The Road Ahead
Theme of the Week
Liquidity is hard to come by for tech / fintech as VC fundraising continued to slow in Q1’23, and investment activity continued to trend towards a focus on earlier-stage companies.
Market Insights
VC funding to Series A startups in the US is expected to decline for the sixth consecutive quarter and be the lowest quarterly total in the last two years, come the end of Q1 2023. This quarter, Series A companies have brought in $4.45 billion—with the majority of that funding going towards biotech startups, and the least going towards Web3 and consumer lending startups. (Pipe Newsletter)
VC fundraising screeches to a halt in Q1 (Pitchbook)
Venture focus has moved to the early stages (LinkedIn – Peter Walker)
Fintech IPO index: percentage return since the IPO (LinkedIn – Marcel van Oost)
Editorials
US bank lending slumps by most on record in final weeks of March (Bloomberg)
Americans’ access to credit is at its toughest level in nearly a decade (Reuters)
Inside Stifel’s plans to win over the VC market after SVB’s collapse (Pitchbook)
Private credit funds, banks will aggressively push to fill SVB’s role (Crunchbase)
Cash dries up for VC newcomers (The Information)
VC Fundraises
Former Disney exec Kevin Mayer looks to double VC fund size to $1 billion (The Information)
Kaszek earmarks nearly $1B in new funds for Latin American startups (Forbes)
Early-stage VC Fuel Venture Capital plans to raise $300M (FN)
Theory Ventures, led by Tomasz Tunguz, raises first fund of $230M (LinkedIn – Tomasz Tunguz)
In a slowing market, venture investor Canaan still closes $850M across two new funds (TechCrunch)
Lux Capital targeting $1B for Lux Ventures VIII, ditches opportunity fund (TechCrunch)
Eclipse eclipses previous fundraises with a whooping $1.23 billion across two new funds (TechCrunch)
VC Insights
Social Capital 2022 Annual Letter (Chamath Palihapitiya)
State of Fintech (FT Partners)
Building the next decade of consumer finance (JC Bahr-de Stefano)
Notable Capital Raises
Covariant’s robotic picking AI nabs another $75M (TechCrunch)
Forme Financial launches out of beta as Earned to help physicians manage wealth (TechCrunch)
Spring Free EV raises $31M to drive electrification of commercial fleets nationwide (Newswire)