You can grasp everything big and small in the venture capital circle
Tencent Venture | ID：qqchuangye
The source of this article is "Silicon Rabbit Race" (ID: sv_race), which is reprinted by Tencent Venture with permission.
Author / Amelie
Edited / Juni
If the epidemic and crisis in 2020 is a huge watershed in the global entrepreneurial technology community, then 2021 is the year when the "new economy" will truly replace the "old economy" in the 21st century.
Last year, when we took stock of the companies that rose in 2020, we wrote about stripe, Airbnb, Robinhood, Zoom, Wish, these bright star companies. And in 2021, they are as dazzling as ever, especially in a March 2021 funding round, Stripe's valuation soared to $95 billion, making it the third most expensive unicorn in the world.
Further reading: "Review 2020: Those Companies that Have Fallen and Risen (Rise)"
In addition to these, there are also many companies that are breaking through in 2021, and here we also do an inventory, hoping to let you who pay attention to entrepreneurship glimpse the leopard and be inspired.
1
IPO of new tech companies
Although the global economic environment has been subtly changed by the epidemic, some of people's core needs have not changed:
That is, while we are accustomed to the convenience of the Internet world, we still attach importance to the value of face-to-face communication, and are eager to rebuild interpersonal connections, reshape our careers, and return the market to normal.
The demand for IPOs, which was suppressed by the epidemic in 2020, has ushered in a surge in 2021. Compared to 2020, 2021 is a record-breaking year for the IPO market. According to Deallogic, the total number of transactions in 2021 reached 1,000 for the first time in history, raising a record $315 billion, while in previous years the total amount raised never exceeded $200 billion.
Among them, some of the technology stocks in the 2021 IPO look particularly eye-catching.
Electric pickup manufacturer Rivian,
Ten years to build a car
At the beginning of the listing on November 10, Rivian broke many "first" records. It is facebook's largest U.S. IPO since its listing and by far the world's largest IPO; it is also the first public company ever to have revenues of less than $1 million but once valued at more than $100 billion (the current market capitalization has fallen back to $89.6 billion).
Although, the company was founded in 2009, since its listing, the total delivery of Rivian's complete vehicles has only been 165 units. Tesla, known in the industry as a Rival of Rivian, had delivered about 1,400 electric vehicles to users when it went public 10 years ago.
Image source: Twitter
The first 165 vehicles are currently mostly given to its own employees, and as of December, Rivian has pre-orders for 56,000 pickups and SUVs in the U.S. and Canada, and plans to deliver 100,000 EDV delivery vehicles to Amazon by 2025. Amazon, Rivian's largest shareholder and largest customer, offered "orders for up to 100,000 electric light trucks" two years ago before Rivian produced an electric van or pickup truck, and led investors including Ford and Saudi institutions to join.
Rivian has been ridiculed by many professionals for failing to achieve mass production, including Tesla founder Musk, whose future plans are to add factories in the United States, China and Europe, and make the annual production of cars reach one million by 2030. But for now, Rivian still has a long way to go in truck and pickup manufacturing.
Image source: Reddit
On the other hand, Rivian's high market capitalization in the secondary market also shows the maturity of today's electric vehicle technology industry ecology, before Tesla's success has doubled investors' confidence in emerging companies in the field of new energy, and then amazon and other giants have endorsed it.
In 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden proposed a $174 billion allocation for electric vehicles and charging stations, and the White House proposed a plan to develop electric vehicle charging infrastructure, which is expected to allocate $41.9 billion. Investors have high expectations for Rivian's prospects, and the market value will naturally rise with the tide.
Whether Rivian can really catch up with Tesla as the head man in the next few years is waiting for the test of time.
Silicon Rabbit Shuttle: Raising $3 billion to build an electric pickup, how did he go from a nameless man to Musk's rival?
