WORKWEEK

This chart is from a must-read piece in the WSJ about the valuation cuts hitting the startup industry. Main takeaway? The 2021 P/S ratio for US tech companies that IPOd was 15.2 vs. 8.1 in 2019 – nearly doubling in 2 years.  And this increase didn’t only affect companies that went public — it hit startups, too.…

Ubering? More Like Cruising SoftBank invested another $1.35B in Cruise, a GM-owned company that’s rolling out an autonomous vehicle ride sharing program, on top of a previous $900M investment. Cruise was founded in 2013 in San Francisco by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan. They saw early success with an autonomous experience for Audi vehicles on highways, but they…

Non-traditional investors (mutual funds, PE investors, sovereign wealth funds) sky rocketed in 2021, creating 5,212 deals and $253.8B in deal value total.  Three thoughts:  This is a big reason valuations are being pushed higher.  Trend will have zero impact on first and second tier VCs.  2022/2023 will return to 2019/2020 levels with stock market correction and high…

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…