If you, like me, scan the deals section of this newsletter, you may have noticed a trend in recent weeks: There seem to be a lot of $100 million-plus deals hitting the newswires. In an environment where the private markets have become much chillier, especially amid the Silicon Valley Bank mayhem, while funding for late-stage startups in particular cooled off since last year, I wondered what’s driving this apparent uptick.
Since the start of February, Term Sheet’s Jackson Fordyce has spied over 25 $100 million-plus funding announcements (to be clear, these funds may have been raised weeks or months ago): Jobber, an operations management software provider for home service businesses, raised $100 million from investors including General Atlantic in early February; energy storage company Our Next Energy raised $300 million from Fifth Wall and others also in early February; cloud security platform Wiz raised $300 million from VCs including Lightspeed Venture Partners several weeks ago; and Chroma Medicine, a genomic medicine company, raised a $135 million round led by Google’s GV. In early March, mysterious A.I. hardware platform Humane raised $100 million from investors including Kindred Ventures and Tiger Global. Last week, Gravie, an employer health benefits company, raised $179 million led by General Atlantic; and Adept, a research and product A.I. lab, raised $350 million co-led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital. You get the picture. And though certainly not the norm, some top companies are reportedly in the process of raising massive fundings, like Chinese fast fashion titan Shein, reportedly raising $2 billion this month, while payments darling Stripe just raised $6.5 billion. And, of course, let’s not forget about the host of buzzy A.I. startups, like Character.AI and Anthropic, raising major cash.