Metaverse head enterprise Roblox,
We've been doing it for 17 years
In the 2021 meta-universe fire, Roblox, a sandbox game platform known as the "first stock in the meta-universe", was valued at more than $38 billion on the first day after landing on the New York Stock Exchange IPO in March. The stock price has risen with the concept of a "metacosm" and was once valued at more than $60 billion (the current valuation has fallen back to $56 billion). CEO David Baszucki said, "In our business plan 17 years ago, we predicted this new thing that would bring people together. For the past 17 years, we have been innovating in this area. ”
Image source: NYPost
Indeed, this new thing is now called the "metacosm".
Roblox is a massively multiplayer online game creation platform where users can design their own games, items, looks, and costumes, as well as play a variety of different types of games created by other developers, all coded using the programming language Lua.
RobloxQ3 reported revenue up 102% year-over-year to $500 million. This represents an increase of 28% compared to the same quarter of 2020. The company's average daily active user (DAU) in the third quarter was 47.3 million, up 31% year-over-year. During the quarter, roblox platform users invested about 11.2 billion hours, an increase of 28% year-on-year.
But David Baszucki, the CEO who founded the promising company, was recently fired for using a completely legal and ridiculous tax avoidance, facing a growing threat of competition from tech giants including Facebook's parent company Meta and video game publisher Epic Games. Where Roblox will go in the future is unknown.
Image source: Forbes
Silicon rabbit shuttle door: advertising is not good, brands have run to Roblox to make a game
Enterprise service giant UiPath went public,
TOP3 unicorns become RPA star stocks
Before going public, UiPath was also a highly valued U.S. TOP3-level unicorn. After landing on the New York Stock Exchange in April, it publicly offered 23.9 million shares for $56, raising nearly $1.34 billion. The market capitalization reached $35.8 billion on the day of listing (the current market capitalization fell back to $22.2 billion).
In terms of combined listing funding, UiPath created the third-largest software industry IPO in U.S. stock history, behind Snowflake in September 2020 and Qualtrics in January 2021. This is also another enterprise-level software unicorn entering the capital market after the successful listing of enterprise service giants such as Zoom and Snowflake. Moreover, UiPath is the first RPA software platform with the highest market capitalization to land on the U.S. stock market.
Image source: UiPath
Founded in New York in 2005, UiPath is primarily for enterprise customers to help them build and optimize their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platforms. Today, UiPath has become a leader in the field of RPA, relying on its three intelligent automation platforms, from discovering, building, managing, running, and participating in a total of 5 major 18 products, to achieve end-to-end automation service solutions for customers.
Source: CNBC
Compared with cloud computing, semiconductors and other tracks, the current RPA market size is still relatively small. By the end of 2020, the global RPA market size is only about $17 billion, and it is expected to increase to $30 billion by the end of 2024, with great commercial value potential. UiPath currently has nearly 8,000 customers. 61% of the famous Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America, Toyota Motor, General Electric, Adobe and other well-known Fortune magazine companies are UiPath customers, and 80% of the Fortune 10 companies are customers.
Leveraging its leadership in RPA, UiPath grew revenue from $1 million to $600 million in five years, achieved high margins, and achieved high retention, making it one of the fastest growing SaaS companies of all time.
Silicon Rabbit Shuttle Door: UiPath is launched, and global robot process automation is further spreading
Cloud platform dark horse Samsara,
Focus on the IoT industry
Samsara, the last IPO of 2021 on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021, successfully raised $805 million on the first day of listing on December 15, and pulled its market value to nearly $12.6 billion.
Image source: Protoco
Founded in 2015, Samsara, headquartered in San Francisco, California, is a company that helps brick-and-mortar businesses leverage Internet of Things (IoT) data to improve their operations, providing a complete data platform for operational customers. Currently operating in North America and Europe, Samsara serves a wide range of industries, including wholesale and retail trade, construction, field services, logistics, utilities and energy, healthcare and education, manufacturing and food service.
Its founders, Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket, are MIT students, and in order to start a hit with entrepreneurship during their time at school, both dropped out of school to start a technology company, Samsara raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz shortly after its establishment, and by 2019, Samsara successfully raised $300 million and then valued at $6.3 billion.
