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KP19, the 19th fund for the firm, will focus on early-stage investments in consumer, enterprise, financial technology, health care and hartech companies, according to a statement from Kleiner Perkins.

KPCB, which has backed companies like and , said it would go back to focusing on early-stage investments when it announced the closing of its last fund last year.

About 35 percent of its KP18 investments were seed series, 53 percent were Series A rounds and 12 percent were Series B. Enterprise startups made up 43 percent of KP18鈥檚 investments, with the firm investing in 15 enterprise companies. Deep tech took second place with 24 percent of KP18鈥檚 investments, or eight companies.

KP19 will be 鈥渕ore of the same,鈥� according to the firm.

鈥淚t’s the same team, with the same strategy, investing in the same sectors at the earliest stages,鈥� KPCB said in a statement.

Additionally, Annie Case, Monica Desai Weiss and Josh Coyne were promoted to principals at the firm. Case will focus on consumer and health care, Weiss will lead investments in fintech and consumer, and Coyne will focus on enterprise and fintech.

, and are the general partners listed on for KP19. , who was listed as a GP on KP18, closed last year, is not listed as a general partner on this latest fund.

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At a certain level of computational complexity, regular central processing units don’t cut it. They’ll do the math just fine, but they’ll take a long time to do it. Graphics cards were designed for massively parallel computing operations, like rendering and driving the multiplying number of pixels on our ever-denser visual displays; and it just so happens that that architecture is well-suited to doing machine learning math quickly.

But there are plenty of applications where running a bunch of graphics processing units (GPU) in a data center is not practical. Take an autonomous vehicle for example: It doesn’t make sense to pipe all the data streaming off the onboard cameras and LIDAR sensors up to a cloud service, wait for it to process, and then get piped back into a car’s onboard computer. At 60 miles and hour, that kind of latency could be lethal.

As the world becomes more data-driven and our tech uses inference to be more responsive, a new generation of computer chips is required to make all the math-magic happen. At a certain scale of computational complexity, or in situations where electrical consumption has to be kept to a minimum, GPUs don’t cut it either.

Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, is one of several companies vying for its spot in the competitive market for specialized artificial intelligence chips built for computing on the edge: automotive applications, mobile devices, AI-augmented home devices and industrial use cases.

Today the company announced that it’s raised $60 million in Series B funding. The round was led by existing backers but saw participation from new strategic investors including the venture arm of robotics and automation company , Japanese IT conglomerate and London-based VC .

The company says that its new funding will “bolster the ongoing global rollout of its breakthrough Hailo-8 Deep Learning chip and to reach new markets and industries worldwide.”

Hailo says its chip is capable of up to 26 trillion operations per second while drawing less than 5 watts at full utilization. supports popular machine learning frameworks like and and meets several compliance standards for automotive applications.

According to the company, the chip’s “Structure-Defined Dataflow Architecture translates into higher performance, lower power, and minimal latency, enabling more privacy and better performance for smart devices operating at the edge, including partially autonomous vehicles, smart cameras, smartphones, drones and AR/VR platforms.”

“This immense vote of confidence from our new strategic and financial investors, along with existing ones, is a testimony to our breakthrough innovation and market potential,鈥� said , CEO and co-founder of Hailo. 鈥淭he new funding will help us expedite the deployment of new levels of edge computing capabilities in smart devices and intelligent industries around the world, including areas such as mobility, smart cities, industrial automation, smart retail and beyond.鈥�

Since its inception in February 2017, the company has raised $88 million in total funding, inclusive of the round announced today. In January 2019, the company closed led by Chinese venture firm . No additional details about the company’s revenue or valuation was disclosed.

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At the time of filing, no capital has yet been raised; however, it bears mentioning that it’s common for venture investors to file their Form D immediately prior to calling down at least some pre-committed capital from limited partners.

Precursor Ventures is managed by , the firm’s sole general partner. Prior to starting his own firm, Hudson served in a variety of operating roles, including starting a couple of companies. Hudson cut his teeth as a venture investor at (formerly known as SoftTech VC) where he served in alternating venture partner and partner roles over his more than eight years with the firm.

