Sources: Robinhood is raising $250M led by Sequoia Capital, at a pre-money valuation of about $8B — Robinhood Markets Inc., the online brokerage that's suffered repeated outages during recent market turmoil, is close to raising new funding at valuation of about $8 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
View, a 13-year-old, Milpitas, Calif.-based company that makes dynamic glass designed to reduce heat and glare as well as lessen eyestrain, has cut an unknown number of employees, including at a plant in Olive Branch, Mississippi.
One employee of several years, an IT manager, wrote on LinkedIn that he was laid off owing to the pandemic. Another employee of the company for the better part of decade — an engineer and project manager — wrote on LinkedIn that he has also been laid off and that the company “really cleaned house.”
This individual added that several other “long timers” had also lost their jobs.
Efforts to reach former View employees was unsuccessful this afternoon. A request for help from the company’s head of communications also went unreturned today.
The company — which touts its glass as a way for real estate owners to attract commercial tenants as well to improve energy consumption by up to 20 percent — is among a large stable of companies that raised enormous amounts of capital from SoftBank’s Vision Fund over the last two years.
The funding that was provided by the outfit — $1.1 billion in early November 2018 — was notable at the time in part because it included no other investors.
The round was also announced at a trying time for the Vision Fund — roughly one month after the journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Instabul, Turkey, drawing unwanted scrutiny to both Saudi Arabia and to the Vision Fund.
As many industry watchers will know, the Japanese conglomerate had raised nearly half the capital for its massive Vision Fund from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. Though no one in Silicon Valley was willing to speak up at the time about the episode, SoftBank’s checks were presumably seen as radioactive in that moment to at least some founders.
At the time it was announced, CEO Rao Mulpuri told Bloomberg that the deal predated Khashoggi’s murder, explaining that, “Obviously, what happened in the region there is quite concerning. But, at the same time, we’ve now built a relationship of getting to know SoftBank over a long period of time, and we are quite comfortable moving forward with this investment.”
View has been selling its glass to building owners and commercial real estate developers. On its site, it features a testimonial from a 14-person development firm in Utah named Cottonwood Partners, for example.
Real estate, as with transportation and fintech, has been a major area of interest for SoftBank. Other related portfolio companies include Katerra, a tech-driven construction company that had run into troubles well before this year, according to several reports by The Information, and Opendoor, the home-buying company that earlier today announced that it was laying off 35 percent of its employees.
Though the construction industry has been hard hit since the coronavirus hit the U.S. market and largely shut the nation down, it is still operating in some pockets, saved by the belief in some states and cities that certain projects constitute essential business.
Earlier this month, for example, crews were at work on apartment buildings just south of West Hollywood. Asked by the New York Times to explain, officials agreed the work was essential, while a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department called what was happening “uncharted territory for all of us.”
Before SoftBank came onto the scene, View had raised about $800 million over the years, including from Corning, Madrone Capital Partners, TIAA Investments and a New Zealand sovereign wealth fund.
Heading into its current layoff, which was announced to employees yesterday, View had roughly 600 employees, according to LinkedIn.
Previse, a fintech focused on helping suppliers get faster payment, announced that it has raised $11 million in new funding led by Reefknot Investments and Mastercard. Returning investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Hambro Perks and Augmentum Fintech also participated.
Founded in 2016, Previse says it currently processes about 100,000 invoices a day, and its goal is to handle payments for five million suppliers within the next five years.
This round brings Previse’s total raised so far to more than $21.8 million and will be used to expand its InstantPay product to more corporate buyers around the world. Previse is taking part in Mastercard’s Start Path accelerator program. Reefknot was founded by Temasek Holdings and Kuehne + Nagel last year to invest in logistics and supply chain startups.
Paul Christensen, the founder and CEO of Previse, told TechCrunch that InstantPay allows corporate buyers to send quick payments to suppliers by using machine-learning based technology to analyze historical data and predict which invoices can be paid immediately, and which ones are potentially higher risk and need to be checked manually.
Traditional invoice payment methods used by large buyers can take up to months to complete, putting pressure on the cash flow of small- to medium-sized businesses. Christensen said this is due to a combination of corporate policy, including the terms and conditions of a sale, and the amount of administrative tasks, including inputting, checking and approving invoices, that need to be performed. InstantPay can reduce that timeframe down to a day.
Rapid payment to suppliers is even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic, he added.
“The pandemic has put a huge strain on the working capital of companies, large and small, all over the world, causing a severe cash crunch. Previse’s platform can unlock working capital, meaning that the tens of thousands of SME suppliers who supply to a large corporate chain can be paid on day one, rather than having to wait weeks or months,” he said.
“This is critical now when supply chains have been disrupted, but it will also be critical when we come out the other side and there is a demand surge and supplier supplies have to fulfill large orders.”
A look at efforts by developers, hobbyists, and students in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and other Asian countries to track and offer information about COVID-19 — Lee Dong-hoon couldn't take any more of the bloody masks. This was January, early in the coronavirus's sweep through South Korea …
Silicon Valley mainstay the Mayfield Fund has raised $750 million across two new funds, the firm said today.
The venture capital firm said its Mayfield XVI will continue to invest in early-stage companies, while its Mayfield Select II will invest in later-stage rounds of breakout portfolio companies. One difference in the new Select fund will be its ability to invest in growth-stage companies outside of its portfolio.
Navin Chaddha
In its blog post announcing the new funds, Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha recalled the timing of its fund XIII, raised in September 2008 right after the market crash.