In 2020, although the company's business development has slowed down during the epidemic and valuation has declined, with the adjustment of the business, the growth rate of Samsara users has been very rapid. So far, among the huge customer groups with more than 20,000 on the platform, the core customers have reached more than 13,000.
Prior to going public, Samsara completed Series F funding, most recently receiving $700 million in co-investments from General Catalyst, Tiger Global Management and others.
Outstanding financial performance, with revenue of $303 million for the nine months ended October 30, 2021, compared to $174 million for the year-ago quarter.
Image source: Samsara
In a list of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. in 2021 published by the Financial Times, Samsara came in second.
Brendan Burke, research analyst for emerging technologies at PitchBook, said of Samsara: By moving video processing from the cloud to the vehicle, Samsara has become the Tesla for commercial third-party telematics, and this market is estimated to reach $33 billion in 2021.
Fintech company SoFi,
Maxima on the golden track
The fintech industry, which can be called the golden track of North America, has been subverting traditional financial institutions in all aspects at the beginning of the outbreak, and in 2021, their growth will be faster.
From listing through SPAC (SPAC is a general term for shell companies that have been listed, the company only has cash, no other business, and can complete the listing by acquiring the target company, making the latter easier and faster to complete the listing, somewhat similar to the backdoor listing of A shares. To large-scale venture capital, the valuations of popular startups have soared with the help of the tech market boom, and fintech company SoFi is one of them.
In June, the fintech company SoFi (code SOFI) completed its listing through SPAC. Although the company is still in the red, its current market capitalization is $11.8 billion. In Insider Monkey's "Top 10 Best FinTech Companies of 2021", SoFi ranked second.
The ten-year-old fintech company, which started on the Stanford campus, has rapidly risen to Silicon Valley by lending to quality student groups at the nation's top 200 colleges and universities. Originally offering tuition instalments, it has now extended its business to a wider range of auto loans, credit cards, insurance, investment advisory and other services, resulting in a longer customer lifecycle.
SoFi's mission is to help people achieve financial independence, fulfill their ambitions, empower money to serve the lives members want, and help members establish the right financial management; currently SoFi is led by former Twitter COO Anthony Noto.
In its first public quarterly report after going public, SoFi's membership grew 110 percent to 2.28 million; growth rates have accelerated for seven consecutive quarters, illustrating the true durability of expansion. Revenue projections for fiscal 2021 indicate that SoFi's revenue will grow by 61% to 63% and is expected to earn $1.5 billion in 2022.
SoFi's investors include SoftBank, Peter Thiel, Silver Lake, Renren Group Chen Yizhou, etc. In 2020, SoFi also acquired a PaaS platform, Galileo, to provide cloud computing services for emerging banks (Neobank) and fintech companies, including Verizon, Revolut, Robinhood, Bluevine, etc.
Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya once said in an interview with CNBC:
The banking infrastructure in the U.S. didn't meet consumer demand, so we systematically listed the problems in banking and then tried to identify the companies that best represented the solution, and soFi was at the top of the list.
Online mortgage site Better,
SPAC curves are available
In May, Better made its market debut through a merger with Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) Aurora Acquisition Corp., with a latest valuation of $7.7 billion. The SPAC deal includes a $1.5 billion private investment led by SoftBank in a public offering.
Better is a New York-based online mortgage site founded in 2016 that promises to offer faster and cheaper home purchases. While its primary service is mortgage lending, the company also has its own in-house real estate group as well as title and homeowner insurance services. On its platform, users can match the relevant interest rate in three seconds, pass the approval within three minutes, and complete the loan liquidation within two weeks; and move the mortgage process completely online, allowing customers to upload and complete electronically signed documents, and claim to shorten the transaction time from the industry average of 42 days to 21 days.
Image source: Better
Since 2019, Better has provided more than $24.2 billion in loans, an increase of 490% year-over-year. Nearly $25 billion in loans were disbursed in 2020, and $14 billion in loans were made in the first quarter of 2021 alone, bringing in a lot of profits.
In the 2020 "CNBC Disruptor 50" list, Better ranked 15th, and after SoftBank's investment, the valuation immediately became $6 billion. The Wall Street Journal reported that SoftBank agreed to give all of its voting rights to co-founder and CEO Vishal Garg as a sign of its ardent desire to support the company.
