The exit was extremely capital efficient, meaning it received a huge price-tag relative to the amount raised by Trello, just $10.3M.
Also interesting is that Trello is focused on task management software and unlike most of New York’s other top exits has no ties to traditionally strong industries in the city like media and marketing, retail, and finance.
Finally, it’s a big exit for Fog Creek, the software company in New York that developed Trello and spun it out into a separate company. Fog Creek, which itself is bootstrapped, also spun out Stack Exchange, which went on to raise $70M. It’s an interesting approach that few startups have followed that I know of, focusing on the process of creating new products rather than building a company and brand around a single idea.
P.S. We sent a correspondent to CES earlier this month, and he came back with the 7 top takeaways from the conference this year, from the stagnation in smart home tech to the ascendancy of NVIDIA’s GPU.
This week in data:
$425M: Publicly traded Atlassian, which makes collaboration software, announced its acquisition of New York-based Trello, another collaboration and productivity app, for $425M. Trello was a spinoff of Fog Creek Software (which also produced Stack Exchange). After becoming a stand-alone company in 2014, Trello raised $10.3M from BoxGroup, Index Ventures, and Spark Capital. We previously looked at other New York-based venture-backed exits, and how they compared to exits in Boston and LA.
147: In the three years since 2016, cannabis startups in the United States have seen 147 deals, compared to less than 10 in the three years prior. The spark has been a wave of decriminalization. We’ll look at the state of the fast-growing cannabis startup industry in our webinar on January 18. Sign up here.
5: At the Innovation Summit this week, the AI 100 — a list of 100 of the most promising private companies applying artificial intelligence across industries — was revealed. The list includes 5 startup unicorns valued at $1B or more in the private markets: auto tech company Zoox, robotics startup UBTECH, healthcare AI companies Benevolent.ai and iCarbonX, and sales tech startup Insidesales.com.
150M: The number of users of Instagram Stories each day, according to this report. Up from 100M in October, the current 150M matches Snapchat’s number of daily users. The report also mentions that 70% of people on Instagram follow a business, explaining the company’s recent announcement that it will introduce skippable video ads to Stories.
20M: Towards the end of 2016, the Indian government made the decision to ban the use of all 500- and 1,000-rupee bank notes. In a report this week, Indian startup Paytm — a mobile payment and commerce platform — is said to have signed up more than 20 million users since the ban. With a total of 177 million users, Paytm is the largest payment app in India.
13: From customized babies to robotic companions to lab-grown diamonds, and more, this week we released a report on the 13 “N+1” trends, or future tech trends that will shape business and society in the next 5-10 years. You can get the entire presentation here.
11 years: Tesla announced that Chris Lattner will join its team as vice president of Autopilot software. Previously, Lattner was at Apple for 11 years, where he was primarily responsible for creating Swift, a programming language for building apps on Apple platforms.
$100M: Marketplace lender Funding Circle raised a $100M Series F round from investors including Accel Partners, Index Ventures, and Union Square Ventures. The London-based unicorn’s latest round is the largest VC-backed deal to a UK fintech company since the beginning of 2016.
$13.5M: Phantom, a cybersecurity platform, raised a $13.5M Series B round from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Foundation Capital, and Blackstone Group this week. The company was on our list of 21 early-stage cybersecurity companies to watch.
35: The number of projects Hyperloop One is working on to make a reality around the world. The company is focused on creating a transportation system that can make trains go as fast as 760 MPH. The company is one of the 36 companies in our 2017 Game Changers report, comprised of startups with “world-changing” potential.
0: The number of times Peter Thiel had spoken with Donald Trump before the Republican convention, where Thiel was a delegate and gave a speech, according to this interview published this week in the NYT. In the interview, Thiel explains his decision to buck the conventional wisdom in tech circles and Silicon Valley, and support Trump.
$300M: As of January 9th, New York City’s subway system became fully connected, allowing commuters to make calls and access Wi-Fi across all subway stations. The effort was part of a $300M, 27-year partnership with Transit Wireless. We previously looked at startups working to build smarter cities, and connectivity is a category private market companies are focusing on.
