SoftBank is reportedly looking into an IPO for semiconductor company Arm as acquisition talks with Nvidia stall. Sources claim that they do not expect the $40B deal to close in the face of regulatory resistance in multiple countries. Nvidia appears to be the party more willing to let the agreement die. More: - After being announced in Sept. 2020, the tie-up was once expected to be the largest in the semiconductor space. A hurdle came in the form of resistance from Arm’s own customers, who feared losing access to the company’s essential technology if Nvidia took control.
- The group includes Qualcomm, Microsoft, Intel, and Amazon.
- The U.S. FTC also sued to block the deal citing antitrust reasons. Nvidia is already the world’s second-largest chipmaker.
- China has signaled that it, too, would throw up roadblocks if the deal made it past other countries’ bureaucracies.
- Facing bad odds, certain factions within SoftBank still want to let the talks continue, as the all-stock deal has become more valuable.
- The hypothetical IPO would not be able to generate nearly the same return for investors compared with the proposed deal.
- Nvidia’s share price nearly doubled following the deal’s announcement.
- The stock dropped 5.6% to $220.70 in New York following the latest report leaking.
Zoom Out: - The deal falling apart would not be without precedent: Qualcomm pulled the plug on its $44B takeover of NXP Semiconductors in 2018 after nearly two years of regulatory hurdles.
- Whether the outcome of this case has a larger effect on the M&A landscape remains to be seen.
- On the one hand, Arm’s technology is uniquely positioned in the tech ecosystem, meaning that the extent of resistance to its sale might not be replicable in other cases.
- On the other hand, governments have, in general, started looking more deeply into tech mergers, and this could be an omen of what is to come for further deals.
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São Paulo-based fintech startup Creditas brought its total funding raised to date to $829M. The $260M funding round came from both new and existing investors and valued the company at $4.6B. More: - Some of the usual suspects in LatAm’s investment scene were involved in the latest round.
- Fidelity and Greentrail Capital were among the new investors, while existing backers QED Investors, Sweden’s VEF, and Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank also joined.
- Creditas provides insurance in addition to secured consumer loans. It also runs an online used-car sales platform.
- Its revenue more than doubled in the first nine months of 2021 to around $100M (R$551.4M), while its losses deepened to nearly $40M (R$215.8M) during the same period.
- Sergio Furio, CEO and co-founder, hails from Spain and has pushed his company beyond Brazil into Mexico. He offered no comment as to whether his firm would follow Brazilian fintech champion NuBank’s lead and enter public markets anytime soon.
Reminder: - Yesterday we took a look at LatAm’s explosive year for funding in 2021. Of the $15.3B invested across the content, nearly 40% was funneled to fintech companies.
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 As big PE investors continue their push into startup investing, their appetite for mega-funds ($5B+) is becoming voracious. According to PitchBook data, 13 such funds were raised in the U.S. with a total capital commitment of $143.4B. That figure is second only to 2019’s $144.5B. More: - Many fund managers report greater ease in their fundraising efforts compared with past years. That has driven the average time between funds down from nearly five years in 2011 to just three in 2021.
- The reasons for this are heightened deal pace, meaning more capital getting called down more quickly, faster distributions, and LPs’ increased willingness to recycle funds into the next vehicle.
- While the majority of the mega-funds are coming from established players, smaller outfits such as Summit Partners, Clearlake, and Veritas have hit the $5B mark relatively early in their lifespans.
- Tech-focused investors including Silver Lake, Management, Thoma Bravo, and Vista Equity Partners have scaled and now raise some of the largest funds in the global buyout sphere. All three have $20B+ vehicles at their disposal.
- Going hand in hand with the growth in mega-funds is a decline of funds of less than $100M (see above).
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Dremio, an operator of a data lakehouse platform, raised $160M Series E led by Adams Street Partners. Participation came from return investor Sapphire Ventures, alongside Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Cisco Investments. More: - Sapphire Ventures led Dremio’s $135M Series D last year, which pushed the company above the $1B valuation mark. The latest infusion doubled that figure.
- CEO Billy Bosworth joined the company two years ago after eight years heading DataStax, a NoSQL competitor.
- Dremio, on the other hand, operates within the SQL framework, allowing multiple analysts to access the same dataset simultaneously without delays in their response times.
- That approach classifies Dremio’s technology as a lake house, as opposed to the previous generation of data tech in the form of data lakes and data warehouses.
- Popularized by competitor Databricks, lake houses radically expand the enterprise functionality of data, which ties in well with the new desire of effectively every CEO to run a data-driven company.
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 Today's Funding 💸 Adtech/Martech - Soona (Denver, Colo.), virtual content creation platform for e-commerce: $35M B led by Bain Capital Ventures, participation from Union Square Ventures, Matchstick Ventures, Starting Line Ventures, et al.
Agtech - Greenlabs (Seoul, South Korea), indoor growing platform: $140M C from BRV Capital Management, Skylake Incuvest & Co., SK Square.
- The Green Coffee (Medellin, Colombia), coffee farming platform:...
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- Instant delivery startup GoPuff has reportedly started to talk to Goldman Sachs about a $15B IPO in the second half of this year. The news comes on the heels of the company’s $1.5B pre-IPO round.
- Of the 586 new entrants in 2021 to the global unicorn herd, 18% were raising funds not at the late stage but earlier in their careers. This shows how quickly the early-stage funding rounds have grown in size.
- Infravia Capital Partners, a French PE outfit, closed on $565.8M (€501M) for its latest growth equity fund. The fund will target European B2B tech scale-ups.
- Deloitte, the world’s largest consulting agency, has raised a $150M venture fund to back early-stage Canadian companies. Companies must have at least $1M in ARR to qualify for the firm’s investments, which will come in between $2M and $10M.
- Decasonic, a Web3-focused investing outfit hailing from Chicago, closed its maiden fund at $48.8M.
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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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