Interestingly, not long ago, the company's CEO Vishal Garg directly fired more than 900 employees at the Zoom meeting before Christmas, which caused an uproar on social media and was once on the news.
2
epidemic catalysis,
The new unicorns who are accelerating their growth
In the 21st century, each industry is updating and iterating rapidly, and the epidemic crisis has affected the world economic structure, accelerating the digital transformation of all aspects of various industries, and the actual needs of industry innovation also coexist with risks.
In the face of the myriad challenges posed by the pandemic, the best and brightest people are able to pivot, reinvent, transform and grow. According to Hurun's "2021 Global Unicorn List", 1,058 unicorn companies have emerged in the world in 2021, more than twice the number of 2020 (472). Among them, industries such as big data, digital platforms, digital banking, telemedicine, education technology and financial technology continue to grow under the catalysis of the epidemic in 2021.
Mobile shopping platform Instacart,
Top 2 giant unicorns in the United States
In the baptism of the epidemic in the past two years, the business of mobile shopping platform Instacart has exploded. Home isolation has made more people choose to try daily grocery delivery services. Instacart, which focuses on "one-hour delivery" and mainly sells daily necessities such as cooked food, tobacco and alcohol, and non-staple foods, has completed 17 rounds of financing in its 9 years of growth, with a total financing of up to 2.7 billion US dollars. After a $265 million round of funding in March, the market is now valued at more than $50 billion.
Image source: Medium
Founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, Instacart is a North American leader in online grocery delivery, bringing same-day delivery and pickup of fresh food and everyday essentials to busy people and families, currently serving the U.S. and Canada, and has partnered with more than 500 beloved national, regional and local retailers to serve nearly 40,000 stores in more than 5,500 cities across North America. 85% of U.S. households and 70% of Canadian households have access to Instacart's delivery service.
Instacart ranked seventh in the world in Hurun's "2021 Global Unicorn List". In 2020, Instacart generated $1.5 billion in revenue.
Silicon Rabbit Shuttle Door: Fresh grocery delivery platform Instacart has completed a new round of financing of $265 million
Big data unicorn Databrick,
Next Snowflake
Nearly every company with data wants to build an automated system that continuously converts raw data sets into business value. In other words, a system that automatically monetizes "data."
Founded in 2013 in San Francisco, Big Databricks, a big data company from Berkeley and MIT, is a big data cloud service platform based on Spark that makes big data simpler. It is currently one of the largest providers of data analysis tools.
Announced in August 2021 that it had secured a $1.6 billion Series H round, led by Morgan Stanley's Counterpoint Global, after which Databricks' valuation would soar to $38 billion.
The company pioneered the concept of the "Lakehouse" structure in cloud computing, a term that is a combination of "Data Lakes" and "Data Warehouses." The homepage reads "One Lakehouse platform that carries all the data, analytics, and artificial intelligence."
Databricks currently offers four products: including developing and maintaining AI lifecycle management platform MLflow, Spark, data analytics tools Koalas, and Delta Lake. Delta Lake provides scalable ACID transactions for Spark and other big data engines, allowing users to build reliable data lakes based on HDFS and cloud storage.
Image source: Databricks
Databricks currently has more than 5,000 customers worldwide, and more than 40% of the world's Fortune 500 companies use Databricks' cloud platform, including Royal Dutch Shell, Comcast and CVS Health. In addition, Databricks is backed by the big four cloud service provider giants, namely Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Salesforce.
Databricks' annual recurring revenue (ARR) for 2021 was $600 million, up $200 million from fiscal 2020. Founder Ali Ghodsi said in an external interview that Databricks has begun to prepare for an IPO and is expected to go public next year.
Fintech company Chime,
"SoftBank" star
From a valuation of $1.5 billion in early 2019, a tenfold increase in the second half of 2020 to $14.5 billion, and a valuation of more than $25 billion in August 2021, Chime is on a rocket and soaring.
