Mind the Gap Startup News - Global

Last week in startups - global

This week’s startup scene was definitely in its top shape. We are talking about a total of 397 funding rounds that’s hundred more than last week, $31.2 billion total funding which is almost 5 times last week, 153 acquisitions recorded, and a transaction of a total acquisition amount of $9.3 billion. That being said, let’s dive right into the highlights.

Feather, a New York-based company that offers contemporary, higher-end furniture on a subscription basis raised $12.5 million in a Series A round led by Spark Capital. Prior seed investors Fuel Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, PJC, Kleiner Perkins, and Y Combinator followed on in the round, according to Crunchbase.

Algorithmia raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners. Algorithmia, based in Seattle, is building infrastructure for the final step of the machine learning workflow: integrating a predictive model into a production code environment. Basically, what the company calls its “AI Layer” is a software environment that automatically produces a model-specific API the data scientist can call.

DNA Script has raised $38.5 million in new financing to commercialize a process that it claims is the first big leap forward in manufacturing genetic material. DNA Script is focused on the manufacturing of synthetic DNA using a proprietary template-free enzymatic technology. The company aims at accelerating innovation in life science and technology through rapid, affordable and high quality DNA synthesis.
The company said the money would be used to accelerate the development of its first products and establish a presence in the United States.

Trendy luggage brand - Away, packs on $100 million funding and rolls past a valuation of $1.4 billion. The capital will be used to build additional brick-and-mortar stores, as well as add to Away’s portfolio of merchandise with an eye toward expanding into generic travel gear. To date, Away has sold more than 1 million suitcases.

Moving on to acquisitions,

HP enterprise announced it was buying Cray (a global supercomputer leader) for $1.3 billion, giving it access to the company’s high-performance computing portfolio, and perhaps a foothold into quantum computing in the future.

VMware announced today that it’s acquiring Bitnami, the package application company that was a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2013 class. The companies didn’t share the purchase price. The company can now deliver more than 130 popular software packages in a variety of formats, such as Docker containers or virtual machine, an approach that should be attractive for VMware as it makes its transformation to be more of a cloud services company.

Sisense announced today that it has acquired Periscope Data to create what it is calling a complete data science and analytics platform for customers. The companies did not disclose the purchase price. Sisense, which has raised $174 million, tends to serve business intelligence requirements either for internal use or externally with customers. Periscope, which has raised more than $34 million, looks at the data science end of the business.

What else caught our eye last week?

Fiverr files to go public, reports revenue of $75.5M and a net loss of $36.1M for 2018

Freelance marketplace Fiverr has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Their mission is to change how the world works together. They started with the simple idea that people should be able to buy and sell digital services in the same fashion as physical goods on an e-commerce platform. On that basis, they set out to design a digital marketplace that is built with a comprehensive services catalog and an efficient search, find and order process that mirrors a typical e-commerce transaction.
Next, let’s take a peek at the Revenue based finance (RBF) model that’s on the rise.
What exactly is RBF you ask? It’s a relatively new form of funding for tech companies that are posting monthly recurring revenue. Here’s how Lighter Capital, which completed 500 RBF deals in 2018, explains it: “It’s an alternative funding model that mixes some aspects of debt and equity. Most RBF is technically structured as a loan. However, RBF investors’ returns are tied directly to the startup’s performance, which is more like equity.”