Fundings and Exits

Yair Snir Contributor Yair Snir is vice president and managing director of Dell Technologies Capital, leading venture investment activity in Europe and Israel. What does an an acquisition process look like? There are two kinds of acquisition processes: planned and opportunistic. A planned process is where a company looks for a suitable buyer for their

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate-focused VC firm linked to some of Earth’s wealthiest individuals, has joined a $44 million bet on solar startup Terabase Energy. Terabase aims to rapidly build new solar farms “at the terawatt scale,” CEO Matt Campbell said in a statement. The startup claims its automated, on-site factory can already speed up

The Middle East has long been thought of as an oil region, but the United Arab Emirates aims to change this with an intense focus on growing the country’s technology and startup scene. For the first half of 2022, the Middle East region brought in $1.73 billion in investments across 354 deals, up from more

JPMorgan is anchor investor of the fund, which counts ex-United Airlines CEO Munoz as a partner Mary Ann Azevedo 1 day Latino founders of early-stage companies based in the U.S. just got a new potential source of capital. L’Attitude Ventures announced today that it has closed on its first institutional fund, raising more than $100

News that private equity group Thoma Bravo is buying Ping Identity for $2.8 billion in cash broke earlier today, marking the beginning of the end of Ping’s life as a public company (at least for now). Thoma Bravo will pay $28.50 per share in an all-cash transaction, a price that TechCrunch noted is a roughly

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex asked: Is it the bootstrapper’s time to jump on the

E-commerce marketing automation platform Klaviyo has received a $100 million strategic investment from Shopify, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The disclosure coincided with the announcement that Klaviyo and Shopify will strengthen their existing partnership by making Klaviyo the recommended email product for Shopify’s premium merchant plan, Shopify Plus, while

Perhaps the most interesting story to emerge from the venture capital slowdown and stock market correction that began in late 2021 is the rejiggering of unicorn valuations. Instacart and Stripe picked up new, lower 409a valuations. Klarna got repriced via an equity round, and other richly funded startups that raised last year are staring down the

Mudafy, a tech-enabled real estate broker operating in Latin America, has raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding led by San Francisco-based Founders Fund. Founded in mid-2019, Mudafy operates with a typical digital brokerage model — aiming to make it easier for people to buy and sell their homes and serve as

With July now behind us, we have a full month of trading data from the NFT market to digest. The numbers are mixed. While there are some positive signals from the non-fungible token market that matter, others are decidedly negative. Trading continues, but at what appears to be a far slower pace. For companies in

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of

Kompliant, a startup delivering an “AI-driven” business onboarding and risk scoring platform, today announced that it raised $14 million in a seed round led by Level One Fund with contributions from former Visa president John Partridge and Current CEO Stuart Sopp. The funds will be put toward supporting Kompliant’s product development, CEO Edward Katzin told

Despite the ongoing correction in the public markets, mass layoffs in the tech sector and high inflation, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says we’re not yet in a recession. At the same time, it’s taking a lot longer to secure startup funding than it did just a few months ago, which means many companies are

Like a groundhog and its shadow, many venture capitalists see a shrinking economy and burrow away, resting their check-signing hand for better days. But climate-focused VCs are on a tear lately, pumping well over a billion dollars per quarter into startups that strive to mitigate emissions as the Earth bakes. Buoyant Ventures is one such firm

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Alex, Natasha and Mary Ann got together with Grace once again this week for our weekly roundup show, and hot dang was there a lot to talk about. So much so that we actually had to

Sari-saris are small neighborhood stores in the Philippines that are often run on pen and paper ledgers. Inspired by a motorcycle journey, Packworks is on a mission to change that, with a mobile enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform that just raised $2 million led by logistics group Fast Group and CVC Capital Partners, with participation

Paragon, a startup building a platform that integrates and aggregates various software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps for enterprise clients, has raised $13 million in a series A round led by Inspired Capital, alongside previous investors FundersClub and Garuda Ventures. CEO and co-founder Brandon Foo said that the tranche will be put toward “scaling” and expanding Paragon’s team

The idea of corporate gifting to maintain client relationships isn’t a novel concept. In fact, there’s a cottage industry of “gifting-as-a-service” startups that promise to streamline the task, ranging from companies such as Reachdesk and &Open to Sendoso and Goody. Vendors claim their industry is a profitable one (worth an estimated $258 billion) because the

Switchboard, a collaboration app that combines features of videoconferencing and digital whiteboarding, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A round that values the company at $200 million post-money.  Icon Ventures led the tranche with participation from Sequoia, XYZ, and Spark Capital, bringing Switchboard’s total raised to $38.4 million. Co-founder and CEO

The fintech sector has had its ups and downs as of late, with Klarna experiencing hefty valuation cuts, Fast shutting down and Robinhood and Better conducting mass layoffs. Despite the market turbulence, investors remain bullish on the potential value that financial technology startups can bring worldwide. To understand how fintech startups are preparing to weather

Shypyard, a startup developing business planning products and services for brands and direct-to-consumer merchants, closed on $3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Gradient Ventures with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, Position Ventures and a group of angel investors that includes current and former executives and founders at Shopify, BigCommerce and SnapCommerce.

The pandemic normalized delivery in the U.S. But even before the health crises struck, delivery sales at restaurants alone were increasing at a rate of 7% to 8% per year, roughly twice that of sales across the entire restaurant industry, according to McKinsey. The trouble is, delivery can be a nightmare from the restaurant and

There are many companies bringing one-click checkout to the direct-to-consumer marketplace, but few are developing similar tools for the business-to-business marketplace. B2B payment volume is five times the size of business-to-consumer retail payments, yet much of those payments are not being done online. That’s where Balance comes in. The company, co-founded by former PayPal employees

Holey Grail Donuts started selling its hand-fried, made-to-order taro donuts on Sunday mornings out of a little red burger trailer in Kauai in 2018. Four years and hundreds of long lines later, the truck is still there, but the company is taking on what co-founder Nile Dreiling calls “a stale $40 billion donut industry” by

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest and most interesting technology, startup and markets news. Sitting as we are on the precipice of a huge data dump, we had lots to chat through!

Tons of capital has been raised across the crypto industry in recent months, but there has been a noticeable pause in deployment. That might change in the coming months. As it’s taken longer to close crypto VC deals, valuations across the industry have dropped, according to David Nage, venture capital portfolio manager at Arca. Some

Seedstars’ portfolio founders Since its launch nine years ago, Seedstars has invested in 81 companies in over 30 emerging countries. Now it’s set a goal of investing in 100 more startups with the launch of its second emerging market seed-stage fund, called Seedstars International Ventures II (SIV), with a first close of $20 million. The

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous

E-commerce across Latin America exploded in the past two years, but against an infrastructure that wasn’t prepared for all of that activity. During this time, startups have taken up the challenge to bolster the infrastructure needed for packages to get to their end destination quickly and cheaper. That goal has created somewhat of a competitive

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Alex, Natasha and Mary Ann got together with Grace once again this week for our weekly roundup show, and as often happens, news broke as we were gearing up to record. So we had to