Hudson, one of the all-too-few black general partners operating in venture today, is also on the teaching team for Entrepreneurship from Diverse Perspectives, a course at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

The firm’s investment team consists of and , two black women with extensive startup and financial management experience. , an ex-Googler with prior founding experience, is working on a new financial technology venture as an EIR at the firm.

If fully raised, Fund III will be the firm’s largest yet. Precursor Ventures closed out in February 2019, nearly one year and four months after taking down its first LP commitments.

Precursor raised a little more than $15 million for its first fund, which closed out in late 2016.

Since the firm’s formation in October 2015, Precursor has primarily focused its investment dollars on seed and pre-seed deals. On its website, Precursor Ventures that it’s committed to investing in companies’ first institutional rounds, typically committing between $100,000 and $250,000 to that first round, with reserves for follow-on investment.

The firm adds that it is “committed to investing in founders who represent a wide variety of backgrounds in terms of gender, race, background, academic experience and life circumstances.”

The firm’s recent investments include organization management software company , childcare-as-a-benefit company , and AI-enabled radiology reporting software company .

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Valuations and other key financial metrics were not publicly disclosed by the company. However, in its announcement, Netlify did say that it’s tripled its customer base (to 800,000 users) and revenue year over year. The company says that 8 percent of internet users visit a Netlify-powered site each month.

In a public statement, Netlify’s co-founder and CEO said “We started Netlify with the mission to empower developers and change the way the web is built. The growing number of developers signing onto Netlify daily and the latest investment in our business has validated that vision. With this funding we鈥檙e full-speed ahead delivering new features, investing in our enterprise-grade infrastructure and growing our team, to help more developers and businesses take advantage of the JAMstack.鈥�

What is the JAMstack? It’s a web development architecture co-developed by Biilmann. The acronym stands for JavaScript, APIs and prebuilt Markup. Dynamic functionality is handled by client-side JavaScript; server-side operations get abstracted into composable APIs which can be called over HTTPS via JavaScript; and sites are served as static HTML which can either be written natively or be generated from source files written in Markdown format using a static site generator.2

The principal benefits the JAMstack offers to web developers is that sites can be served exclusively over a content delivery network (CDN), which improves scalability. Because a project’s entire codebase lives in a version control system like Git, and each deployment represents a snapshot of the entire site, developers are able to trace version histories and ensure consistency across an entire live site.

Netlify builds software tools that help with different aspects of JAMstack development. is a local application server developers can use for building and testing their websites prior to production deployment. is a Git workflow for web development. is Netlify’s “application delivery network” that offers features some traditional CDNs don’t.

“To enable more use cases at scale in 2020, we鈥檙e investing in new features catering to our enterprise customers, including more control and better collaboration for larger teams. We look forward to enabling the JAMstack at scale with the services they need as they look to migrate major parts of their web infrastructure to Netlify,” said co-founders Chris Bach and Matt Biilmann in about the round.

The company offers for tinkerers and small teams, but with this new funding the company is intent to scale out its . These include more processing power on the build side, higher speed on the deployment side, and other client services like security auditing and premium support.

鈥淣etlify and the JAMstack are fundamentally changing how websites and web applications are built. The large and growing community of developers building on the JAMstack is testament to the movement that Matt and Chris and the team are spearheading, and to the unified platform they鈥檝e built,” said Laura Yao of EQT Ventures.

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Today, though, it’s making waves for different reasons. Stock markets around the world roil and churn as investors grapple with the implications of a particularly virulent and aggressive respiratory virus formally known as SARS-CoV-2, which originated in China but is now rippling across the planet.

This is the sort of moment some risk-loving swing traders live for, the sort of moment others dread, the sort of moment where some people want to watch their stocks and make some money moves. On Monday, , 10.8 billion shares traded hands, 50 percent higher than the 50-day moving average.

None of those shares were traded on Robinhood, because Robinhood has been in the midst of a prolonged service outage that stretched into a second day.

