When they first met in 2007, the now brothers-in-law bonded over their passion for venture capital, eventually leading them to invest together from their personal capital.
By 2020, Anderson and Fogelsong decided to take their investing relationship to the next level by launching their first fund with external capital.
That fund, which the firm considers its second vehicle, closed at $91.5 million, well above its initial target of $60 million.
So,they named their firm “Friends & Family Capital” to capture that spirit, their own family connection, and Fogelsong’s roots in a prominent Silicon Valley VC family.
Like its previous fund, Friends & Family’s third fund will be used to invest in “classic B2B enterprise software” companies and hardware businesses with recurring revenue components.
For Informatica investors, it was the opposite: The price was too low to warrant selling — they wanted more, more, more — and their stock also dropped, down a similar amount over the same period.
The biggest by far of that bunch was the $28 billion deal to buy Slack at the end of 2020.
Informatica is also far smaller than Salesforce, making its potential revenue bump to Marc Benioff’s company modest.
The ace up Informatica’s sleeve is that while its total revenue growth is slow, one important segment of its revenues is expanding quickly.
If we were to compare Informatica cloud net-new ARR that it expects this year instead, the percentage becomes even smaller.
Serve Robotics, the Uber and Nvidia-backed sidewalk robot delivery company, debuted publicly on the New York stock exchange Thursday, making it the latest startup to choose going public via a reverse merger as an alternative path to capital needed to fund growth.
While Serve’s debut in the public markets comes from a reverse merger and not a SPAC, the two alternate paths to IPO are not too dissimilar.
However, Serve Robotics said it’s expecting enormous growth fueled by money generated by going public.
“I never thought that I would start a robotics company and then be in the ads business,” said a tired, but excited, Kashani in a phone interview minutes before the bell rang.
Upon the closing of the merger, Uber held a 16.6% stake and Nvidia an 14.3% stake in Serve, according to regulatory filings.
Spend management startup Ramp has raised another $150 million at a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today.
New investor Khosla Ventures and existing backer Founders Fund co-led the raise, which also included participation from new backers Sequoia Capital, Greylock and 8VC.
Other existing investors Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Sands Capital, D1 Capital, Lux Capital, Iconiq Capital, Definition Capital, Contrary Capital also put money into the latest round.
Apparently, there were no hard feelings on the part of Founders Fund, which still participated in the financing, even without Rabois.
(It’s worth noting that Rabois originally represented Founders Fund and has sat on Ramp’s board since 2019.)
That was also the year SpaceX launched its first 60 Starlink satellites.
The company was spending plenty of cash on research and development, too — $559 million in 2018 and $661 million the following year.
The Starlink program completed a milestone in 2019, when SpaceX launched the first batch of operational Starlink satellites in May of that year.
The company ended the year with cash and cash equivalents of $868 million for 2018 and $990 million for 2019.
The company launches its Starlink satellites with its own rocket, its Falcon 9 workhorse, which means it can launch the space-based internet satellites at unprecedented rates.
Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg ultimately blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for the failure of his short-form video app, but maybe it was just too soon.
In the first quarter of 2024, 66 short drama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox pulled in record revenue of $146 million in global consumer spending.
In March 2024 alone, consumers spent $65 million on short drama apps, a 10,500% increase from the $619,000 spent in March 2023.
In Q1 2024, short drama apps were installed nearly 37 million times, up 992% from 3.4 million in Q1 2023.
Short drama apps claimed a 6.7% share of the total across all three categories combined, up from 0.15% a year ago.
Bot creators now have a new way to make money with Poe, the Quora-owned AI chatbot platform.
The addition follows an earlier October 2023 of a revenue-sharing program that would give bot creators a cut of the earnings when their users subscribed to Poe’s premium product.
Today we’re introducing a new way for model developers and bot creators to generate revenue on @poe_platform: price per message!
The offering is currently available to U.S. bot creators only but will expand globally in the future.
Alongside the per-message revenue model, Poe also launched an enhanced analytics dashboard that displays average earnings for creators’ bots across paywalls, subscriptions, and messages.
Model N, a platform used by companies such as Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and AMD to automate decisions related to pricing, incentives, and compliance, is going private in a $1.25 billion deal.
Vista Equity Partners is doling out $30 per share in the all-cash transaction, representing a 12% premium on Friday’s closing price, and 16% on its 30-day average.
Founded in 1999, Model N’s software integrates with various data sources and internal systems to help companies analyze trends, pricing efficacy, market demand, and more.
The platform is typically used in industries such as pharmaceuticals and life sciences, where there may be complex pricing structures, and where regulatory or market changes can impact business.
However, its valuation has generally hovered below the $1 billion market for the past six months, sparking Vista Equity Partners into action today.
Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its inception.
This funding round comes as a bit of a surprise as large rounds have been few and far between in France.
Before Pigment, Crespo worked for VC firm Index Ventures and Google.
We’ve developed a lot of modules that enable us to serve HR teams, supply chain teams and sales teams,” Crespo said.
Like many software companies, Pigment has also added AI features.
Rubrik, a data cybersecurity company that raised more than a half-billion dollars while private, filed to go public after the bell on Monday.
As a private-market company, Rubrik last raised a lettered round in 2019 when it closed $261 million at a $3.6 billion post-money valuation, according to Crunchbase data.
However, subscription revenue grew 40% over the same period, rising from $385.3 million to $537.9 million.
The growth in its subscription revenue, and not its legacy revenues, is the engine that could propel Rubrik to a successful IPO.
A Silicon Valley storyRubrik’s potential IPO could prove a coup for Lightspeed Venture Partners, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital shop.
