VNTR Capital Newsletter June 9, 2024 – News, Events, VC Reads
Venture Capital, Web3, and Private Equity – News, Events, and VC Reads
Hello friends,
Happy Sunday!
VNTR Capital Newsletter is delivered to 90k+ investors weekly to share the latest news, events, and articles from the global VC and startup ecosystem.
Scroll down for VNTR Capital Community News, Upcoming Events, and VC News/Reads.
VNTR CAPITAL COMMUNITY NEWS
Spotlight
Rebranding: We are revamping VNTR’s branding with a new logo, colors, look and feel, a new website (coming soon), and VNTR Club merchandise. This process will take a few weeks, and we are excited about the fresh branding and new VNTR vision.
VNTR Podcast: The latest episode of the VNTR Podcast is now live on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. In this episode, we talk with Benedikt Knobloch, Founding Partner at Souschef Ventures, a VC fund specializing in restaurant tech. We explore the future of restaurant tech and Benedikt's journey from entrepreneur to emerging VC. Catch up on previous episodes with Tim Draper and Lou Kerner.
Stay tuned for our upcoming episode featuring Dave McClure, Founder of Practical Venture Capital and 500 Startups, and Yossi Vardi, one of Israel's first high-tech entrepreneurs and a pioneer in the Israeli internet and VC industry. Contact Elise if you're interested in joining as a guest on the VNTR Podcast.VNTR Socials: To stay connected to the VNTR Community and keep up with our events, insights, and news, we are active on several social media platforms. Follow and subscribe to LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and YouTube.
VNTR Corporate Membership: Introducing our latest offering, the VNTR Club Membership service tailored specifically for Corporate VCs, providing unparalleled access to the expansive VNTR global community. Corporate VCs keen on exploring this opportunity are encouraged to connect with Sara. Here's a glimpse of the benefits awaiting CVCs as part of this exclusive membership:
Access to a diverse pool of startups sourced from over 3000 VNTR Community members.
Opportunity to extend corporate accelerators/incubation services to carefully vetted startups endorsed by existing VNTR investors.
Global networking platform facilitating knowledge exchange and potential co-investment opportunities among CVCs.
Collaboration opportunities to co-invest in promising early-stage startups.
Facilitated connections with qualified startups for M&A and corporate development initiatives.
Formation of a Corporate sub-community of co-investors.
VNTR Summit: We opened registration for the VNTR Summit, which will gather our global community in Lisbon from November 11 to 14 during the Web Summit. The summit will feature keynotes, panel discussions, and roundtables, offering opportunities to share insights, learn, network, and collaborate with investors worldwide. You can reserve your spot via VNTR. Companies interested in connecting with investors can apply for sponsorship or contact Lukas.
Coming 2 weeks:
Barcelona: June 11 VNTR Investors Luncheon, (chapter BBQ event)
London: June 12 VNTR Investors Roundtable London during London Tech Week (Get complimentary investor pass). Thank you, Legal Tech Talk, for hosting.
Dubai: June 12 VNTR Investors Roundtable Dubai (chapter event)
Online: June 13 VNTR Expert Session with Bryan Talebi, Founder at Ahura.ai
Tbilisi: June 16 VNTR Investors Roundtable Tbilisi during DeGameFi. Thank you, Terminal, for hosting.
Toronto: June 18 VNTR Investors Roundtable Toronto during Collision.
Online: June 19 VNTR Speed Networking hosted on Airmeet.
Thank you to our Partners:
Terminal is a pioneering co-working space born in Georgia, that is transforming the way to work in a co-working environment. At Terminal you will find a vibrant community that fosters collaboration and creativity. Whether you are a freelancer, entrepreneur or part of a growing startup, Terminal provides you with the perfect workspace for achieving your professional goals and making your workdays more productive.
Legal Tech Talk is Europe's Premier event for legal transformation. As the legal industry undergoes a significant transformation driven by top-tier technology, demographics, and new business models, you will have important insights into legal tech trends with Legal Tech Talk.
Zeebu is the first-of-its-kind Web3 Payments Platform. Our purpose-built protocol is dedicated to empowering telecom carrier businesses to transact at the speed of real-time global connectivity.
Upcoming VNTR Events:
June 26 VNTR Investors Roundtable Mexico City (Chapter gathering)
June 26 VNTR Investors Roundtable Koh Samui (Thailand Chapter gathering)
June 27 VNTR Investors Roundtable Clug Romania (Techsylvania)
Aug 8 VNTR Investors Roundtable Auckland (New Zealand Chapter gathering)
More events available on the VNTR Platform
Reach out to Lukas to sponsor VNTR events or join VNTR Corporate Membership.