In the wake of the crisis, Chaddha writes, Mayfield stuck to core principles. The firm decided not to dramatically increase the size of its investment vehicles (unlike some of its peers, which now hold several billion under management in current funds), and kept to a four-year fundraising cycle.
Kleiner Perkins, by contrast, went through a $600 million investment vehicle in about a year and went back out to market to raise another fund shortly thereafter.
“We stuck to our conviction of staying as an early-stage venture investor over four subsequent funds even as the venture industry was shifting. We went deeper into domains we were already experts in vs. following shiny new objects. We raised funds at a measured pace of every four years and built a team of investors who were company builders,” Chaddha wrote.
To date, Mayfield has backed a slew of companies that have gone on to successful exits, including Lyft, Marketo, ServiceMax and SolarCity — all deals that came out of the 2008 financial crisis and its subsequent funds. Current portfolio companies, like the CRISPR-focused biotech company Mammoth Biosciences and retail investments like PoshMark, show that the firm hasn’t lost its luster for picking new deals.
The secret to the firm’s continued success is its focus on what Chaddha considers to be the “craftsman model” of investors “working closely with a handful of entrepreneurs.”
“As many of our peers raised mega-funds, it took courage and discipline for us to stay focused rather than follow the crowd. We raised a similar size fund every four years and invested in thirty companies per fund. We primarily led Series A investments and were comfortable with the fact that the companies we invested in will evolve,” Chaddha wrote.
So what’s next for the venerable firm as it heads into its latest fund? Chaddha flags biology as technology; human-centered artificial intelligence; the resurgence of chip design; the future of work; privacy and security; and next-generation consumer brands as areas where Mayfield will look to commit capital.
Some big changes are underway for London-based Medopad, a startup that builds software for medical practitioners to monitor patients remotely based on digital biomarkers — measurable indicators of the progression of illnesses, diseases or overall health that are picked up not with blood samples or in-doctor visits but using apps and wearables.
The company is rebranding to Huma and appointing its first chairman, the former U.K. Health Minister Alan Milburn. And alongside that, Huma is announcing the acquisition of two AI startups to expand the scope of its business: the mental health-focused BioBeats, and cardiovascular specialist Tarilian Laser Technologies (TLT).
The financial terms of the deals have not been disclosed, but we understand BioBeats was around a $10 million deal, and TLT includes software assets, a number of patents and a new hardware device that measures blood pressure continuously but in a non-invasive way that is currently awaiting FDA approval.
Both will help Huma expand its biomarker monitoring to new areas of coverage (specifically mental health-related biomarkers, and all of the indicators related to blood pressure), and extend into areas around preventative, proactive human health, alongside monitoring for chronic illnesses, diseases and other conditions.
Huma has built a strong network of partnerships to expand its reach and scope. They include working with Tencent on a trial to measure the progress of Parkinson’s just by monitoring you as you speak into the camera on your smartphone. And with pharmaceutical giant Janssen, it’s working on a way to measure Alzheimer’s based on the sound of your voice. It’s also collaborating closely with leading research hospitals like Kings and Barts in London and Johns Hopkins in the U.S. to develop other biomarker tests.
But when it comes to building some of the early work, it would take years for Huma to build up knowledge and teams that would be on par with what BioBeats and TLT have built: hence the move to acquire.
That’s a pattern that the startup plans to follow.
Huma is currently working on closing a fundraise in the coming weeks and months that’s targeted to be one of the biggest ever in the U.K. health technology sector (the high watermark is Babylon Health, which last year raised $550 million).
The fundraise will be to make more acquisitions, not to run the business itself: Huma still has more money in the bank than it last raised (it announced a $25 million round led by Bayer last November), and has, according to CEO and founder Dan Vahdat, already hit its revenue target for the whole year (and it’s only April).
Part of that strong business funnel is due to the novel coronavirus. Huma announced a COVID-19 tracker at the end of March that aims to help keep hospitals from overflowing. People with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19 that are not serious enough to land them in the hospital are instead monitored closely using measurements taken using smartphones, watches and other devices. If their biomarkers indicate that their illness may be taking a turn for the worse, they can subsequently be ordered to come into the hospital before the case becomes a dire one.
At a time when many health systems around the world are being stretched to the breaking point with the influx of coronavirus cases, this is one way to try to triage the traffic, and that’s struck a chord in many places. Huma is due to announce its first official deals for the service in multiple countries in the coming weeks, Vahdat said.
“I’m pleased to work with Huma to help transform the health sector by developing a new understanding of the human body through digital biomarkers,” said Milburn in a statement. “We’re at the very early stages of what could be breakthroughs in how we understand health, diagnose and treat illnesses and Huma could become a true leader in this promising new area for life sciences, innovation partners and healthcare.”
Enlarge / World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a daily press briefing on COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, at the WHO headquaters in Geneva on March 11, 2020. (credit: Getty | Fabrice Coffrini)
The director-general of the World Health Organization called for global unity and continued focus on saving lives and fighting the common enemy, COVID-19, on Wednesday—a day after US President Donald Trump attacked the organization for allegedly “severely mismanaging” the pandemic response. Trump announced he would halt funding to the WHO until his administration reviewed its response.
The WHO, an agency formed in the 1940s by the United Nations and supported by its member states, receives around 15 percent of its funding from the United States.
“We regret the decision of the President of the United States to order a halt in funding to the World Health Organization,” WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (aka Dr. Tedros) said in a press briefing Wednesday. “With support from the people and government of the United States, WHO works to improve the health of many of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people,” he went on.
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