liquidity

Canva helps Airtree Ventures maintain majority stake as first fund yields promising returns

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Airtree Ventures already returned its first fund thanks to Canva while maintaining the majority of its stakeVenture secondaries has exploded over the last couple of years. While some firms have used the increase in activity to build up their positions in their most promising portfolio companies, Airtree Ventures is taking advantage of the momentum a little differently. So in 2021 Airtree started seeking out alternative ways to get liquidity for some of their earliest stakes, Blair said. Airtree got a 1.4x return on Fund I from this transaction alone and was able to maintain the majority of their original stake. They aren’t wrong, and Blair acknowledges that when a company does eventually exit, Airtree makes less money off of it because of this strategy.

VCs set to receive liquidity in 2024 through secondary market instead of IPOs

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The secondary market allows for that now.”Stripe’s recent secondary sale is a clear example of this. Leung said that Sapphire deployed roughly $500 million into the secondary market in 2023, and expects to deploy the same if not more into secondary stakes in 2024. But given the maturation of the secondary market, it doesn’t need to thaw before the market is really ready. The secondary market “is playing a huge role,” Leung said regarding companies waiting to go public. [LPs] are not pressuring the GPs to push out their assets, which reduces the demand for the public market.”

“Record-Breaking Employee Stock-Sale Deal Boosts Fintech Powerhouse Stripe’s Valuation to $65B”

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Payments infrastructure giant Stripe said today it has inked deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation. Notably, the valuation represents a 30% increase compared to what Stripe was valued at last March when it raised $6.5 billion in Series I funding at a $50 billion valuation. But it is also still lower than the $95 billion valuation achieved in March of 2021. A Stripe IPO has been long anticipated and was widely expected to happen in 2024. But with this deal, it appears that an initial public offering may not take place until next year.

“Exploring Creative Techniques for VCs to Return Investor Funds in Times of Limited Liquidity”

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Today on The Exchange, we’re digging into continuation funds, counting down through some of our favorite historical Exchange entries, and discussing what we’re excited to report on for the rest of the year! It is also a very topical one: “The greatest source of liquidity now is going to be continuation funds,” VC Roger Ehrenberg predicted in a recent episode of the 20VC podcast. If you have been following the last few months of venture capital activity, the “why now?” is easy to answer. “It’s a viable strategy for a decent swath of the venture industry,” Ehrenberg told 20VC host Harry Stebbings. We went from tallying monster rounds and a blizzard of IPOs to watching venture capital dry up and startup exits become rarer than gold.

Strategizing Venture Capital’s Resilience during a Three-Year Liquidity Decline

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Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our interview show, where we sit down with interesting, knowledgeable folks and dive deep into their favorite topics. For this weekend’s Special Equity Edition, we invited Gené Teare to come back on the podcast. Longtime listeners will recall that we’ve had Gené on a time or two to chat venture capital data with us, and she’s back to do the same this week! Yep, we’re back to dig into Q4 2023 venture capital results and what’s coming up this year.

“The U.S. Must Act Swiftly to Close the $1 Trillion Void in Startup Funds”

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Just how backed up are the venture capital markets today? That’s what a recent data analysis indicates is happening today in one critical venture capital market. The value of the most mature startups in the United States that need to find an exit neared the $1 trillion mark through Q3 2023, according to a recent PitchBook analysis. The figure underscores how weak the exit climate has been over the last two years and highlights the sheer mass of illiquid equity investments made into startups that call the United States home. Still, the United States’ venture capital market is worth about half of the global whole, so when we discuss Yankee territory, we’re nevertheless talking about a huge portion of the startup market.

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