On Tuesday morning, stated that it was experiencing a system-wide outage affecting all facets of its service except for market data and dividends. During this time, I attempted to sign up for a Robinhood account for testing purposes. I succeeded in entering my information and creating the account, but was faced with a series of error messages when I tried to hook up my bank account and perform other functions on the company’s mobile application.

As of about 11 AM Central Time on Tuesday, Robinhood’s status page indicates that all systems are operational with the exception of its email support system, which had been experiencing reliability issues since Monday morning.

The company said it will work with customers “on a case-by-case basis” and possibly offer compensation or other forms of restitution to people whose trading accounts were affected by the company’s system outage.

Robinhood was one of several companies rumored to seek IPOs in 2020. With the reputational damage and the as-yet unknown costs stemming from its early March outage, its path to public markets now looks decidedly more uphill.

According to 小蓝视频色情网页版 data, Robinhood has raised from investors including , , and .

Robinhood was valued at $7.6 billion in its Series E round, which netted the company $373 million over two tranches. 小蓝视频色情网页版 News covered the first $323 million close in late July 2019, and the company to extend its Series E round at the end of October 2019.

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Investors in the round include , , SMiT, , Chariot Gold Limited, and .

Sensel is in the touch interface business. Its PressureGrid sensor technology can be integrated into touchscreen displays and other touch-enabled surfaces.

The company says its technology offers two functions: high accuracy position reporting and force sensing capable of detecting between 1 gram and 5 kilograms of pressure for each contact point. Sensel said in its announcement that its technology responds to “any object” and can work underwater or if the user is wearing heavy gloves. Its sensor layer is flexible and can be integrated into folding displays, or “behind a flexible AMOLED display, a non-display touchpad, steering wheel, or any surface area where a high-resolution force sensing experience is desired.”

, managing director at SIG, said, “We believe Sensel鈥檚 high-resolution and cost-effective touch sensing solution will create a new era of innovations in human machine interfaces across industries, from gaming, to robotics, industrial machinery and medical equipment. SIG has witnessed not only the exciting development of Sensel technology, but also progress in the team鈥檚 management and maturity over the past three years. We are glad to join the other investors as Sensel enters a new phase of its business.”

Sensel intends to use its fresh funding to expand its production, customer support and supply chain capabilities.

鈥淪ince Sensel鈥檚 founding in 2013, we鈥檝e worked tirelessly to create a sensor that outperforms existing touch technologies on every metric and at a lower overall cost,鈥� said Sensel Co-founder and CEO . 鈥淭his financing brings us closer to our ultimate goal of improving how people experience the products they rely on every single day.鈥�

The company says it has raised $38 million since it was founded in 2013. No information about the company’s valuation was disclosed.

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The autonomous driving company, previously incubated as an “other bets” project under the umbrella of , says it has raised a staggering $2.25 billion in financing from investors including , the , and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund . Other firms including , global automotive supplier , pre-owned vehicle listing service , and its corporate parent Alphabet also participated in Waymo’s round.

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“We’ve always approached our mission as a team sport, collaborating with our [original equipment manufacturer] and supplier partners, our operations partners and the communities we serve to build and deploy the world’s most experienced driver,” said , CEO of Waymo. 鈥淭oday, we’re expanding that team, adding financial investors and important strategic partners who bring decades of experience investing in and supporting successful technology companies building transformative products. With this injection of capital and business acumen, alongside Alphabet, we鈥檒l deepen our investment in our people, our technology and our operations, all in support of the deployment of the Waymo Driver around the world.鈥�

Waymo did not say, precisely, what it will do with its newfound cash, but it did share a number of development and business milestones. The company says its autonomous Waymo Driver platform has driven “more than 20 million miles on public roads across over 25 cities, and over 10 billion miles in simulation.” Waymo added that the company has already shipped its first L4 autonomous vehicles (which include electric vehicles and Class 8 trucks, according to the company) with the company’s latest hardware and beefed onboard sensors and compute hardware.

The company also provided updates about Waymo One, its on-demand autonomous car service which currently operates in Arizona. The service has already provided thousands of trips to locals “in a high-speed mixed usage market area larger than San Francisco.”

The deal comes 10 months after rival self-driving car outfit at an approximate $18 billion post-money valuation. The , , and automakers and participated in the raise.

