WORKWEEK

Domestika? More Like Intertionalika

Domestika, the arts and creatives tutorial site, raised a monster $110M funding round at a $1.3B valuation led by Zeev Ventures. 

The company currently has 2k courses, created by 13k professionals, and 8M members who have taken a total of 13M courses. 

This is a significant step up from the company’s last raise in October, where they raised $20M Series C at a $350M valuation.

Alan’s Angle: Domestika has big competition. 

• Skillshare ($136M raised) – 12M+ users and 30,000 classes. Raised $66M Series D in August 2020. 
• Creativelive ($25.3M raised) – 10M+ users and 2,000 classes. Company was bought by Fiverr back in October. 

The online education and hobby industries respectively are massive and growing — so I think there’s plenty of room for all of these players to be winners. The creative hobby industry is valued at $2.2T in the US alone and the online learning market is expected to hit $1T globally by 2027.  

Final thought: Domestika was founded in 2002. Not every unicorn is created overnight. 

Crypto: Death & Taxes Applies Too

CoinTracker, the crypto tax company, raised a $100M Series A (led by Accel) at a $1.3B valuation. 

Some of CoinTracker’s features include: integration with top crypto exchanges, automatic cost basis optimization for tax losses, and centralized tracking for assets on multiple exchange platforms.

Alan’s Angle: Fun fact: A majority of crypto investors didn’t pay taxes last year, but this is about to change — fast. 

The recent US Infrastructure Bill requires crypto companies to report users’ transactions to the IRS, which means the 20M+ crypto traders in the US will need to start paying up – great news for CoinTracker. 

CoinTracker has lots of competitors, like TaxBit ($235.8M raised), Koinly, and TokenTax. 

• TaxBit just raised a $130M Series B at a $1.33B valuation in August –the same amount of money and valuation. The main difference to keep in mind is that TaxBit did a $100M Series A in March while CoinTracker, obviously, did not.

Also, iTrustCapital, a crypto IRA software company, just raised $125M Series A at a $1.3B valuation last week. I love to see the consistency in fundraising valuations in the crypto software space. 

Remember our chart from last week where Queen Cathie shared how crypto can get to $1M a coin by 2030? Now, imagine how big CoinTracker could get… $1.3B? More like $130B. 

Nik the Solo Capitalist

Nik Milanovic, FinTech industry expert, announced the launch of his $10M fund, aptly named “The FinTech Fund.” 

Nik built a strong following with his newsletter, “This Week in FinTech,” which just hit 10k subscribers.

Alan’s Angle: The rise of the solo capitalist continues. 

Nik Milanovic joins the likes of Josh Buckly, Lachy Groom, Elad Gil, and most recently Packy McCormick to launch their own funds. On top of Workweek’s announcement a couple of weeks ago which is building a fund that is a collective of creator investors. 

Two angles on this story:

1. Solo capitalists have seen serious success. In Q3 of 2021, out of the top 20 performing VCs, 7 of them were solo capitalists – likely leveraging the accessibility and first hand experience for deal flow and investment decisions respectively. 
2. Solo Capitalists themselves have also gotten more aggressive in the quantity of investments:

2019→2021      

• Elad Gill: 17→21
• Lachy Groom: 5→18
• Josh Buckley: 4→7 

These are the same reasons my team at Workweek just launched a $10M fund. Workweek creators are experts in their respective fields who are now able to invest without having to get accredited themselves.

My prediction? We’ll soon see that content creators make the best solo capitalists. Funds like The Fintech Fund and Workweek Capital will drive significant ROI.