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By Lu Zhang, Fusion Fund To say artificial intelligence is old news would be an exaggeration, as we’ve only just started to see its implications: It’s transforming industries across the business landscape, and PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts AI will grow the global economy by $15.7 trillion over the next 12 years. Needless to say, venture capitalists should be investing […]
By Kevin O’Neill, Acertitude While “greed…is good” was the manifesto of Gordon Gekko, the iconic corporate raider from “Wall Street,” “transformation is king” is the proclamation of today’s private equity leaders when driving portfolio company value. Gone are the days when a sponsor buys a company, makes little or no change in the business strategy […]
Paul Asel, NGP Capital On Oct. 9, when Brex announced its $125 million Series C financing, Business Insider proclaimed breathlessly, “credit card startup joins unicorn club months after launching.” Since the term “unicorn” was first applied to technology companies exceeding $1 billion valuations in 2013, a cottage industry has emerged tracking the rise of these […]
By Rohit Kulkarni, SharesPost After a two-month delay, Tencent Music Entertainment’s IPO is back on track. This much-anticipated public offering is likely to re-ignite the battle with Spotify for global supremacy of streaming music. Tencent (TME), the Chinese leader in music streaming, initially filed to go public in October. But TME, a subsidiary of Chinese […]
By Mike Geldart, Excellere Partners The declaration was radical and to the point: “Eighty percent of what doctors do should be and will be done by machines using AI.” As legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla uttered those words at a recent healthcare conference, I looked around the room full of doctors, healthcare executives, […]
By Jeff Howard and Michael Gruber, Salveo Capital As the cannabis industry takes shape, the market’s momentum has been punctuated every few weeks by news of celebrity enlistments, ranging from the obvious, such as Willie Nelson, to the unexpected, John Boehner. While it may not capture the public’s imagination, the steady march of Silicon Valley […]
By Craig Lawson, MHT Partners The special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, is back. This unique, at times misunderstood, hybrid investment vehicle has enjoyed a strong resurgence in recent years. SPACs, known on Wall Street as blank-check companies, enable investors to acquire equity in a company formed for the sole purpose of finding an appropriate firm […]
By Rohit Kulkarni, SharesPost Anaplan, an enterprise software maker focused on cloud-based planning tools, said it will go public on Nasdaq under the aptly named ticker symbol PLAN. Privately valued at $1.41 billion, the San Francisco unicorn counts Granite Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Baillie Gifford as its investors. Thanks to healthy fundamentals, Anaplan is well […]
By Rohit Kulkarni, SharesPost Upwork, an online platform that connects companies with freelancers, recently said it plans to go public on Nasdaq under the ticker UPWK. The company, the product of a merger between Elance and oDesk in 2014, helps everyone from the Fortune 1000 to small business clients find competent freelancers with skills in […]
By Tim Schigel, Refinery Ventures VCs are staring at a massive opportunity to make capital-efficient deals at better valuations, and it’s located squarely in the middle of the U.S. Major tech companies are establishing footholds far from Silicon Valley. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others are rapidly expanding in the Midwest and elsewhere. Google, having outgrown California, has […]