🏦 Crypto Gets Decrypted
Plus: Southeast Asia's most valuable sees exits, Epic Game's epic valuation, a16z's financial returns, the rise and rise of climate funds + WeWork's overpriced SPAC
Wrapped Up Newsletter #22
Today’s Menu
Quick Bits: Grab + Coinbase break records
Done Deals: Crypto, Metaverse + Fitness Tech
What Else We're Following: a16z + Tiger Global’s meteoric rise
Jobs - Internships/Full-Time: 13 full-time jobs and internship postings
🤜🤛 Help us to deliver better content to you by filling out the survey here.
Quick Bits 🌎
Recap in the West
Coinbase's IPO is a big win for crypto enthusiasts. Jeff Bezos bids farewell in a letter. European VC reaches all-time high in Q1 2021. Amazon wants to deliver and assemble your furniture. Apple gets transparent with its artist-friendly, penny-per-stream model and revives its smart home efforts. Is the Clubhouse hype fading? Vanity Fair meets Substack. Spotify builds its first hardware product and launches a car thing. Twitter sets up shop in Ghana. DTC brands get a marketing plug through TV ads. Substack injects $1m into supporting local journalism.
Recap in the East
Grab breaks record with $40bn U.S. SPAC deal and plans next steps with secondary listing in Singapore. Gojek + Tokopedia + $18bn = GoTo. Alibaba shrugs off record antitrust fine, while 34 Chinese tech companies undergo some introspection. Huawei drives its AV/EV ambitions with a $1bn investment to take on Tesla and Xiaomi. Ant Group's failed IPO scares tech startups from listing domestically. Indonesian audio app Noice gets noise from investors to compete against Spotify. Chinese EV giant Geely floats a SPAC. Luckin Coffee finds some luck with a $250m lifeline. Some Singaporeans can now get their milk and eggs delivered via robots.
Done Deals ✍🏼
Funding Rounds
Fortnite maker Epic Games banks $1bn at a valuation of $28.7bn to build out the metaverse
Palo Alto-based AI hardware and integrated systems SambaNova Systems raises $676m (Series D) led by SoftBank
Chinese home fitness startup Fiture raises $300m from Sequoia, Tencent and GSR Ventures, making it one of the world’s fastest-growing smart fitness firms
US space startup Astranis raises $250m (Series C) at a $1.4bn valuation to scale the manufacturing of its smaller, cheaper geostationary communications satellites
German Amazon FBA buyer Berlin Brands Group raises $240m in debt to acquire smaller but promising enterprises in Europe and North America
Indonesian e-commerce company Bukalapak raises $234m led by Microsoft, Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, and local media conglomerate Emtek
San Francisco-based home gym startup Tempo picks up $220m (Series C) led by SoftBank to meet surge in pandemic-driven demand
Austin-based insurance comparison site The Zebra raises $150m (Series D) and becomes a unicorn after recently launching a dedicated home and auto bundled product
Indian social e-commerce DealShare bags $100m (Series D) led by Tiger Global just three months after its Series C
Berlin-based consumer electronics subscription and circular economy startup Grover raises $71m (Series B) to expand into more markets
Swiss’ ConsenSys, a key player in crypto and a major proponent of the Ethereum blockchain, raised $65m from J.P. Morgan, Mastercard and UBS to build out the infrastructure for decentralized finance
Miami-based Papa, an elder tech company that offers care and companionship to seniors, gets $60m (Series C) led by Tiger Global to build on its 7x year-over-year growth
Indonesian EdTech startup Ruangguru gets $50m from Tiger Global
New York-based sales appointment scheduling platform Chili Piper raises $33m (Series B) led by Tiger Global, taking on Calendly
Seattle-based B2B payments platform Routable bags $30m (Series B) led by the Altman Brothers
New York-based insuretech Level snags $27m (Series A) from Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed to rebuild insurance from the ground up
French restaurant checkout startup Sunday, founded by the creators of Big Mamma, bags $24m (Seed) led by Coatue
Brazilian e-commerce marketplace integrator Olist gets $23m (Series D extension) from Goldman Sachs and plans to go public
Swiss end-to-end encrypted messaging app Wire picks up $21m (Series B) led by UVC Partners and focuses on the enterprise market
Kleiner Perkins EIR Thomson Nguyen starts Hatch, a neobank for SMEs, and secures $20m from the likes of Foundation Capital, SVB and Plaid’s founders
Berlin-based e-commerce logistics platform Hive raises $7.7m (Seed) from Earlybird to expand its product offering and enter new markets
New Funds
Singapore’s Temasek partners with BlackRock to invest $600m into advancing decarbonization solutions
Amazon announces a $250m fund to invest in Indian startups focusing on digitization of SMEs in key overseas market
Apple launches a $200m fund to invest in forestry projects to help remove carbon from the atmosphere while also generating financial returns for its investors
US venture capital legend Index Ventures launches Index Origin, a $200m dedicated Seed fund
New investment firm Pale Blue Dot aims to be Europe’s premier early-stage climate investor and has $100m to prove it
Exits: Acquisitions, IPOs & SPACs
Indian merchant commerce platform Pine Labs acquires Fave, Southeast Asia's fast-growing consumer fintech platform, for $45m
Microsoft acquires Nuance Communications, a leader in speech-to-text software, for $19.7bn
Autodesk, the software company best known for its CAD and 3D modeling tools, acquires Upchain, a Toronto-based startup that offers a cloud-based product life cycle management service
New York-based Squarespace, the software-and-hosting provider for SMB websites, files for a direct listing on the NYSE
Jessica Alba's consumer goods company Honest files for U.S. IPO
What Else We're Following 👀
Contrarian bets and bold moves are paying off: a16z's financials are starting to support its legendary status (The Information)
Josh Constine writes on artists becoming founders and speaks with Patreon's Jack Conte (Josh Constine's PressClub)
Partial automation, full automation, lidar sensors: a Guide to Autonomous Vehicles (Emerging Tech Brew)
High velocity, cheap(er) capital: an interesting perspective on Tiger Global’s mission to disrupt VC (The Valley of Dunning-Kruger)
After a track record of mismanagement, mishaps and misfortune...is WeWork’s $9bn valuation still overpriced? (Sacra)
Fred Wilson on entrepreneurship in Latin America (AVC)
Jobs - Internships/Full-Time 👩🏽💼
We have created a Notion page dedicated to aggregating job opportunities (internships & full-time). You can find this week’s job postings here.
Feedback Time!! 🙏
Please answer our 2-min survey here. Your feedback is invaluable! For any additional comments, feel free to email us at jeffrey.dong@insead.edu. We look forward to seeing you in the next issue!
👋 Hey there! We are Jeff, Dom and Vas, coming to you live from INSEAD in Singapore. Thanks for reading Wrapped Up.
Please share Wrapped Up if you enjoyed this newsletter.