 |
Ken Gavranovic Business Breakthrough PodcastAuthor: ken gavranovic
Get Actionable insights on how the best companies, teams, and leaders across the globe accelerate success as they grow, scale, and transform. Language: en-us Genres: Business, Education, Management, Self-Improvement Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
Listen Now...
TOP VC FUNDING: $450M Raised By Yuga Labs, $35 Million Raised On April 1, And More
Episode 2
Sunday, 15 May, 2022
- We're going to look at the top venture capital investment over the last 30 days. Yuga Labs raised $450 million on March 22 in the top 10. Lee will provide more information soon. We've got a massive raise here. Snappt, which I'll be discussing in a moment, raised $35 million on April 1. Congratulations to the team members who created those businesses and raised the capital. We've got Cascade Strategy, Tinybird Fractal, Boba Network, Cyera, MoonPay, Proof Diagnostics, and Binance. Again, congratulations to all the team members that created those companies and raised the capital. It's always a lot of fun to close on April 1. Transcript:- Welcome back to Tech Trends First Look. And we're going to, again, talk about the top VC funding in the last 30 days. So at the top 10, we've got a tremendous raise-- which Lee is going to talk a little bit more-- with Yuga Labs, $450 million just on March 22. Binance, Snappt, which I'm going to talk about, MoonPay, Cyera, Boba Network, Proof Diagnostics, Cascade Strategy, Tinybird Fractal. Again, congratulations to all the team members that built those companies and raised it. So at the top 10, were at $35 million raise on April 1. It's always a fun day to close. Datavault, InvestorFlow, Subject, Todyl, Pinecone, Selector, Rutter, Rattle, Pixxel, and Black Crow AI. Of course, it's always getting harder to name your company-- so many companies out there. You got to get the domain name and all that stuff. But so at the bottom 20, we're at 25 million. I always think that's important-- top 10, where are we at from a raise, and top 20. It just gives you an idea of how much capital's out there. LEE: So what's heard in the funding circles this month is a really consistent message from last time. If you're a growth company and you're slowing growth or unprofitable, it's getting tougher and tougher to get money unless you're in the crypto and blockchain space. If you're growing like leaps and bounds, no problem getting money. But money is a little bit tougher to get if your growth is slowing. Also, if private equity companies, they're still loaded with capital, still plenty of money to go around there. Top funding themes this month, cryptocurrency/blockchain. We're going to talk about that in the last part of this episode. Artificial intelligence, Ken's going to talk about that next. And cybersecurity round up the top three, and those are three that are all consistent from last month. They're major hot trends. I don't see them changing anytime soon. Those three are going to be top of the list for quite some time. Also, this month, there's some business automation and observability. That's still on the list as well. - All right, so when I think about AI, when I looked at the list, even the top 50, I think it's almost like AI's that Uber for x. So everybody used to be like, how do we Uber-ize x business? And you used to see business model after business model after business and model, thinking about how would we do the work? I think it's the same thing as AI's super powerful. Instead of-- or maybe not instead of. But we've got-- instead of hiring the data lake team, and we're going to do our own AI, increasingly, companies are saying, hey, you know what? There's problems for a whole business sector. Maybe it's health care. Maybe it's property management. How can we apply AI for that particular industry? And to that point, if you think about Eleos Health-- hopefully I'm saying it right-- CareOps, health care, Snappt-Proptech-- I'm going to talk about that-- property management/fraud, Black Crow AI, democratizing machine learning, Alife, fertility AI, Antidote Health, telehealth, EvolutionIQ, insurance, KUMO.AI, SaaS, Kubit, no-code AI-- so just drag and drop-- The Routing Company, fleet management. So again, a tremendous amount of investments in AI in a lot of different spaces. And I think we're going to see that continue to happen. Let me dig into Snappt. It's one of the companies that got funded. So again, congratulations. I think Daniel Berlind was also the founder and CEO, so congratulations on a series A raise from great VC Insight Partners with Thomas Krane. But Snappt is AI-enabled fraud detection platform that actually determines the authenticity of a financial document. So if you think about when a lot of times, when people are going to move into an apartment, or maybe apply for-- become a new tenant, maybe commercial or residential. I think they're mostly in residential right now. Their people have to turn in