Justworks postponed its IPO, citing poor market conditions. The enterprise SaaS company was expected to set its share price range at $29 to $32, which would have raised up to $224M and valued it at around $2B at the top of its range. More: - Justworks provides a central platform for SMEs to access benefits, payroll, human resources, and compliance support. It counts its clients at 8,000 across the country.
- Its revenue came in at $982.7M in the fiscal year ending in Q2’21, up from $742.4M for the previous period in 2020. It generated a gross profit of $106.1M and $77.1M, respectively, both years.
- Another SaaS company, Trajector, which provides a benefits software platform, canceled its planned offering last week.
The bigger picture: - Tech stocks are being rocked by higher interest rates and investors’ bullish views on Mainstreet U.S. stocks.
- The Nasdaq-100 Technology Sector Index is down 4.3% so far this year. By comparison, the S&P 500 is down 0.9%.
- However, last year’s enterprise SaaS public market debuts have fared comparatively well:
- Shares of 11 enterprise software stocks that debuted via traditional IPO last year were trading up 12% since Friday’s close, reported The Information.
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Checkout.com, the London-based payments platform geared toward large corporations, raised $1B at a $40B valuation. The main investors in the Series D round included Altimeter, Dragoneer, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Insight Partners, the Qatar Investment Authority, Tiger Global, the Oxford Endowment Fund, and one other. More: - The round also saw participation from existing investors Blossom Capital, Coatue Management, DST Global, Endeavor Catalyst, and Ribbit Capital.
- Thanks to its eye-watering valuation, Checkout became the U.K.’s most valuable tech company. It only traded 2.5% of its shares in exchange for the funding.
- One year before this funding round, the company raised $450M Series C at a $15B valuation.
- Checkout lets companies process payments directly on their site or app. Users can also rely on hosted payment pages, create payment links, etc.
- TikTok, Klarna, Qonto, Revolut, WorldRemit, MoneyGram, Netflix, Farfetch, Grab, NetEase, Pizza Hut, and Shein are all counted among its clients.
- The company processed hundreds of billions of dollars in payments in 2021.
- Without giving specific figures, it claims to have tripled its transaction volume for the third year in a row, and it now has 1,700 employees across 19 countries.
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Despite frequently antagonistic reception by the rest of society, the power law of venture capital has repeatedly shown its effectiveness: a small minority of investments produce most of the returns. That is the underlying message of Sebastian Mallaby’s sweeping new history of VC, The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption. More: - The book’s thrust comes from its attempt to shift attention away from the ubiquitously famous founders — Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg — to those investors who backed them.
- The stamp of approval from firms like Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and others enabled high-risk businesses to gain a degree of respectability and change the world as we know it through technology.
- The guiding question of the book is whether VCs created the success of tech companies or merely showed up at the right time for it.
- To answer it, Mallaby traces the arc of strategy that went from VCs offering heavy advice to founders to eventually letting them do things their way.
- While this eventually resulted in the hubris of Uber and WeWork, the ability of VCs to peek behind the doubts has led them as a group, as Mallaby writes, to have a positive effect on economies and societies.
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Eight years after exiting stealth mode, AIOps platform BigPanda has raised $190M at a $1.2B valuation. The company’s latest round was led by Advent International and brought its total raised to $317M. More: - BigPanda’s main proposition is to convert huge volumes of IT data into actionable insights and automate incident management, enabling IT operations to be proactive in their responses.
- Assaf Resnick, co-founder and CEO, said the company’s market has expanded dramatically since the pandemic accelerated the digital transformation and ratcheted the pace of automated workflow beyond what people can manage.
- The decision to take on so much capital was based on the increased pace.
- Sales in 2021 grew by 155%. Q4’21 brought in a record number of new customers by a factor of two compared with 2019.
- Its YoY increase in deals valued at over $1M grew by a factor of five.
- Still, Resnick says that it has only accessed 1% of the total market with its current clients.
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 Today's Funding 💸 Adtech/Martech - Superchat (Berlin, Germany), all-in-one messaging platform for SMEs to communicate with customers: $15.6M A led by Blossom Capital, participation from 468 Capital.
AR/VR - AmazeVR (Los Angeles, Calif.), VR concert platform: $15M Bridge from Partners Investment, Smilegate Investment, Quantum Ventures Korea, ABC Partners, Everrich Group, et al.
Biotech/Health - SEBA Bank (Switzerland), digital asset banking platform:...
Want to read about all of today's funding in one place? The funding roundup is only available to free users on Mondays and Fridays. Upgrade to Inside VC Premium for either $10/month, or $100 billed annually, to receive the full list in every issue! For a limited time, we are offering a 14-day free trial. Click here to sign up! | | | |
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- Jitterbit, an API transformation company, acquired PrimeApps, a Turkey-based low-code application development service, for an undisclosed sum.
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- App Annie reports that global app spending reached $170B in 2021, up 19% YoY. Growth in downloads is being driven largely by emerging markets like India, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Egypt.
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 |  | Inside VC's writer/curator Stephen currently lives in Berlin and is pursuing a Master's degree in philosophy. He otherwise spends his time trying his hand at recipes from India and Southeast Asia, escaping it all at the kickboxing gym, and offending aural sensibilities with his band. |  | | Editor | Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 Ford. | |
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