SoftBank will spin off its Latin America fund into an independent investment entity called Upload Ventures. The new vehicle will be outfitted to deploy around $100M per year throughout the region. More: - The announcement comes in the wake of a larger reorganization following SoftBank COO Marcelo Claure’s resignation.
- Claure reportedly advocated for Upload and clashed with leadership over his position, resulting in CEO Masayoshi Son denying that there were even talks about the idea.
- The early-stage companies that received investment from the Latin America fund will be migrated to Upload, in addition to SoftBank Latin America Fund’s 12-person team.
- Managing Partners Rodrigo Baer, Marco Camhaji, and Norberto Giangrande created Upload. Camhaji and Giangrande were specifically brought in to boost the Latin America fund’s early-stage strategy.
- Claure once claimed that the fund had placed bets on two-thirds of the nearly 24 unicorns currently operating in the region.
- That includes Abstra, Arch, Birdie, BotCity, Digibee, D-Uma, Indaband, Medway, Neivor, Nilo, Salu, and Worc, among others.
- He also told TechCrunch that, by 2023, SoftBank would invest close to $30B in the region per year.
The wider lens: - Spinning out a dedicated fund is rare; the decision could be tied to the difficult year SoftBank as a whole is having.
- With the new arrangement, Upload Ventures can add money from new investors to its balance sheet and even build out a separate brand from its oft-controversial main backer.
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 Defying trends, total European VC investment actually grew 4% QoQ to reach $29.8B in Q1’22. That figure is the second-highest sum to date, behind only the $37.6B in capital deployed in Q2’21, and was up 21% YoY. More: - The growth in European funding in the last two years has been astounding. As recently as 2020, funding on the continent was between $10B and $13B. It jumped to over $24B in Q1’21.
- The biggest gains come from late-stage funding, which last quarter alone brought in $18.5B.
- That figure is actually only the third-highest quarterly late-stage haul for Europe. Directly after the $26.8B of late-stage capital distributed in Q2’21, Q3’21 saw $19B deployed.
- Early-stage funding was also up, but seed/angel-stage funding was down and has moreover displayed a downward trend in the number of funding rounds.
- The U.K. still makes up a plurality of European funding, coming in at just below 50%. It was followed by Germany and France.
- After a long period of expansion, German funding contracted significantly last quarter, while French funding held its level from the previous quarter.
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Voyager Innovations, the parent company of Philippine financial services app PayMaya and neobank Maya Bank, raised $210M. The fresh funding valued the company at $1.2B and was led by SIG Venture Capital. More: - Participation in the round came from EDBI, First Pacific Company, PLDT, KKR, Tencent, International Finance Corporation, IFC Emerging Asia Fund, and IFC Financial Institutions Growth Fund.
- The fresh capital injection comes almost a year after Voyager’s last $167M round in July 2021.
- At that time, it was just preparing to launch its neobank services, which it will expand upon with the latest influx.
- Its Maya Bank services, including savings and credit products, are offered via its PayMaya app, which has over 47 million registered users.
- Maya Bank secured one of six digital banking licenses from the country’s banking authority in Sept. 2021 and started pilot testing Maya Bank in March of the next year.
Some context: - The funding comes just a week after the Philippine digitization platform for small businesses GrowSari raised $77.5M Series C from International Finance Corporation, KKR, Wavemaker Partners, and Temasek’s Pavilion Capital.
- Nearby Indonesia yesterday saw its tech champion GoTo reach a $32B valuation following its domestic IPO after raising 13% during its first day of trading.
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Three VC firms — Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz, and Union Square Ventures — have been named in a lawsuit against crypto token exchange Uniswap. The firms are accused not only of having stakes in the company but a deep involvement in its allegedly unregistered exchange and brokerage. More: - The plaintiff, a Uniswap user, asserts that the platform knowingly tolerates various fraudulent practices.
- These include rug pulls, i.e., a new issuer places a new token into a liquidity pool, then prematurely withdraws their coins, or pump and dump schemes, where issuers send new tokens to themselves, tout them on social media, and quickly dump their holdings.
- The VCs, the lawsuit claims, are liable for this behavior due to their hands-on approach to their investments.
- They are accused of being intimately involved with the development of Uniswap’s platform, which turns a blind eye to fraud because of the profits it generates through transaction fees for the platform.
The takeaway: - Because of increasing capital supplies and high competition for stakes in top companies, VCs are effectively required to offer more than just funds in order to land good positions.
- The hands-on approach, a value-add proposition, will leave them open to liability for the behavior of companies they get in bed with.
- Uniswap has denied the lawsuit’s merit, but whether a court sees it that way is a different story.
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 Today’s Funding 💸 Biotech/Health - Medfin (Bengaluru, India), platform to health patients navigate care systems: $15M B food Arka Nxt, HealthXCapital, Blume Ventures, Axilor Ventures, Sony, Kotak Investments.
- GripAble (London, U.K.), rehabilitation programs for people with neurological and musculoskeletal conditions: $11M A led by IP Group, Parkwalk.
- Forge Health (White Plains, N.Y.), behavioral healthcare provider: $11M led by HC9 Ventures.
- DrugBank (Edmonton, Canada), drug knowledge platform: ...
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Quick Hits - B2B businesses are switching to e-commerce. Now, it’s your turn. Learn three persuasive approaches that communicate the value of digital to decision-makers.*
- Thoma Bravo will acquire Texas-based cybersecurity outfit Sailpoint for $6.9B. The PE giant will pay $65.25 a share, a 48% premium on the company’s volume-weighted average trading price over the past 90-days.
- LionBird, closed a third fund to invest in pre-scale digital health companies: $85M.
- Ampere Computing, an Oracle-backed server processor startup, filed for an IPO. The company raised $426M. Reports recently claimed that talks between SoftBank and Oracle would have valued Ampere at $8B.
- GrubMarket, a San Franciscan company operating a food supply chain, acquired Regatta Tropicals, a provider of high-quality fruits, for an undisclosed sum.
- Three of VC’s icons — Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel — have become ever more active and incendiary online, reports Bloomberg.
- Meituan, the Chinese delivery giant, has cut 20% of employees in its core business.
*This is a sponsored post.
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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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