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The funding landscape in AR/VR has been defined by large rounds to the exceptionally well-funded Florida-based startup Magic Leap, which has raised nearly $1.4B in venture funding. After raising massive Series B ($542M) and Series C ($780M) rounds, the stealth AR company’s financings tend to distort industry funding trends.
To identify well-capitalized AR/VR startups that aren’t named Magic Leap, we used CB Insights data to see which companies are raising big financing rounds and building war chests to help build out the AR/VR ecosystem, which some theorize could become the next major computing platform.
Topping the list of big AR/VR rounds was Laguna Beach, California-based NextVR, which focuses on virtual reality broadcasts of live events. NextVR recently raised an $80M Series B round.
The next biggest deal went to Palo Alto-based cinematic VR platform Jaunt. The company raised a $65M Series C in September of 2015.
In third was UK-based Blippar, which produces a mobile AR visual search app. Blippar last raised a $54M Series D in March of 2016.
Andreessen Horowitz partner and longtime mobile analyst Benedict Evans met with reporters in San Francisco yesterday morning to discuss the 16 mobile trends that he thinks will be the most worth watching in the New Year.
Since Evans has a long history of producing sharp analysis, we thought we’d share his observations with you.
Mobile is the New Central Ecosystem of Tech The mobile ecosystem is heading toward perhaps 10x the scale of the PC industry, says Evans, who calls the smartphone the “new sun.”…
For companies like Zenefits, the very name unicorn–a venture-backed private company sporting a valuation above $1 billion–carries irony. The term derives from historic rarity: the idea that an eBay or a Google or a Facebook is a kind of magical occurrence, one that single-handedly turns a portfolio into a blockbuster, a venture capitalist into a superstar. Now it’s a downright common benchmark and one that’s invoked with a sense of dread as their numbers grow. We count 140 unicorns globally, up from 75 at the end of last year. Most are U.S. firms, but it seems like a new one is minted every week or two in China or India.
Unicorns, critics say, represent the next risk bubble: so many largely unprofitable firms lacking in rigorous auditing or public disclosures. “We may be nearing the end of a cycle where growth is valued more than profitability,” veteran venture capitalist Bill Gurley of Benchmark tweeted in August. “It could be at an inflection point.” Skeptics point to the mediocre post-IPO performance of former unicorns Pure Storage and Box as evidence that the chickens have come home to roost. Reports of startups with unworkable business models surface with increasing frequency....
VC-backed companies continue to raise more money, with the first half of 2015 seeing nearly $60B invested across more than 3,500 deals. This puts the year on track to hit nearly $120B worth of investment, growth of 35% from last year’s already record-high funding total of $88.3B.
However, deals have not followed the same growth, with 2015 on track to be the first year without deal growth since 2011. This suggests that deals are getting larger, which is evidenced by the increasing presence of $100M financings.Internet and mobile continue to account for the bulk of deals to VC-backed companies, as the two major sectors accounted for 65% of all deals in Q2’15. All other sectors remained fairly range-bound with healthcare accounting for 12%, software 5%, and consumer products & services at 3%.
As VC deals get larger, there are fewer of them. 2015 could be the first year without deal growth since 2011....
No survivorship bias here. A compilation of startup failure post-mortems by founders and investors.
On his many failed experiments, Thomas Edison once said,
"I have learned fifty thousand ways it cannot be done and therefore I am fifty thousand times nearer the final successful experiment."
And so while we have dug into the data behind startups that have died (as well as those acqui-hired) and found they usually die 20 months after raising financing and after having raised about $1.3 million, we thought it would be useful to see how startup founders and investors describe their failures.
While not 50,000 ways it cannot be done, below is a compilation of startup post-mortems that describe the factors that drove a startup’s demise. Most of the failures have been told by the company’s founders, but in a few cases, we did find a couple from investors including Roger Ehrenberg (now of IA Ventures) and Bruce Booth (Atlas Venture). They are in no particular order, and there is something to learn from each and every one of them....
...BuzzFeed is to journalism what Geraldo is to Walter Cronkite. It sucks.
It is built on meanest of readers’ instincts. These endless stream of crass listicles are an insult to the human intelligence and goodness you personify. Even Business Insider, a champion practitioner of cheap click-bait schemes, looks like The New York Review of Books compared to BuzzFeed. And don’t tell me that, by hiring a couple of “seasoned editors and writers” as the PR spin puts it, BuzzFeed will become a noble and notable contributor of information. We never saw a down/mass market product morphing into a premium media. You can delete as many posts as you wish, it won’t alter BF’s peculiar DNA.
