Stitch Fix IPO. AI deals tracker. Airbnb acquisitions.
Hola,
Stitch Fix went public today at a valuation of $1.43B, making it the largest venture-backed e-commerce exit since Jet.com’s acquisition by Walmart for $3.3B back in August 2016.
Stitch Fix has raised relatively little capital compared to other recent startups that went public. It raised $46.8M, all between 2013-2014, and had not raised any additional funding since June 2014. In contrast, Bonobos raised over $127M prior to its acquisition by Walmart this past June.
Investors seemed to compare it to troubled tech stocks like Snap and Blue Apron and worry that they were signing on for an overpriced tech issue.
Certainly, Stitch Fix’s model of using AI to send customers boxes of curated clothes, shoes, and accessories is still very new.
But as our analysis shows, compared to other e-commerce plays, Stitch Fix is fetching a large premium. It popped today on the first day of trading, but plenty of companies have done that and then floundered.
The 1% of the 1% club
In case you were wondering how much money it takes to live as a an independently wealthy person in New York City, i.e. live it up while not actually having a job, we’ve got some news. Someone has crunched the numbers for us based on a hypothetical couple with a “fully loaded” lifestyle. The specs on this are ridunculous:
For the net worth needed to sustain this lifestyle, see This Week In Data Below. We also cover 163-carat diamonds, $450M dollar paintings, and something known as “the hundy club.”
64: The number of companies featured in our latest bracket which asks: what is the best company to invest in and hold for 10 years? We’ve already got some close matchups, including those between Walmart & Starbucks and Slack & Verizon. Round 1 closes this Sunday, November 19th. Vote now. And don’t forget to submit your bracket by then for a chance to win a drone. The winner will be the first person to submit the bracket closest to the final results.
$30M: The amount raised by AI in healthcare startup Arterys in Series B financing led by Temasek Holdings and with participation from GE Ventures, DNA Capital, and Northwell Ventures, among others. For a look at the breakdown of AI-related deals across industries, check out our Artificial Intelligence Deals tracker.
6: Airbnb is increasingly acquisitive, having made 6 acquisitions year-to-date. This week, Airbnb acquired Accomable, a platform that allows users to find hotels and vacation rentals that are disabled-accessible. The company also bought Adbasis this week, a platform for ad testing and optimization. Among its acquisitions this year are those of Deco Software and Luxury Retreats. We recently put together our Airbnb Strategy Teardown, which looks at the company’s strategy and future prospects.
$100M: The amount Procter & Gamble has paid to acquire Native — a health and beauty brand that develops natural products, specifically aluminum- and paraben-free deodorant. The company had raised $500K in a seed round from Azure Capital Partners in 2016. We previously looked at over 70 startups in the beauty and grooming space. Check out the market landscape.
30: This week, we released our 2018 Game Changers report, which looks at 10 sectors and 30 companies that could change the world, working on everything from engineering organs and creating lab-grown animal products to developing processing units for AI applications and automating construction. Game-changing startup Graphcore, which sells an intelligent processing unit (IPU) designed to lower the cost of AI applications in cloud and enterprise data centers, raised $50M in Series C financing earlier this week.
10: Amazon entered into a partnership with Allrecipes.com that will allow meal ingredients from Allrecipes to be delivered by Amazon Fresh. The partnership could come as a threat to meal kit companies like Blue Apron and HelloFresh, among others. We previously looked at 10 companies that could be hurt by Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods.
$50M: Mashable, a hyped digital media startup that had been valued at $250M, has sold to publisher Ziff Davis for a fraction of that amount. At a $50M sell price, Mashable is the latest company to make it on to our Downround tracker, which tracks down exits as well as down rounds. It now has 44 entries for 2017.
500 miles: This week, Elon Musk revealed the fully electric Tesla Semi truck. The vehicle is powered by a battery and is able to travel 500 miles between charges, and can haul 80,000 pounds and drive autonomously on highways. Musk promises to launch these trucks commercially by 2019. Check out our market map of private companies working in the trucking tech space.
10,000 feet: Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, the China-based parent company of Volvo, has acquired “flying car” startup Terrafugia, which makes a flying car with a max altitude of 10,000 feet and a cruising speed of 100 miles per hour. Terrafugia had previously raised $5.84M in funding. The company expects to deliver its first flying car in 2019. Here are 5 other startups working on aerial vehicles. Our Trends tool highlights the greatly increased attention these startups have received.
1st: This week, the FDA approved Abilify MyCite, “a pill with a sensor that digitally tracks if patients have ingested their medication,” which will improve adherence. This is the first drug approved in the US with a digital ingestion tracking system. The medication Abilify is approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, acute bipolar disorders, and as an add-on treatment for depression. The pill has a sensor that connects to a wearable patch, which then transmits ingestion information to a mobile app. We recently looked at over 100 startups reinventing medicine, including companies focused on patient monitoring and care management. We also covered this topic in our Digital Health Insights Newsletter from earlier this week, which you can sign up for here.
$15.1M: TechShop, a membership-based, do-it-yourself workshop and fabrication studio, shut down this week, declaring bankruptcy. The company, which had raised $15.1M in total disclosed funding, operated internationally with over 9,000 active members in the US alone. For more on startup death, check out our list of 242 startup failure post-mortems.
$100M: The amount of money which billionaires start to view as real wealth, which they call a “hundy,” according to Richard Kirshenbaum, who has written a book on New York’s 1%. Kirshenbaum was quoted in an article estimating that a wealthy, non-working couple would need $190M in net worth to live happily in New York City.
$450.3M: The price which Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting “Salvator Mundi” fetched at auction this week, making it what is believed to be the most expensive painting ever sold. It is the last Da Vinci known in existence outside of museum walls.
$34M: Continuing with the 1% theme, a flawless 163-carat clear diamond sold for $34M at an auction in Geneva. As part of a necklace, the diamond is said to be the largest of its kind to ever be auctioned, and is 40% bigger than a diamond which sold for just $3M less in 2013. The jewel was cut from a rough 404-carat stone previously discovered in Angola, and the necklace took more than 1,700 hours to create. Diamond trading is the focus of 1 of 9 early-stage startups serving the luxury sector.
