Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association.
Sonya Petcavich, the founder of cat-sitting app Meowtel, thinks that cats, and cat people, deserve more.
“Rover had been around for a few years, and Wag was picking up steam, but they were so dog focused.
Meowtel has made it to this point raising just under $1 million in venture capital.
ImpriMed, a dog oncology startup, raised $23 million in November, and Fi, a smart dog collar, has raised more than $40 million in venture capital.
But it’s unlikely that startups’ fundraising slog will become much easier soon, mostly because of venture capitalists’ own capital-gathering challenges.
In Q1, U.S. VC funds raised only $9.3 billion, according to PitchBook data.
At this pace, VC fundraising will end 2024 at just above $37 billion, the lowest capital raised since 2013 and a 54% decline from last year.
PitchBook estimates that dry powder, the amount of capital VCs still have to invest from previous funds, remains high.
“One low fundraising quarter is not going to make or break the future of VC,” said Kyle Stanford, lead venture capital analyst at PitchBook.
The UK threw a splashy event in New York this week to woo more American VCs Welcome to the new UK: the Unicorn KingdomA 3-D hologram, dubbed the Ever-Changing Statue, will be on display at the Rise by Barclays workspace in New York until April 4.
Dealroom data shows that UK startups raised $31 billion in venture capital in 2022 and $41 billion in 2021.
It’s also still more than the $18 billion the UK raised in 2019 and the $12 billion raised in 2018.
Between 2009 and 2019, only 38 UK Black founders raised venture capital funding—that number now stands at 80, according to an updated report by Extend Ventures.
“The UK tech ecosystem has made significant strides, but work remains to reach the scale and influence of Silicon Valley,” Taylor told TechCrunch.
1991 Ventures is the brainchild of Ukrainian brothers Denis and Viktor Gursky, who are better known for running incubation and accelerator programs inside Ukraine.
The Gursky brothers previously backed over 200 startups between 2016 and 2024, via their incubator Social Boost and their 1991 Accelerator.
Startups backed to date include LegalTech startup AXDRAFT; European toll payment app eTolls; and cybersecurity company Osavul.
Finally, TA Ventures is perhaps the best known and most active Ukrainian VC internationally, headed up by the almost-ubiquitous Viktoriya Tigipko.
Of course, many of the tech companies Ukraine will produce in the forthcoming years are likely to be either ‘dual-use’ or related to defence.
Crafting the perfect venture capital pitch is so simple that there’s an industry of consultants to help founders get their decks in order.
TechCrunch has a long-running series of Pitch Deck Teardowns to help founders, and you can find an infinite number of Twitter threads on the subject.
Enter Wing Venture Capital’s Sara Choi, who will give a talk at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 this April and take audience questions on how to pitch.
After all, when venture capital is harder to raise than it has been in years, nailing the pitch is critical for today’s early-stage founders.
Early Stage 2024 is just around the corner, so book your pass here before March 29 and save $200.
The big cloud vendors have all already lined up with other chatbot partners: Microsoft with OpenAI, Google and Amazon with Anthropic; Cohere picking up assorted others like Oracle and Salesforce.
If and when Inflection ever perfected Pi on its enormous AI infrastructure, the race looked to be already lost.
Despite close ties with OpenAI, Microsoft also has many reasons to be needing a backup for it’s all-important AI gambit.
There are so many red flags with OpenAI that Microsoft is wise to wean its dependence.
Then again, just like Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, we wonder if regulators will also have something to say about this deal.
VCs double down on fintech Coast, which aims to be the Brex for ‘real-world’ industriesThe expense management arena is a crowded one, with well-funded players such as Brex, Ramp and Navan all clamoring for market share.
While Coast declined to divulge hard revenue figures, CEO Simon told TechCrunch that it saw about 550% increase in annualized revenue and payment volume growth in 2023.
That growth prompted its existing investors to double down on the company, while attracting a new backer as well.
Today, Coast is announcing that it has raised an additional $25 million in venture capital and $67 million in debt financing.
Sign up for TechCrunch Fintech here.
Late-stage VCs may be preventing their startups from going public in 2024 Founders might have unintentionally given their VCs too much power to block an IPOWhile some investors are loudly bemoaning that the IPO window can’t stay shut forever, other VCs themselves are actually part of the problem.
It’s a common term for late-stage investors agreeing to pay higher prices for their stake to boost a startup’s valuation.
When late-stage startups raised at sky-high valuations in 2021 they may not have realized how much power they were giving their late-stage investors if the market cooled, which it did.
“People confuse up and to the right, with a god-given right,” Hinkle said.
He added that there is always a lot more friction between investors and startups about the decision to IPO than investors would like to admit.
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.”
What’s the Deel with Remofirst, and why are VCs playing musical chairs?
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Friday episode, in which we dig through the most critical stories and themes from the week.
Today on the pod, Mary Ann and Alex dug into a whole mess of news, including:We have an interview coming out tomorrow that we’re stoked about, and will be back on Monday.