Follow us on Social media: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, and X.
UPCOMING VC EVENTS
June 10-14 London Tech Week, London, UK (Complimentary Investor Passes)
June 13-14 LegalTech Talk, London, UK
June 15-16 DeGameFi, Tbilisi, Georgia (15% Discount using PARTNER15V)
June 17-21 Cannes Lions, Cannes, France
June 17-20 Collision Conf, Toronto, Canada
June 24-26 Fund Forum, Monaco
June 26-27 Techsylvania, Cluj, Romania
June 26-27 FinTech Summit Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa
June 26-28 Mobile World Congress, Shanghai, China
July 25-27 Bitcoin2024, Nashville, USA
Aug 21-23 VCILAT, Santa Cruz De La Sierra, Bolivia
Aug 22-24 Coinfest, Bali, Indonesia
Aug 28-29 WebX, Tokyo, Japan
Sep 11-12 TechBBQ, Copenhagen, Denmark
Sep 18-19 Token2049, Singapore
Sep 25-27 South Summit, Seoul, Korea
Sep 29 - Oct 1 Bitz & Pretzels, Munich, Germany
If you would like to submit VC-related events, please respond to this email or Telegram @byuric
Check out VNTR Capital upcoming events
VC Reads and News
View curated VC news and articles on the VNTR Platform
The 10 Biggest Rounds Of May: xAI And CoreWeave Lead Big Month For AI
May was a big month to raise, well, really big. Four rounds hit $1 billion or more and companies needed to raise at least $200 million to make this list. Not surprisingly AI led the way — as it always seems to do — with a trio of a billion-or-more rounds. 1. xAI, $6B, artificial intelligence: Elon Musk’s generative AI startup, xAI, officially announced its long-awaited fundraise — making it the second-most-valuable generative AI company in the world behind only competitor OpenAI. The $6 billion round included investment from the likes of Valor Equity Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Fidelity Management & Research, among others.
Nvidia hits $3tn and surpasses Apple as world’s second most valuable company
Shares of Nvidia rallied to record highs on Wednesday, with the artificial-intelligence chipmaker’s stock market valuation hitting the $3tn mark and overtaking Apple to become the world’s second most valuable company.
The chipmaker’s stock was up 5.16% at $1,224.40, giving Nvidia a market value of $3.01tn at market close. Apple’s market capitalization was at $3.00tn at market close as its stock climbed 0.78%.
Generalist fund managers beat specialists in returning cash to LPs
Buyout funds focused on B2B, tech and healthcare historically benefited from specialization, outperforming generalist managers in terms of delivering returns to investors. In recent vintage years, however, these and other specialist vehicles saw a fall in distributions through 2023 compared to generalist fund strategies. The findings are highlighted in recent PitchBook research that examined historical trends in the duration it took for these funds to turn profitable for investors—a metric known as the J-curve.
Crunchbase Monthly Recap May 2024: AI Leads Alongside An Uptick In Billion-Dollar Rounds
Venture funding rebounded in May to reach $31 billion, the highest monthly tally so far this year. Investment was up over 40% month over month and 29% year over year, with AI leading as the sector that raised the most funding.
A spate of billion-dollar fundings contributed to the total, with $11 billion — over a third of capital raised last month — invested in six companies in rounds at $1 billion or more. This was the highest count of billion-dollar fundings in a single month since the venture market slowdown began in 2022.
13% of VC firms aren’t planning to raise another fund
Thirteen percent of venture GPs don’t plan to raise another fund as the LP pullback spoils fundraising efforts, according to PitchBook’s semiannual VC Tech Survey. That’s double the rate in H1 2023, when 6% said they had no plans to raise another fund.
Nearly half of venture firms—44% of those surveyed in mid-2023—had previously pushed back their plans to re-enter the fundraising process, as institutional investors became increasingly concerned with overexposure to the asset class.
VCs are selling shares of hot AI companies like Anthropic and xAI to small investors in a wild SPV market
VCs are clamoring to invest in hot AI companies, and willing to pay exorbitant share prices for coveted spots on their cap tables. Even so, most aren’t able to get into such deals at all. Yet small, unknown investors, including family offices and high-net-worth individuals, have found their own way to get shares of the hottest private startups like Anthropic, Groq, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Elon Musk’s X.ai (the maker of Grok).
