#Business Finance
In this week's newsletter: The moments that defined venture capital and startups in 2019.
Facebook is reportedly getting into the venture capital game, but for young entrepreneurs working in social media, ignoring or deleting that particular friend request could be the right call. According to a report in Axios, the company is building up a corporate fund under the auspices of its “New Product Experimentation” team, which launched last […]
Learn from top European and U.S. venture capitalists at Disrupt Berlin next week.
Nauta Capital, the pan-European venture capital firm that invests in B2B technology startups at seed and Series A, is launching its fifth fund. The new vehicle has an initial close of €120 million and is expected to surpass the VC’s 2016 fund, which topped out at €155 million. With offices in London, Barcelona and Munich, Nauta Capital […]
In this week's newsletter: Amazon takes a bite of Deliveroo and Away packs on $100M
Venture hiring by definition is exclusive. Legally, investors have to be able to fork out their own capital, ranging from hundreds of thousands to multi-millions, to join as a partner of a fund, meaning to be a senior partner typically requires some personal wealth. The industry is exceedingly gender imbalanced, with data showing that 84.6% […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the consumer, leisure and media companies hard, but a new venture firm called The-Wolfpack is still very upbeat on those sectors. Based in Singapore, the firm was founded by former managing directors at GroupM, one of the world’s largest advertising and media companies, and plans to work very closely with […]
A dozen active investors who offer funding via revenue-based, compensation-based and blended-return streams.
Learn from top VCs at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Kaszek Ventures, the investment firm that has been one of the primary architects of the recent boom in startup financing and growth in Latin America, has just raised $600 million across two new funds. The new commitments (raised in roughly two months) put Kaszek’s total capital under management at roughly $1 billion, making the firm […]
Y Combinator wants to bring more startups through its accelerator that can help with the COVID-19 crisis, and the firm is looking to expedite the pace of its application process so it can put money behind the efforts sooner. The accelerator’s most recent batch “presented” just last week in a virtual demo day that was […]
The global recovery in venture capital activity did not miss Europe, new data indicates. According to a PitchBook report, European venture capital activity rose in Q3 2020, putting the continent on pace to set a new yearly record for aggregate VC activity (as measured in Euros). The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it […]
The venture world is swimming in capital these days, and the flood doesn’t appear to be abating. That’s changing the game for venture capitalists and their firms, which transformed from solo practitioners focused on one stage and a single geographical area to covering all startups in all geos in all industries in just a handful […]
Most venture capital firms are based in hubs like Silicon Valley, New York City and Boston. These firms nurture those ecosystems and they’ve done well, but SaaS Ventures decided to go a different route: it went to cities like Chicago, Green Bay, Wisconsin and Lincoln, Nebraska. The firm looks for enterprise-focused entrepreneurs who are trying […]
In this week's newsletter: A new car-sharing unicorn, WeWork's IPO expectations and an introduction to Stripe Capital.
In this week's newsletter: When to seek VC backing, Lance Armstrong's VC career and Calm's big raise.
The American venture capital world has staged an impressive comeback from the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. For a moment, there was worry that startups would struggle to raise for quarters, leading to layoffs, slowed hiring and budget cuts. But as the pandemic accelerated plans to shift operations online, many startups wound up more […]
Space may be the final frontier, but in terms of investment, VCs are just getting started.
Venture capitalists aren’t supposed to make their portfolio companies battle to the death. There’s a long-standing but unofficial rule that investors shouldn’t fund multiple competitors in the same space. Conflicts of interest could arise, information about one startup’s strategy could be improperly shared with the other, and the companies could become suspicious of advice provided […]
Q1 VC data is not great, and it's hard to imagine that Q2's results are going to look much better.
If you only start learning about VCs when you’re already down the fundraising path, you’ll already be too late.
Oxx, a European venture capital firm co-founded by Richard Anton and Mikael Johnsson, this month announced the closing of its debut fund of $133 million to back “Europe’s most promising SaaS companies” at Series A and beyond. Launched in 2017 and headquartered in London and Stockholm, Oxx pitches itself as one of only a few […]
In this week's newsletter: Airbnb's new safety measures, Coveo's unicorn round and the TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin agenda.
Creditas, the Brazilian lending business, has raised $255 million in new financing as financial services startups across Latin America continue to attract massive amounts of cash. The company’s credit portfolio has crossed 1 billion reals ($196.66 million) and the new round will value the company at $1.75 billion thanks to $570 million raised in outside […]
European entrepreneurs who want to launch startups could do worse than Switzerland. In a report analyzing Europe’s general economic health, cost of doing business, business environment and labor force quality, analysts looked for highly educated populations, strong economies, healthy business environments and relatively low costs for conducting business. Switzerland ended up ranking third out of […]
Most founders who are raising capital look first to traditional equity VCs. But should they? Or should they look to one of the new wave of revenue-based investors?
It’s no secret that a massive digital transformation is happening within financial services companies and amid the growing number of non-financial outfits that are also adding financial products to their offerings. Still, Sheel Mohnot, who was formerly a general partner at the fintech fund of 500 Startups, and Jake Gibson, co-founder of personal finance startup […]
The venture capital market appears to be getting later, larger and more expensive. As a result, fintech — one of its hottest and most-funded sectors — is evolving in a similar manner. For late-stage fintech companies, it’s great news. But for smaller players, is the shift towards bigger, more mature rounds undercutting their ability to […]
This year has shaken up venture capital, turning a hot early start to 2020 into a glacial period permeated with fear during the early days of COVID-19. That ice quickly melted as venture capitalists discovered that demand for software and other services that startups provide was accelerating, pushing many young tech companies back into growth […]
For a very long time, the venture industry was stubbornly resistant to change. The same people sat back in their chairs on Sand Hill Road while nervous founders made the rounds, hoping one of these firms would champion their cause. No longer. Since roughly the advent of Y Combinator, the landscape has seemed to shift […]
