholders Amazon and BlackRock joined the round.

To date, Rivian has raised $8 billion since the start of 2019.

Rivian’s factory in Normal, Illinois.

Rivian hasn’t held back on spending that capital. The company has put more than $1 billion into its factory in Normal, Illinois. The factory, which once produced the Mitsubishi Eclipse through a joint venture between Mitsubishi and Chrysler Corporation, has been completely updated and expanded.

The overhaul of the 3 million-square-foot is on schedule, but not yet complete, according to the company. A pilot line is operational and is producing validation prototypes of its R1T pickup truck daily.

Rivian has raised $2.65 billion as it prepares to begin production this summer of its all-electric pickup truck.

The round, which was led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., also included Fidelity Management and Research Company, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Coatue and D1 Capital Partners as well as several other existing and new investors.

Rivian is now valued at $27.6 billion, according to a person familiar with the investment round.

The capital comes at a critical time for Rivian, which is undertaking the design, development, production and delivery of two consumer vehicles — the R1T pickup truck the R1S SUV — build out of its electric vehicle charging network as well as fulfilling an order for 100,000 commercial delivery vans for Amazon.

“The support and confidence of our investors enables us to remain focused on these launches while simultaneously scaling our business for our next stage of growth,” Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said in a statement.

This latest round follows two years of heavy investment activity that began in earnest after the company unveiled its electric SUV and pickup truck at the 2018 LA Auto Show.

Just months after that reveal, Rivian announced a $700 million funding round led by Amazon. More deals and investments would follow, including a $500 million investment from Ford — along with a promise to collaborate on a future EV program — and a $350 million investment by Cox Automotive in September 2019. The company closed the year with an announcement that it had raised a $1.3 billion round led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. with additional participation from Amazon, Ford Motor Company and funds managed by BlackRock.

The stream of capital didn’t stop in 2020. Rivian announced in July it had raised $2.5 billion in a round led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. New investors Soros Fund Management LLC, Coatue, Fidelity Management and Research Company and Baron Capital Group along with existing shareholders Amazon and BlackRock joined the round.

To date, Rivian has raised $8 billion since the start of 2019.

Rivian’s factory in Normal, Illinois.

Rivian hasn’t held back on spending that capital. The company has put more than $1 billion into its factory in Normal, Illinois. The factory, which once produced the Mitsubishi Eclipse through a joint venture between Mitsubishi and Chrysler Corporation, has been completely updated and expanded.

The overhaul of the 3 million-square-foot is on schedule, but not yet complete, according to the company. A pilot line is operational and is producing validation prototypes of its R1T pickup truck daily.

Despite a pandemic that sparked a global recession, 2020 was still a record year for venture capital investments into American startups.

According to data shared by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association, investors poured $156.2 billion into domestic startups last year, or around $428 million for each day of the year. The huge sum of money, however, was itself dwarfed by the amount of liquidity that American startups generated, some $290.1 billion.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The exit-value figure was a record as well, as were the 321 rounds worth $100 million — nearly one for each day of the year.

But while the U.S. venture capital market in 2020 was hot, it was not newly so. In 2018 and 2019, VCs invested around $140 billion into domestic startups, making last year’s $156 billion result a record, but not a shocking departure from previous years.

A first read of the data indicates that the U.S. venture capital market is still getting larger in scale and later-stage in focus. But inside those well-worn trends are a host of notable movements that both underscore what we observed last year in real time, and teach us something new about today’s venture capital market.

So far, 2021’s startup financing and exit market appears to be the mirror of what we saw in late 2020. So we’d best understand the past so we can forecast what we’ll see in Q1 of 2021.

To avoid getting too lost in the data, we’ll proceed by stage, pulling out key facts for each step of the startup lifecycle. Feel free to scroll to the one that makes the most sense for where your company is, or fund invests today.

Seed

In the U.S., seed deal count was high in 2020, around 5,227 per PitchBook’s estimates. Those rounds were worth just over $10 billion, making it the third year in a row in which American seed-stage startups managed around $10 billion in capital against around 5,000 rounds.

Boring, yeah? Not really. Inside those numbers are the whole year’s ups-and-downs: the fact that the seed data is so close to 2018 and 2019 levels is almost silly.

