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 […]
Venture capitalists in the United States posted their strongest quarter of investing since the end of the dot-com boom in 2000, with $27 billion distributed to startups in the third quarter. Big deals fueled quarterly activity as a record 55 rounds of $100 million or more spawned the creation of 16 new unicorns, including LegalZoom, […]
Sequoia Capital, which is said to be raising well over $8 billion for worldwide growth and U.S.-focused venture and growth funds, participated in the most venture deals in the third quarter. The firm invested about $715 million in 37 deals in Q3, according to VCJ’s analysis of preliminary Thomson Reuters data. Matrix Partners closely followed, […]
Artificial intelligence, one of the most intriguing technologies of the 21st century, has the power to reshape the way people live, work and play. It also has the power to fundamentally change the way companies do business — and one of the first places it’s having impact is in sales. AI can free salespeople from busy […]
Below is performance data for the University of Texas Investment Management Company‘s vintage 2016 venture-capital funds. Internal rates of return are current as of February 2018. To download the full version of the spreadsheet below with additional data, click here: UTIMCO venture portfolio (2016 vintage) UTIMCO venture portfolio (2016 vintage) Fund Vintage Contributed capital ($M) Distributions ($M) NAV […]
HACK Fund is scaling its model of tokenized investing to launch a $100 million venture fund. Launched in 2008 by Jonathan Nelson as a network of meetups for entrepreneurs, Hackers/Founders in 2011 founded an investment co-op as a series of special-purpose vehicles to invest in early-stage companies. The SPVs enable investors to buy and trade blockchain-based […]
So far the trickle of U.S.-trained tech workers returning to Africa, as well as to Europe and Asia, is small, but some suggest it may be the start of something big. “People want to return to the continent and do something that can impact the system,” said Josh Sandler, an entrepreneur and CEO of Africa-based transport-logistics […]
One data point that encapsulates the nation’s debate over skilled immigration is this: During the five-day application window for H-1B visas this April, 190,098 people petitioned for 85,000 spots. The more than 2-to-1 imbalance shows how skilled workers who want to come to the U.S. continue to overwhelm the available visas, as they have during […]
Many factors come together to create a fertile environment for venture investing: money, ideas, a new-era shift of technology to mobile, cloud or artificial intelligence. One largely overlooked factor is immigration. Most investors know immigrants make good founders, and as of January 2016 more than half the nation’s billion-dollar startups had at least one of them. […]
John Ruffolo, CEO of OMERS Ventures, is leaving the firm, Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System said. Ruffolo, who is also leaving his role as executive managing director of OMERS Platform Investments, the pension system’s innovation arm, will remain in an advisory capacity until Dec. 31, the statement said. The statement did not indicate why Ruffolo is stepping down. Ruffolo founded […]