Fact is, quality content does exist in BuzzFeed (an example here), but in the same way as a trash can contains leftovers of good food: you must go deep to find it. It won’t change the fact that what people enjoy the most on BuzzFeed is unparalleled ability to package, organize and disseminate mediocrity broken down in this promising nomenclature:...
Marc Andreessen is able to explain himself so well that I should have less commentary to add to the quotations in this post than usual. But where is the fun in that?
My primary task with this blog post has been assembling the quotations and placing them in an order which flows well, since understanding the earlier topics helps the reader understand ideas which come later in the list. Each set of quotations is a mash up from sources like the links identified in the notes at the bottom of this post....
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I just did what no startup founder is ever supposed to do.
I gave up.
It wasn’t even one of those glorious “fail fast and fail forward” learning experiences. After seven months of hard work and two weeks before we were to start fundraising, we had a good team, glowing praise from beta users, and over $250k in handshake commitments. But I pulled the plug.
My team and most of my investors are pissed, but I’m sure I did the right thing. At least I think I’m sure.
The business had what I considered to be an unfixable flaw. My investors and my team wanted us to take the funding and figure out how to fix the problem before the money ran out. I’ve started four companies in the past with a mixture of exits and bankruptcies, so I understand that this is what startups are supposed to do, but I just couldn’t do it this time.
This article is in part my explanation to the various stakeholders, in part self-therapy, and in part a call to other founders and investors to let me know what they would have done in my situation.
Many corporate investors and smart money VCs have placed significant bets on the Internet of Things industry, which is expected to see nearly $2B in funding through the end of 2015.
Which firms are most active? We used CB Insights data to rank VCs by their unique IoT investments over the past 5 years.
Intel Capital tops the list as the most active investor in IoT startups, followed by Qualcomm Ventures. Both small-chip companies’ venture arms have been active investors in wearables startups and sensor companies. Since Intel and Qualcomm are involved in designing and/or manufacturing ever-smaller chips to power mobile devices, this area likely offers them strategic value....
We took a look at our real-time unicorn company tracker and the websites of 13 of the most valuable private companies before they became the companies that everyone is talking about today.
As you look at them, think about whether you’d have predicted they’d be worth $1, $10 or $40 billion today....
Andreessen Horowitz appears to be one of the winners in the $2.4 billion acquisition of online retailer Zulily by the owner of home shopping network QVC that was announced on Monday.
The Menlo Park-based venture firm was the Seattle company's (Nasdaq: ZU) biggest shareholder as recently as April, with about 13 percent of its stock at that time. But its hard to know exactly how well it did as Term Sheet reported on Monday that A16Z had "quietly distributed" most of its shares within the past few months.
Zulily's example may not be terribly comforting, either, to other so-called unicorns — as venture-backed companies that hit $1 billion in valuation are known. It is one of a growing group of VC-backed companies that have strong IPOs and first-day stock gains, only to lose value after their quarterly financials are subjected to Wall Street scrutiny....
E-commerce startups saw multi-year highs in funding and exits in recent quarters.
We put together a periodic table of e-commerce to spotlight the top e-commerce startups, industry categories, exits, and investors
.The table is meant to serve as a guide to navigate the key players in the space. The 131 companies and investors in the table were chosen using CB Insights data and analytics around momentum, financial health, and investor quality....
Here's where to find the next big thing.
Product Hunt, founded by Ryan Hoover, is used by a lot of familiar names in Silicon Valley and New York: Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Raptor Ventures, Betaworks, SV Angel, Y Combinator, 500 Startups (Dave McClure), Techstars, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures (Kevin Rose, MG Siegler), Dave Morin, VaynerRSE, Cowboy Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Greycroft, Andrew Chen and others.
The site looks like Hacker News or Reddit, with up-votes to signal which new products are most popular. But instead of sorting through news articles or photos, Product Hunters can expect to find apps that have just bubbled up, like a crowd-sourced Google Play or App Store.
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CB insights always has valuable perspectives on venture capital, startups, disruptors and industries ready to grow. This report looks at 15 startups in the artificial reality/virtual reality space and it's fascinating.