Cannabis trailblazers. New unicorn alert. Juicero drama.
Hola,
Remember on-demand? The entire category has gone off a cliff this year, falling to deal activity levels last seen in the first quarter of 2014, before Uber’s giant $1.2B Series D round in June 2014 kicked off a year of on-demand frenzy.
The category peaked in Q3’15, with 120 deals. Among the companies funded in that crazy quarter Din, PepperTap, Take Eat Easy, Pronto Technologies, and Chef Nightly. What do all these 5 companies have in common besides being on-demand?
Even the on-demand “winners” are looking decidedly less shiny than they once did. Uber is in a permanent PR crisis, Munchery recapped, and DoorDash raised a down round. On top of that, the top three deals of Q1’17 to Instacart, Airbnb, and Olacabs accounted for 74% of total dollar funding for the quarter.
It’s a reminder that for every sexy category chased by herding investors, there will only be a couple of real winners.
We’ve chosen videos of what we consider the four most distinctive laughs in the tech industry, including the awkward nerd snort of Mark Zuckerberg, the evil chuckle of Elon Musk, the mad Jeff Bezos guffaw, and the manic Marissa Mayer giggle.
See videos of their laughs and vote for your favorite here. We’ll let you know who won next week.
6: Question-and-answer platform Quora raised an $85M Series D, bringing its valuation to a reported $1.8B. The round’s investors included Tiger Global Management, Matrix Partners, and Y Combinator. Quora is the 6th unicorn to be added to our real-time unicorn tracker this month.
20: Stealthy AR headset startup Magic Leap acquired FuzzyCube Software, creators of iPhone and iPad games. With $1.39B in total funding, Magic Leap tops our list of 20 stealth startups and is joined by companies such as Zoox and Zee.Aero. The company is also featured on our AR/VR stack, which showcases startups focusing on hardware all the way down to distribution.
9900+: The number of words in our first-ever Amazon Strategy Teardown, covering M&A trends, investments, and patent activity, among other areas. As shown below, we looked at the proportion of open jobs by vertical and team. You can access the complete teardown here and also print out a PDF version if you love it that much.
420: In honor of 4/20, we released our first-ever 38-page Cannabis Trailblazers 2017 report, covering trends to watch and high-momentum startups with the potential to shape the future of legal cannabis. The report looks at 17 startups across 6 categories, from next-gen cultivation to healthcare to business intelligence, and more.
10%: The Amazon Echo is leading the Oculus Rift by just over 10 percentage points in Round 4 of our bracket to determine the most innovative consumer product since the iPhone. Polls close this Sunday, so make sure you cast your votes here.
$1000: From Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale to CEO of Credit Karma Kenneth Lin to Paytm’s CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma, a number of speakers from companies valued at $1B+ will be joining us at our annual Future of Fintech conference held this June at Lincoln Center. Today is your last chance to get $1000 off a Future of Fintech ticket. Buy your tickets before they go up and use the code GlobalUnicorn to receive the discount.
$25M: The amount raised by ZappRx, a prescription management system, in Series B funding. The company raised from Google Ventures, Qiming Venture Partners, and SR One. ZappRx is one of the 80+ startups featured on our digital health startups market map.
$400: Juicero, a Wi-Fi enabled juicer that creates cold-pressed juice from produce packets, recently made headlines when investors discovered they could hand-squeeze the juice without using the $400 machine. A recent experiment showed that squeezing a bag yielded nearly the same amount of juice in a shorter amount of time — 7.5 ounces of juice in 1.5 minutes versus the 8 ounces produced in two minutes using the machine. Check out our food & beverage market map for other beverage-focused startups.
$3.35B: This week, Petsmart announced its acquisition of pet care e-commerce platform Chewy, for a reported price tag of $3.35B. The deal, if finalized, would make Chewy the most expensive e-commerce acquisition in recent history (since 2009), knocking out Jet.com, which Walmart acquired in 2016 for $3.3B.
3 minutes: AeroMobil, a company working on commercializing flying cars, revealed its new hybrid vehicle model this week. The flying car company is taking pre-orders for an anticipated ship year of 2020. The vehicle “[fully transforms] from car mode to air in less than 3 minutes” and has a parachute system in place for emergency landings.
44.71: In 2015, the median age for people in the United States was 38.01, jumping from 28.31 50 years prior in 1965, according to historical estimates. In 2100, UN projections show the median age to be 44.71 in the United States. South Korea has the highest projected age for 2100 at 51.99 and Niger has the lowest at 29.43.
