Bitcoin has increased 9.5% in the past seven days and is up 50% on the month, according to CoinMarketCap data.
There is, of course, no way of telling how high bitcoin can rise during the current bull frenzy.
The CoinMarketCap Crypto Fear & Greed Index is in “extreme greed” territory at 89.12 points, up from “neutral” at 59.3 points, in early February.
The index measures price and trading data of the biggest cryptocurrencies, with its user behavior data to measure crypto market sentiment from 0-100.
The last bitcoin halving was on May 11, 2020 and drove its price up about 600% from around $9,000 to $63,000 by the April 2021 mark.
In a new SEC filing, Reddit says it’s planning to sell around 22 million shares, priced between $31 to $34, potentially raising around $748 million at the high end of that range.
But the IPO could be volatile given that Reddit will allow its community members to sell their shares immediately, instead of being subject to the usual lock-up agreements that typically prevent investors from selling shares for six months after the IPO.
The move sets up Reddit to become a meme stock — a term coined in reference to the wild GameStop short squeeze of 2021, which was driven by a group of Reddit users on its community r/WallStreetBets.
The users had taken on the hedge funds that had shorted GameStop’s stock by over 100% by working collectively to buy the stock.
By allowing the Reddit community to buy into the IPO, there’s again potential for the stock to be manipulated — this time, possibly in Reddit’s favor — by Redditors’ collective action.
Astra Space, the launch company that went public in 2021 at a $2.1 billion valuation, is going private again after months of burning cash and failing to secure alternate investment.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2024, at which time Astra will cease trading on the Nasdaq.
In an investor presentation from February 2021, Astra touted a “mass produced portable launch system” that could launch from anywhere in the world.
At the time Astra completed its SPAC merger it also acquired Apollo Fusion, an electric propulsion developer for spacecraft, with the aim of integrating those systems into an Astra satellite constellation.
That constellation never came to fruition, however, and while the company did succeed in selling many Apollo Fusion propulsion systems it has struggled to turn that backlog into revenue.
A South Korean startup called QuotaLab is on a quest to follow in the footsteps of Carta, the cap table management company that’s used by a host of startups and investors in the U.S.Carta started life as “eShares” in 2012 as a cap table management service that startups could use to issue equity to their investors and employees.
Today, its stable of offerings has expanded to include everything from valuation and equity management, to bookkeeping, risk assessment and brokerage services.
A Y Combinator alum, QuotaLab also started off as an equity management service (called QuotaBook) for startups and investors in South Korea.
It also offers investment management such as investments, returns, asset changes, markdowns, valuations, accounting, e-approvals and risk management,” Choi added.
According to Choi, the equity management market has many sides you can tackle.
A new startup called Ema out of San Francisco thinks it’s a lot more than just a passing fancy.
“Our goal is to build a universal AI employee,” Surojit Chatterjee, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview.
Accel, Section 32 and Prosus Ventures are co-leading, and Wipro Ventures, Venture Highway, AME Cloud Ventures, Frontier Ventures, Maum Group and Firebolt Ventures also participating.
He himself has some 40 patents to his name in areas like machine learning enterprise software and ad tech.
Most recently, he was VP of engineering at Okta where he oversaw data, machine learning and devices; and prior to that he was also at Google, where he was engineering lead for data and machine learning where he focused on privacy and safety.
New report confirms Europe’s tech investment doldrums, but there are signs of lifeEurope is suffering from a big hangover after the tech investment party of the 2020-2021 period.
That said, compared to pre-pandemic levels, VC investment in European startups is up, historically speaking, and reached $60 billion, according to a new report.
2023 marked a reset and major correction in investment levels globally.
According to the report, Europe is sitting on “record levels of dry powder” and “producing more new founders than the U.S.”, funding remains slow.
Climate Tech overtook FinTech as Europe’s most popular sectorAI’s share of total investment in Europe soared to a record high of 17%5.
Berlin’s Razor Group has acquired U.S.-based Perch, and on top of this it has raised just over $100 million led by Presight Capital with other undisclosed investors participating.
The news is the latest development in a wider consolidation and reordering taking place in the world of e-commerce aggregation.
Perch, we have heard from multiple sources, had been looking for a buyer for the better part of a year.
Perch and Razor do happen to have some investors in common, such as Victory Park Capital, which may well have been central to the negotiations between the two.
He claims that this deal solidifies Razor as the “market leader”, and that it is on track for $1 billion in revenues in the next four to eight quarters.
Camshaft disclosed in court filings this week that some $533 million it managed for Byju’s Alpha, a U.S. unit of Indian edtech group Byju’s, was transferred to another 100% and U.S.-based subsidiary of Byju’s, thereby refuting allegations that the Indian firm used the wealth manager’s services to misappropriate money.
In the court filings, Camshaft said the capital was transferred to Inspilearn LLC, a Delaware-based subsidiary of Byju’s.
Camshaft also clarified that Byju’s or any of its entities are not limited partners in the hedge fund.
Camshaft Capital attracted media attention last year after lenders of Byju’s questioned the legitimacy of the wealth advisor as they claimed the $533 million was a collateral for a $1.2 billion they had lent to the Indian startup.
A select few estranged investors in Byju’s later used the allegation to discredit Byju’s founder Byju Raveendran’s credibility.
“The need for partnerships for deep tech investments, and the need to work together, it seemed obvious,” Hyuk-Jeen Suh told TechCrunch.
Initially, Greentown’s founders were looking for lab space, but they quickly realized the benefits of the shared space went far beyond lower rent payments.
The fact that the collaborative emerged among deep tech investors isn’t surprising.
The sort of problems deep tech startups face favors cooperation over cutthroat competition.
For investors, there’s so much blue sky in deep tech that Suh doesn’t think secrecy and jealousy gives anyone an edge.
Startups typically operate under tight budget constraints, and spending significant time and money on pitch deck design may not be the best use of limited resources.
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