TechCrunch in March 2019 that the company was seeking outside investment at a lofty valuation. In September, to $105 billion from $175 billion, based on its discounted cashflows.

No information about the company’s valuation or other terms of today’s financing have been disclosed at this time.

Illustration: .

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According to the filing, the company has raised a little over $71 million of a round aiming to raise up to $83.85 million in fresh capital for the company. Rigetti Computing disclosed in its filing that the total amount raised and the total offering amount includes approximately $23.85 million1 from the conversion of convertible securities into equity in the company.

The filing states that, so far, 65 investors contributed capital to the round, and that the company received its first capital commitment for the round on Feb. 18, 2020.

, an investor with , is a new addition to the company’s board. It’s typical for lead investors to take a board seat following a deal, so it’s likely that Bessemer is the lead investor in Rigetti’s latest round.

According to 小蓝视频色情网页版 data, the company has in prior funding. Rigetti’s last round was closed in November 2017.

Depending on whether the convertible securities mentioned in today’s filing were previously reported, the company has now raised between $166.7 million and $190.5 million, and it is authorized to raise $12.8 million more in this offering.

The company’s valuation and information about which investors participated in the deal have not been disclosed at this time. Previously disclosed the likes of , , , , and , among others.

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DoorDash said in its announcement that the number of shares on offer and a target price range for the transaction “have not yet been determined.”

The brief statement also adds that the IPO “is expected to take place after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.” In recent days, the U.S. stock market has experienced significant downward pressure amid concerns about the spreading SARS-CoV-2 virus and speculation about the scale of its impact on the global economy.

As of 2017, the SEC has granted smaller, high-growth companies a path to initially file their S-1 registration statements confidently, allowing for regulatory review without immediate exposure to scrutiny from the media and would-be public market investors. Confidentially filed S-1 documents are made public prior to IPO.

According to 小蓝视频色情网页版 data, San Francisco-based DoorDash has raised in equity funding since its inception in 2013. Its last private market valuation was approximately $12.6 billion, post-money, earned in .

The include the likes of , , , , , the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund , and the .

DoorDash has never released a complete picture of its financials, which will be part of the IPO process. The company is not profitable and was expected to lose $450 million on revenue of between $900 million and $1 billion in 2019, according to from .

The company faces a number of labor disputes, as its “gig economy” workers are treated as independent contractors and are not eligible to receive benefits like health insurance. Earlier in February DoorDash was as it works through individual cases brought by 5,010 drivers for the platform who believed the company was in violation of California labor law.

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Disentangling what, exactly, a “seed” round is these days is kinda tough. Not so long ago, a company might’ve raised a little bit of money from friends and family to get off the ground, and raised their first institutional investment round at Series A. But institutional capital has moved further and further upstream. In many cases today, seed is the first institutional round a company raises.

But that doesn’t begin to address the full semantic complexity of the funding landscape for fledgling ventures. Yes, there’s seed, but now, for even earlier-stage companies, there’s an emerging class of specialized pre-seed investors. Already seed-funded companies may opt to raise a “seed-plus” or “seed extension” round if they’re not quite ready to pursue a proper Series A round.

This doesn’t even get into whether the round is priced or unpriced. If priced: What metrics were used to derive the company’s valuation? If unpriced: What sort of financial instrument is being used? A Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) or convertible debt? Capped or uncapped? Discount or no discount? What are the triggers for conversion into honest-to-goodness equity shares? What’s the likelihood that a convertible debt instrument or SAFE will actually convert?

Suffice it to say there’s a lot of complicated stuff happening in the earliest stages of a company’s life as an investible asset.

But one thing’s for sure: most rounds aren’t very big, but they are getting bigger.

Sizing the swarm of seed

To bear this out, we analyzed 15,538 funding rounds labeled as seed in 小蓝视频色情网页版’s dataset, which were raised by 12,772 unique U.S.-based startups between January 2015 and mid-February 2020. Rounds without listed dollar amounts were excluded from our sample set. We then segmented our data by the size of funding round, bucketing the numbers in half-million-dollar increments, inclusively. (e.g. a $500,000 seed round would be in the “$0 to $500,000” category, whereas a $500,001 seed round would belong in the “$500,000 to $1,000,000” bucket.)