They are using special purpose vehicles, or SPVs, where multiple parties pool their money to share an allocation of a single company. SPVs are generally formed by investors who have direct access to the shares of these startups and then turn around and sell a part of their allocation to external backers, often charging significant fees while retaining some profit share, known as carry.
The Opaque Investment Empire Making OpenAI’s Sam Altman Rich
Less publicly, Altman is one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific and aggressive individual investors, managing a sprawling investment empire that is becoming a direct beneficiary of OpenAI’s success. The holdings he controls were worth at least $2.8 billion as of early this year, according to company filings and Wall Street Journal reporting. Much of the portfolio isn’t widely known.
Altman and his venture funds have invested in more than 400 companies, by Altman’s own estimate, including big names such as Stripe, Airbnb and Reddit. The holdings are managed by his family office and rival the value and size of some full-blown venture firms.
Most-Active US Investors In May: Andreessen Horowitz And General Catalyst Lead Month With A Lot Of Big Rounds
Similar to April, big-named investors dominated investing in U.S.-based startups last month. Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and Alumni Ventures led the way in the number of deals, although only a16z hit double digits, with 10 investments. Just a couple of years ago it was not uncommon for firms to need a dozen or more deals to head up this list. But as the venture market continues to plug along, a smaller amount of deal-making seems to be the preferred route for even the biggest VC firms.
In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but there’s a catch
When Bowery Capital general partner Loren Straub started talking to a startup from the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch a few months ago, she thought it was strange that the company didn’t have a lead investor for the round it was raising. Even stranger, the founders didn’t seem to be looking for one. She thought it was an anomaly until she talked to about nine other startups, Straub told TechCrunch. They were all looking to raise nearly identical rounds: $1.5 million to $2 million with around a $15 million post-money valuation, while giving up only 10% of their companies — aside from YC’s standard deal, where it takes a 7% stake. Most had raised the majority of that already from multiple angels with only a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of shares left to sell.
The Consumer Renaissance
“Consumer” has become something of a bad word in venture capital circles.
We see this reflected in the early-stage markets: recent data from Carta showed that just 7.1% of Seed capital raised last year went to consumer startups. That’s less than half the share from 2019 (14.3%).
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Xcimer Energy Leads The Way As Big Rounds Dry Up
Another slow week for funding — the third straight after a significant pick-up in large rounds earlier this year. Xcimer Energy led the way, as it was the only startup to lock up a nine-figure round. The dog days of summer seem to already be here in the venture world.
US tech sector pressures Chinese venture capital to divest
US venture capital firms are putting pressure on tech start-ups to cut ties with Chinese backers as they anticipate tighter controls on foreign ownership from Washington.
In one example, HeyGen, a generative artificial intelligence start-up that was founded in Shenzhen during the pandemic but has since moved to Los Angeles, asked its Chinese investors — IDG Capital, Baidu Ventures, Sequoia Capital’s former Chinese venture capital arm HongShan and ZhenFund — to sell shares to US counterparts, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
The AI video start-up, co-founded by former Snap software engineer Joshua Xu, completed a funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Benchmark in March, during which early-stage Chinese investors dramatically reduced their stakes through sales to US VC firms, these people said.
Crossing The Series A Chasm
As we get deeper into 2024, there is increasing concern about the state of Series A fundraising. The bar for investment appears much higher, and fewer startups are reaching it.
This is a problem for founders, and investors like Jenny Fielding, managing partner of Everywhere Ventures, who said, “Every Seed investor’s dilemma: All my Series A buddies want to meet my companies early! All my companies are too early for my Series A buddies.”
5 charts: Australia, New Zealand VC deals fail to bounce back
Venture capital dealmaking in Australia and New Zealand got off to a relatively slow start this year with deal count in the first three months of 2024 coming in at its lowest quarterly figure in nearly seven years. Here’s a look at five charts from PitchBook’s inaugural 2024 Australia and New Zealand Private Capital Breakdown that show the current state of the region’s VC market.
All the new first-time European VC funds of 2024
Fundraising in 2023 was not easy, for founders or VCs. Sifted tracked just 40 new first-time funds that announced a first or second close in 2023 — compared to over 60 in 2022. Will 2024 be rosier? We’re not too sure. Limited partnerships are still waiting for more established funds to return capital, the public listing market is still on ice and the mood music remains muted. But those dogged VCs who do succeed in closing a fund in 2024 we’ll list right here.