Founded in 2013, the San Francisco-based startup uses mobile phones to provide customers with a wide range of banking services, including fee-free mobile banking, debit cards and ATM access. The company's target group is Americans who earn between $30,000 and $75,000 a year.
Chime mainly earns commissions on transaction fees when customers swipe their cards, and allows customers to overdraft up to $200 or use directly deposited wages in advance without penalties, which has been popular during the epidemic.
Image source: Chime
In the 2021 Series G funding round, Chime raised $750 million, led by Sequoia Capital, and continued to invest by original shareholders such as SoftBank, General Atlantic, Tiger Global Fund and Dragger Investment Group.
Chime describes itself as the largest of the new fintech startups, Challenger Bank, and "more like a consumer software company than a bank," with a business model that is more transaction-based and transfer-based, "highly predictable, highly repeatable and highly profitable." In terms of valuation, Chime currently ranks third among unlisted fintech companies.
Financial technology company Brex,
The youngest FinTech unicorn
Brex, another start-up financial technology company in San Francisco, founded in 2017 by Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras, is known in the industry as the youngest FinTech unicorn. The company focuses on providing intelligent low-threshold credit card services for enterprises, solving the problem that it is difficult for start-ups to meet the application conditions for traditional bank corporate credit cards.
Image source: Funnel Teardowns
In a Data Item from TechCrunch in October 2021, Brex's value soared to $12.3 billion after receiving a new round of $300 million. The company has raised $1.5 billion in debt and equity financing in four years since its inception, and it took them less than two years to go from being a small company to a unicorn.
Interestingly, Brex didn't start out as a fintech, they started out as a VR startup in YC's accelerator program, and now they're reimagining the financial system to help every growing company save time and reach its full potential.
NFT Market Trading Platform Opensea,
Absolute head
It took Only 3 years for Opensea to go from zero to $10 billion valuation.
As the largest decentralized NFT digital commodity trading market, Opensea covers the widest range of market categories, including art, music, domain names, game assets, and cards. According to its official website data, there are about 828,100 collectible types on the platform, and the number of NFTs exceeds 30 million.
Image source: Opensea
In July 2021, OpenSea processed a $350 million NFT transaction and secured a $100 million financing led by A16z, resulting in a post-investment valuation of $1.5 billion. By August, as the popularity of NFTs increased further, business volumes quickly soared tenfold to $3.4 billion. With the finalization of a new round of funding, the valuation went from $3 billion to more than $10 billion, taking less than 3 months.
What underpins its high valuation? Big data can be glimpsed:
As of now, the total trading volume of OpenSea in the NFT market has exceeded $11 billion, setting a new high, ranking first in the transaction volume of the NFT market;
The trading activity of the platform increased exponentially, and the monthly trading volume easily exceeded 1.2 billion US dollars;
It is in the top three in the Ethereum network Gas consumption (the fuel fee generated by the miners' verification calculation of the transaction and consuming the resources);
At present, the total number of trading accounts on all global NFT platforms has exceeded 7 million, and the OpenSea platform alone has more than 600,000 trading users.
OpenSea's original intention was to make anyone an artist, with a completely open market (anyone can create an NFT), and it also has a built-in secondary market and easy-to-use interface, a relatively low threshold and lower fees than its peers, which makes it the preferred market for the masses to trade NFTs, stand out from its peers, and quickly occupy the market share of the NFT trading market.
Silicon Rabbit Shuttle Door: Catching the Sea in the NFT World, How this Company Went from 0 to 10 Billion
Online lending company Upgrade,
Overwhelming
Upgrade, an online lending service platform in the United States, announced in November that it was backed by a $280 million Series F financing, valuing the company at $6 billion.
Upgrad, also headquartered in San Francisco, was founded in 2017 by LendingClub founder and former CEO Renauld Laplanche. The initial business is to provide Small Loans to Americans to help them pay off their credit card debts, and in the future, it will expand into the field of mortgages and car loans. Unlike Lending Club, upgrade loans will only be sold to large asset managers, not individual investors.
