Q2 Venture Data is Out

Plus Ten Boston Companies That Raised $470M+

Jul 19, 2021

The Data is Out

Last week, Pitchbook & SVB published the Venture Monitor report for Q2’21 and CB Insights published its Q2’21 State of Venture Report. I plugged in my email and phone number to get those links so you don’t have to. The numbers between each report differ slightly, but tell similar stories nonetheless.

Some Macro Highlights:

Global Funding Numbers Hit Record Highs:
US deal activity alone was record breaking, with YTD 2021 funding already representing 90%+ of 2020’s total funding. CB Insights puts the figure at $139B spread across 5.5K deals while Pitchbook says it was $150B across 7K deals.

Global Unicorn Count Grows 491% YoY:
136 private companies became unicorns in Q2’21 alone, 76 of which are US-based. For context, only 128 unicorns were created in all of 2020. On average, that’s about 1.5 new unicorns birthed per day in Q2’21. Funny comparison, Tiger Global also made 1.5 investments per day in Q2’21 😏.

Megarounds Make Up 5% of Global Deals, But 58% of Capital:
There were 390 megarounds done globally in Q2, a 195% hike YoY. These deals represented 58% of total venture dollars deployed. US startups accounted for 204 of these megarounds, with Asia coming in second at 92. When measured by deal count, megarounds made up “only” 5% of venture deals last quarter.
Early Stage Gets Larger:
Early Stage deals are bloating in size, with $10M+ rounds now representing 50% of US deal count. When measured by deal volume, these $10M+ investments represent 90%+ of total Early Stage capital invested in the US.

Female Founders:
In terms of deal value, 2021 has already eclipsed 2020 for capital invested into teams with with at least one female founder, with $23.2B invested so far this year across 1.6K deals. When parsed exclusively by all female founded teams, the figure drops to $2.3B across 399 deals (that’s 6.1% of total US VC deal count and 1.6% of total US VC deal value).
Going a bit deeper — the median deal size in the US for all male teams has risen 42% since 2020. For mixed gender founding teams, it’s risen 40%. However, the median deal size for all female teams shrank by 6%. Although median pre-money valuations have grown for each of these groups, all female team valuations grew 26% while all male team valuations grew 114%.

VC Fundraising Activity:
Thanks to a stellar year for exits, VC fund performance has outperformed all other asset classes globally when comparing 1-year and 3-year horizon IRRs. YTD for 2021, US VC’s have raised $74.1B for their funds, compared to 2020’s annual aggregate capital raised of $81.0B. At this pace, there’s a good chance that the asset class clears $100B for the year. Micro funds (sub $50M funds) are at a four-year low in terms of % new fund count, while $1B+ funds now represent over 50% of total fundraising value.

Some Boston-Specific Stats:

This data isn’t just tech deals like I report, it includes the massive life science deals closing in the Greater Boston Area. Either way, it looks pretty good.

It would be nice to see this broken down by deal volume as well, but surprising uptick either way.

Two of these are also in the top ten for the whole US

Boston Tech Financing News:

Cybereason 🦉

US and Israel-based endpoint security firm Cybereason just raised a $275M Series F from Steven Mnuchin’s fund, Liberty Strategic Capital. The rise of ransomware attacks has been a boon for the company, which was already doing $120M in ARR by the end of 2020. Here’s a nice interview with Cybereason’s CISO on TechMeme Ride Home

OM1 👩‍⚕️

HealthTech company OM1 raised an $85M Series D led by D1 Capital Partners, Kaiser Permanente, and Breyer Capital. Other investors included General Catalyst, Polaris Partners, Scale Venture Partners, 7Wire Ventures, and Glikvest. They focus on using big data and AI to predict outcomes for patients with chronic disease.

Teikametrics 🛒

Teikametrics, which helps eCommerce retailers become more profitable with AI, just raised a $40M Series B led by Intel Capital. Other investors included GoDaddy, Centana Growth Partners, and Lydia Jett of Softbank. They specialize in eCommerce optimization, making firms that sell to marketplaces like Amazon’s FBA marketplace do so more profitably.

LinkSquares 🕵️

LinkSquares, an AI-powered contract analytics platform, just announced a $40M Series B led by Sorenson Capital, with participation from Hyperplance VC, MassMutual Ventures, Catalyst Investors, Xerox, Bottomline Technologies, and First Ascent Ventures. The company helps businesses know the key liabilities within a contract before reading them. The software is used for crisis management, quarterly reporting, fundraising/M&A, and internal legal processes.

Blues Wireless 📡

Lachy Groom is on a roll. Not only has the ex-Stripe PM closed his third $250M solo fund — but he’s already using it to co-lead deals with Sequoia. Last week, LGF and Sequoia invested a $22M Series A into Blues Wireless alongside XYZ Venture Capital and Bill Gates. The two-year-old company was founded by former Microsoft executive Ray Ozzie, and it wants to basically put 5G in everything (cue conspiracy theorists galore). They’re building $49 IoT chips to help various companies, from agriculture to manufacturing, bring usage data into the cloud.

Banjo Health 🪕

Banjo Health, a prior authorization decision support platform, just raised a $5M Series A led by Epsilon Health Investors, with participation from Spark Growth Ventures and Tao Ventures. The company uses AI to understand benefit managers (payers) criteria to drive fast and accurate authorization decisions. It’s very similar to Boston-based Cohere Health, which raised a $36M Series B back in April.

Medcase 📊

Medcase, formerly Edgecase AI, just announced a $4.1M seed round led by Sopris Capital. The company is building a marketplace for an on-demand network of clinicians that provide at-scale data annotation, data enrichment, medical data labeling, telehealth and automation workflows from case management, coding, or other use cases.

Nobee 🏘️

PropTech startup Nobee just raised a $1.3M pre seed led by Vulcan Inc and the CEO of Squarefoot. The three-year-old company plans to reduce broker fees by 70-80% by vertically integrating the rental process and employing a gig economy styled network of agents.

The Building Machines Company 👻

Year-old stealth startup The Building Machines Company just raised a $575K SAFE (according to Pitchbook but unconfirmed elsewhere). It’s founded by Jeremy De Bonet, who was previously Director of Technology and Innovation at Amazon, specifically working on Amazon Go and Nicholas McMahon, who was a hardware Development Manager at Amazon.

Givinga 🎁

Following a $2.4M fundraise back in November 2020, Givinga just raised $270K according to a new filing. It’s a corporate giving software company that helps companies enable their employees to engage with charitable causes through employee benefits programs.

Tech Deals by Nick Stuart

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