The Portion Of US VC Funding That Went To Female Founders Hit A New Peak In 2023, Thanks To Massive AI Deals
In 2023, the proportion of U.S. venture funding that went to startups with at least one female co-founder reached a new peak. In fact, a quarter of all funding — $34.7 billion — was invested in companies with at least one female founder, Crunchbase data shows. The uptick in the portion of startup investment going to female-founded companies — up from 15% in 2022 — was in large part due to a number of billion-dollar-plus rounds raised by AI companies with a female co-founder. For example, OpenAI raised the largest funding deal in 2023, at $10 billion, and foundation model company Anthropic raised more than $6.5 billion across four funding rounds that year. Both companies count women among their founders.
The 10 most active VC investors cultivating agtech’s future
Agtech’s harvest hasn’t been bountiful recently. Startups in the space raised $1.2 billion across 161 deals in the first quarter, declines of 25.8% and 20.3%, respectively, from the previous quarter, according to PitchBook’s latest agtech report. But select startups are still raising blockbuster sums. Oishii, an indoor vertical farming startup, raised $134 million in February, led by Japanese telecommunications company NTT. Seed gene-editing specialist Inari raised $103 million in January. And Captain Fresh, an Indian seafood cultivation startup, closed its Series C with $45 million, backed by investors like Tiger Global and Prosus in February.
Crypto’s Latest Privacy Battle
At the end of May the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's (SEC) newest mass surveillance tool – the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) – went "fully operational." SEC registered broker-dealers, exchanges and alternative trading systems now have to collect and report trade information related to every U.S. trade as well as the personal information of every U.S. retail brokerage customer. While this obviously impacts customers of traditional financial institutions, the personal privacy of participants in the digital asset economy may be seriously compromised as well.
Nordic early-stage startups to watch - according to investors
The Nordics have an impressive track record over the past two decades of building successful startups — with global companies like Northvolt, Klarna and Oura. Its startup investment per capita also far exceeds the regional average compared to the rest of Europe, according to Sifted data. As the world took a financial hit in the last couple of years, the influx of US capital in the Nordics (as a percentage of the investment received by the country of origin) dropped from 20.5% to 8.8% between 2022 and 2023. Capital originating from the Nordic region, however, rose from 29.6% to 38.3% in that period — a record high for regional investment according to Dealroom data dating back to 2010.
Major league investors: Private equity’s pro sports ties
Private equity sports investment is on the rise. As leagues have eased ownership rules, dealmakers spy opportunities to gain outsized returns and cultural influence. It’s no wonder why: US sports teams’ valuations have grown faster than the S&P 500 in recent decades, prompting firms like Arctos Sports Partners and Redbird Capital Partners to amass portfolios of minority stakes in teams. This dashboard tracks every connection between North American men’s pro sports teams and PE firms and partners. The NFL wasn’t included because it doesn’t allow PE ownership.
The Promises and Perils of Private Asset Tokenization
Alternative assets such as natural resources, art and private equity have become popular investments because of their potential for higher returns and lower volatility than traditional assets. However, the benefits of alternative asset classes like these also come with a number of limitations, including high minimum investment requirements, liquidity constraints and a lack of transparency. Tokenization, the process of converting traditional assets into digital tokens through blockchain technology, may overcome some of these limitations, and its success could transform the alternatives sector.
As Plastic Piles Up, So Does Funding To Startups Working On Alternatives
People are using and discarding too much plastic. It’s terrible for the environment, contributes to global warming and can contain substances dangerous for our own health. This isn’t new information. Consumers are already pretty aware about the awfulness of plastic and guilty about how much we consume. We spend billions on things like paper straws and fancy reusable water bottles. And yet, plastic remains omnipresent, from berry cartons to bottle caps to shopping bags. In tandem, global plastic waste is on track to almost triple by 2060 from 2019 levels.
Startups can hedge bank risk with Bitcoin — Tim Draper
Companies should start using Bitcoin as a way of hedging risk, according to venture capitalist Tim Draper. When Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed in March 2023, many cryptocurrency and tech firms suddenly found themselves unable to access funds. Silicon Valley Bank specialized in servicing venture capital-backed tech startups, including crypto firms. Stablecoin issuer Circle was among its many clients. SVB held $3.3 billion of Circle’s USD Coin reserves when it became illiquid, prompting the stablecoin to temporarily depeg to $0.88.