The real surprise from seed, per PitchBook’s report, is that these valuations actually fell on a year-over-year basis in 2020. This, despite the fact that seed deal sizes rose.

Considering these two trends at once, it appears likely that, on average, VC ownership as a percentage of seed-stage companies rose in 2020.

Frankly I was just surprised to see a form of startup valuation decrease after expanding for nearly a decade.

Despite a pandemic that sparked a global recession, 2020 was still a record year for venture capital investments into American startups.

According to data shared by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association, investors poured $156.2 billion into domestic startups last year, or around $428 million for each day of the year. The huge sum of money, however, was itself dwarfed by the amount of liquidity that American startups generated, some $290.1 billion.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The exit-value figure was a record as well, as were the 321 rounds worth $100 million — nearly one for each day of the year.

But while the U.S. venture capital market in 2020 was hot, it was not newly so. In 2018 and 2019, VCs invested around $140 billion into domestic startups, making last year’s $156 billion result a record, but not a shocking departure from previous years.

A first read of the data indicates that the U.S. venture capital market is still getting larger in scale and later-stage in focus. But inside those well-worn trends are a host of notable movements that both underscore what we observed last year in real time, and teach us something new about today’s venture capital market.

So far, 2021’s startup financing and exit market appears to be the mirror of what we saw in late 2020. So we’d best understand the past so we can forecast what we’ll see in Q1 of 2021.

To avoid getting too lost in the data, we’ll proceed by stage, pulling out key facts for each step of the startup lifecycle. Feel free to scroll to the one that makes the most sense for where your company is, or fund invests today.

Seed

In the U.S., seed deal count was high in 2020, around 5,227 per PitchBook’s estimates. Those rounds were worth just over $10 billion, making it the third year in a row in which American seed-stage startups managed around $10 billion in capital against around 5,000 rounds.

Boring, yeah? Not really. Inside those numbers are the whole year’s ups-and-downs: the fact that the seed data is so close to 2018 and 2019 levels is almost silly.

The real surprise from seed, per PitchBook’s report, is that these valuations actually fell on a year-over-year basis in 2020. This, despite the fact that seed deal sizes rose.

Considering these two trends at once, it appears likely that, on average, VC ownership as a percentage of seed-stage companies rose in 2020.

Frankly I was just surprised to see a form of startup valuation decrease after expanding for nearly a decade.

Citrix announced today that it plans to acquire Wrike, a SaaS project management platform, from Vista Equity Partners for $2.25 billion. Vista bought the company just two years ago.

Citrix, which is best known for its digital workspaces, sees this as a good match, especially at a time where employees have been forced to work from home because of the pandemic. By combining the two companies, it produces a powerful combination, one that didn’t escape Citrix CEO and president David Henshall

“Together, Citrix and Wrike will deliver the solutions needed to power a cloud-delivered digital workspace experience that enables teams to securely access the resources and tools they need to collaborate and get work done in the most efficient and effective way possible across any channel, device or location,” Henshall said in a statement.

Andrew Filev, founder and CEO at Wrike, who has managed the company through these multiple changes and remains at the helm, believes his company has landed in a good spot with the Citrix purchase.

“First, as part of the Citrix family we will be able to scale our product and accelerate our roadmap to deliver capabilities that will help our customers get more from their Wrike investment. We have always listened to our customers and have built our product based on their feedback — now we will be able to do more of that, faster.,” Filev wrote in a company blog post announcing the deal, stating a typical argument from CEOs of acquired companies.

The startup reports $140 million ARR, growing at 30% annually, so that comes out to approximately 16x its present-day revenue, which is the price companies are generally paying for acquisitions these days. However, as Wrike expects to reach $180 million to $190 million in ARR this year, the company’s sale price could look like a bargain in a few years’ time if the projections come to pass.

The price was not revealed in the 2018 sale, but it surely feels like a big win for Vista. Consider that Wrike has previously raised just $26 million.

WeChat continues to advance its shopping ambitions as the social networking app turns 10 years old. The Chinese messenger facilitated 1.6 trillion yuan (close to $250 billion) in annual transactions through its “mini programs,” third-party services that run on the super app that allow users to buy clothes, order food, hail taxis and more.