Image source: Upgrade
Lending Club can be said to be the originator of the global online lending industry, and Renauld is also known as the "Godfather of P2P". In 2016, Renauld was forced to resign due to a well-known loan violation, which led to The Elevation, which was founded in 2017.
In 2021, Upgrade was named by the Financial Times as the number one fast-growing innovator in the Americas. Renauld said it plans to push The Upgrade to the public in 2023.
3
Those fierce startups
In keeping with the escalation of the epidemic, vaccines have been developed and rolled out at an alarming rate. It also reminds us that the power of science and technology to change the world lies in ourselves. No Pain No Gain, the post-pandemic era is also spawning more emerging technologies to develop rapidly.
VR fitness
The VR industry has been continuing to break out hot spots recently, not only 5G is adding firewood to it, the industry also believes that VR is one of the bridges to the metaverse, and will be the main force in building a new form of the next generation of the Internet in the future.
During the pandemic, VR fitness workouts have become more popular as gyms have closed and with the release of the powerful, low-cost headset Oculus Quest 2. Supernatural, a VR exercise app launched in North America, is acclaimed, and the VR fitness app from American VR content manufacturer Within allows users to immerse themselves in nature.
Image source: Supernatural
Former Universe
Friends who have watched the "Ready Player One" movie know that the oasis system in the film is an ideal scene that completely depicts the future metaverse world.
Recently, Wonder Dynamics, a startup founded in 2021 by "Ready Player One" star Tye Sheridan and with director Spielberg as a consultant, completed a $9 million round of funding. The funding will be used to expand machine learning engineers and CG authoring teams to accelerate the development of the company's AI-driven content creation platform, the Wonder AI Suite.
The round was led by Li Ka-shing's private investment fund Victoria Harbour Investments, with the participation of Epic Games, developer of the hit game Fortnite, and Samsung Next, Samsung's emerging technology investment fund.
Sheridan said: "As we developed deeper, we knew it wasn't just visual effects software... Our platform can be used for movies and TV, but also for video games, social media content, and even metaversics. That's why we're so excited to invite strategic partners like Epic Games and Samsung, leaders in these areas, to participate in this round of funding. ”
NFT industry
Riding on the newly blown metaversal easterly wind, NFT and its developers are also benefiting. The NFT industry, which is highly related to the metacosm, is receiving more and more attention. Although it is still in the early stages, investment institutions are also laying out early, behind which there are many well-known capital institutions such as Coatue Management, a16z, and Sequoia China.
Recently, NFT startup Candy Digital, which was only established in June 2021, announced the completion of a $100 million Series A funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion, jointly led by PE firm Insight Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund Phase 2.
Founded by Michael Rubin, chairman of Fanatics, a major U.S. sporting goods retailer, Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital, and Gary Vaynerchuk, a well-known entrepreneur, the company develops sports digital collection NFTs around baseball and basketball. Its trading platform for trading NFT commodities will open on January 15.
Space economy
At the beginning of 2021, Space Capital, a well-known space investment platform, released the latest edition of the space sector private equity investment report, with another $2.9 billion invested in space infrastructure companies in the fourth quarter, the amount of investment in this field reached $8.9 billion in 2020, setting a record high.
In addition to top-notch space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, many space startups in 2021 are also actively developing all nascent commercial economies from propulsion systems to payloads.
Space travel company Space Perspective raised a $7 million seed round for the development and trials of the Neptune spacecraft;
3D printing rocket manufacturer Relativity Space completes $500 million financing to launch a fully 3D printed rocket;
Axiom Space announced that it has completed Series B financing and raised $130 million to develop the world's first commercial space station;
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has founded a new company, PrivateEr Space, whose main business will focus on monitoring and cleaning up space junk.
Image source: Google
The companies that will rise in 2021 are of course far more than what we have sorted out.
In the new wave of globalization, the epidemic is reshaping the entire business economy. Time is moving, the development of global science and technology cannot be stopped, and most of us will not stop the pace of progress. Whether it is the North American technology community or Chinese companies going to sea, it is believed that in 2022, they will continue to set sail at full speed.
END
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