Here are the numbers in chart form.

This is a surprisingly neat-looking chart. It’s pretty darn close to a perfect exponential decay function, up to a certain point.

In our sample set, just a bit over 60.5 percent of recent U.S. seed rounds came in at less than $1 million. On the one hand, that’s not surprising. At least in 小蓝视频色情网页版’s data, most of the rounds in which the big accelerator programs invest in are labeled seed. And since theirs is a business of seeding at scale, the influence of accelerators can be seen in the market. writes $150,000 checks these days, to hundreds of companies per year. , , and other large-scale accelerator programs write similar-sized checks. Smaller programs, especially those located outside major startup hubs, tend to write even smaller checks. In our sample set, 9.4 percent consisted of seed rounds that were $50,000 or less.

A rising tide for recent seed

If you follow startup funding news closely, you might have the feeling that seed rounds are getting larger. On the whole, current data suggests that they indeed are.

In the chart below, we plot the same set of 15,538 rounds–still segmented by $500,000 increments–but this time we split the distribution into two chunks of time: rounds raised in the three years between 2015 and 2017, and those raised in the little more than two years between 2018 and mid-February 2020, when we pulled the data. You’ll note in the legend of the chart that we’re dealing with significantly different sample sizes between the two time periods, due in part to the fact that the actual amount of time included differs between the two sets of data, and due to known reporting delays in private company financing data.

You’ll notice that the distribution of round size decays somewhat exponentially for both subsets of seed rounds. However, in the case of rounds struck between 2018 and very early 2020, the long tail of the distribution is a little fatter.

In other words, the majority of rounds are still pretty small. Of the rounds reported between 2018 and early 2020, 70.3 percent were $2 million or less. But of the seed rounds announced between 2015 and 2017, 83 percent were $2 million or less. More recent seed rounds, as a population, are bigger than seed rounds raised by a previous generation of startups.

A small set of the most recent seed rounds are creeping up toward the size of small Series A rounds. In relative terms, the proportion of seed rounds that were larger than $3 million more than doubled from one cohort to the next. Of the seed rounds raised in the 2015-2017 period, 7.8 percent raised over $3 million, and 17 percent of the seed rounds raised between 2018 and early 2020 were greater than $3 million.

What does one make of all this?

First, this is hardly new information. 小蓝视频色情网页版 News has tracked the rising size of seed rounds in its quarterly reporting over the course of several years. It’s a global phenomenon; the U.S. seed scene is not a hotspot in an otherwise tepid market. It seems that seed investors around the world are warming to the idea of funding larger rounds.

Second, it shows a shift in investor strategy over time. From the investor standpoint it makes good business sense to back larger rounds, because unless valuations are rising faster than round size (which is hard to tell given limited available data) bigger rounds redound a bigger chunk of equity to seed investors. If that larger position can be defended through negotiation and exercise of pro-rata rights in the rounds that follow, seed funds backing bigger rounds may end up generating higher returns over time than their counterparts backing comparatively smaller seed deals.

Third, despite all the anecdotal evidence that seed rounds are getting bigger, and despite the numbers presented above, it’s important to note that the significance of the change between the two cohorts might be attenuated by reporting delays. This is not to say that the shift toward bigger seed rounds, as of late, isn’t real. It’s just that it can sometimes take several quarters (heck, occasionally a year or more) for seed funding to be disclosed and ultimately added to a set of private company data like 小蓝视频色情网页版. Data reporting delays are a known phenomenon across all private company datasets, to varying extents. So, if in a couple years we look back at the same windows of time (2015-2017 and 2018-February 2020) the numbers may have shifted slightly as smaller, currently undisclosed rounds surface and get integrated into the dataset. That being said, it’s still a safe bet to say that, on the whole, seed rounds got bigger.

As a parting thought, it’s important to think about what happens to this big seed trend if and when the world economy starts to slow down. So much more capital has flowed into seed-stage ventures over time, but what happens when it eventually ebbs?

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