documents, pay stubs. And using AI to detect, have those been forged or modified, or is there fraud in those documents? Again, congratulations, amazing raise. But I think that's what you're going to see is a lot of those AI become SaaS products because different companies in the same industry are all trying to solve the same problem. So I think you've got some scale with that. We'll dig into the story behind the news, which I think is really-- you see a lot of crypto, blockchain, NFTs. But I think Lee's got some pretty interesting takes on that, so we'll talk about that in just a second. You know, for those of you not familiar with Lee, he's a good friend and wrote the book Architecting For Scale and works with companies across the globe helping them move to the cloud, modernize their applications, and accelerate that. If you have anything, you can please reach out to Lee at lee.cloud. And then for myself, I work at a great company-- Chief Product Officer of a company called Course Dog. But I just really enjoy sharing with companies the formulas to grow, scale, and transform because very similar to SaaS services, different company, different industry, often the same patterns to scale your business from 0 to 100, to 100, 200, 300, 500-- so a lot of fun. If I could do anything to help, please reach out. So story behind the story in news. Lee, if you could talk about-- I think you ready to talk about crypto, and blockchain, and tremendous amount of investments. LEE: That's correct. And the company that's got me thinking about this this month is Yuga Labs. Yuga Labs was founded in 2021. And they just raised $450 million in a seed round. 36 total investors, including Mark Cuban, and Adidas, and a couple other-- and some major companies like Coinbase. But what they do is they make NFTs. They make and sell NFTs. If you're familiar with the Bored Ape Yacht Club series, that comes from them. And this is an entire NFT sale, and it's worth $450 million for their seed round, and it's amazing the amount of money available to NFTs nowadays. And that brings me to the discussion point which I want to talk about, which is blockchain. The core technology behind NFTs is blockchain, and blockchain is going to be the core of what makes up what we're colloquially calling web 3.0, the idea of a distributed ownership and management with no central control in the internet. We're starting to see the first few technologies come out based on blockchain and become successful. We're seeing Bitcoin, NFT, other cryptocurrencies. And Bitcoin and NFT, these are essentially the technologies to web 3.0 what blog and Myspace were to web 2.0-- web 2.0, which was building social connections between people but controlled and managed by large companies, like Facebook in the world. But we're seeing the Bitcoin and NFT as the blog and Myspace. But who's going to be the Facebook? Who's going to be the Twitter? Who's going to be the Amazon of web 3.0? We haven't seen those companies yet. And it's going to be very interesting to see who really takes this on and becomes the winners, if you will, in this move to web 3.0? And how does it fundamentally change the way that people across the world interact with each other, interact with the internet, interact with companies, interact with governments? How does that change in response to this new way of interacting with people that doesn't involve the central corporations like Facebook and Twitter to be in control of those communications? So how will blockchain play into this? I wrote an article about this that's going to be in Infoworld on Monday. So by the time you're watching this video, the article should be out. Feel free to go take a look at it. And it's talking about how blockchain is the central technology for this transformation that's going to happen and why do I believe that's so important. - That's a great article, and they'll be able to check that out. I think it's also just interesting is you never, having both of us been in a lot of trends from the beginning of the internet when people were like, is it a thing to web 2.0? We've got web 3.0 and all kinds of innovations in between. But I think about back in the day, Napster, right? The beginning file-sharing, peer-to-peer. And you know, I think about some of the computers now update. So if one of the computers in my house updates, you can put an option where it goes to the other computer to get that update. So you never know where this technology is going. But one thing we know is there's a tremendous amount of capital going into that, and you're going to have that big innovation. So it's going to be interesting to see who the winner is and how that evolves over time. All right, so hopefully, that's it for this round. If you have any questions, you can reach out to lee@leeatchison.com. And again, we love just helping people brainstorming and helping uncover patterns. Or if I could do anything for you, you can email me, ken@kengavranovic.com. Thank you.