That is double the value of transactions on WeChat’s mini programs in 2019, the networking giant announced at its annual conference for business partners and ecosystem developers, which normally takes place in its home city of Guangzhou in southern China but was moved online this year due to the pandemic.

To compare, e-commerce upstart Pinduoduo, Alibaba’s archrival, saw total transactions of $214.7 billion in the third quarter.

WeChat introduced mini programs in early 2017 in a move some saw as a challenge to Apple’s App Store and has over time shaped the messenger into an online infrastructure that keeps people’s life running. It hasn’t recently disclosed how many third-party lite apps it houses, but by 2018 the number reached one million, half the size of the App Store at the time.

From Tencent’s strategic perspective, the growth in mini program-based transactions helps further the company’s goal to strengthen its fintech business, which counts digital payments as a major revenue driver.

A big proportion of WeChat’s mini programs are games, which the app said exceeded 500 million monthly users thanks to a boost in female and middle-aged users, as well as players residing in China’s Tier 3 cities, WeChat said.

The virtual conference also unveiled a set of other milestones from China’s biggest messaging app, which surpassed 1.2 billion monthly active users last year.

Among its monthly users, 500 million have tried the WeChat Search function. The Chinese internet is carved into several walled gardens controlled by titans like Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance, which often block competitors from their services. When users search on WeChat, they are in effect retrieving information published on the messenger as well as Tencent’s allies like Sogou, Pinduoduo and Zhihu, rather than the open web.

WeChat said 240 million people have used its “payments score.” When the feature debuted back in 2019, there was speculation that it signaled WeChat’s entry into consumer credit finance and participation in the government’s social credit system. WeChat reiterated at this year’s event that the WeChat score does neither of that.

Like Ant’s Sesame Score, the rating system works more like a royalty program, “designed to build trust between merchants and users.” For instance, people who reach a certain score can waive deposits or delay payments when using merchant services on WeChat. The score, WeChat said, helped users save more than $30 billion in deposits a year.

WeChat’s enterprise version has surpassed 130 million active users. Its biggest rival, Dingtalk, operated by Alibaba, reached 155 million daily active users last March.

The one-day event concluded with the much-anticipated appearance of Allen Zhang, WeChat’s creator. Zhang went to great lengths to talk about WeChat’s nascent short-video feature, which is somewhat similar to Snap’s Stories. He didn’t disclose the number of users on short videos because “the PR team doesn’t allow” him to, but said that “if we set a goal for ourselves, we will have to achieve it.”

Zhang also announced the WeChat team is weighing up an input tool for users. It’d be a tiny project given Tencent’s colossal size, but the project reflects Zhang’s belief in “privacy protection,” despite public skepticism about how WeChat handles user data.

“If we analyze users’ chat history, we can bring great advertising revenue to the company. But we don’t do that, so WeChat cares a lot about user privacy,” asserted Zhang.

“But why do you still get ads [related to] what you have just said on WeChat? There are many other channels that process your information, not just WeChat. From there, our technical team said, ‘Why don’t we create an input tool ourselves?'”

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

This is Equity Monday Tuesday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and make sure to check out last week’s two episodes, covering all the news sans ecommerce, and then all the ecommerce news.

We’re here on a Tuesday due to an American holiday, but that short break did not mean that the world’s news volume slowed down in the slightest. Here’s the rundown:

• From the weekend: The story of a fired GitHub employee ended as you expected it would, with a small twist; the Microsoft company’s head of HR is leaving. Not sure from this remove is this is a firing, or merely finding someone to axe over the error, but the fact that they are leaving stood out.
• Auto1 Group is going public, and Sequoia wants a piece.
• In more news from German, Personio has put together a $125 million round at a $1.7 billion valuation.
• And Grab, the Southeast Asian food delivery and ride-hailing goliath could raise $2 billion in a 2021 US IPO.
• Turning to this morning: The WhatsApp-India saga continues, Citrix is buying Wrike for $2.25 billion, and American stocks are looking up this morning.
• On the funding round front: LeoCare raised €15 million from Felix Capital, Ventech and Daphni. PPRO raised $180 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion. And Darwinbox raised from Salesforce Ventures, something that we did not know that the American corporate VC did.
• Finally, read this crypto piece.

And that’s that for today, we are back in short order on Thursday afternoon!