Venture capital funds turned in their worst performance last year in eight years and distributions tumbled by a third to $18.7 billion, according to Cambridge Associates. One-year performance for the industry was a meager 0.3 percent in 2016 as returns in the year’s final quarter sank to -0.1 percent, Cambridge said. The year was the […]
A startup cryptocurrency hedge fund and accelerator that invests in blockchain companies planning ICOs announced the launch of its own token sale today. San Francisco-based Superbloom Capital is raising $37.5 million by offering SEED tokens, which in turn gives purchasers access to an exclusive platform of ICOs of blockchain startups incubated in the company’s accelerator […]
Vision care is already an eye-catching opportunity. Growing at a rate of 9.8 percent annually, the North American market alone is projected to reach $100 billion by 2027. The consumer base is huge, as three out of four U.S. adults now use some sort of vision correction. Yet the potential is far larger, as many technologies […]
By Alex Derber, VCJ correspondent Point Nine Capital’s origins appear fairly typical of the consumer-oriented, locally active VCs that most people associate with Berlin. But the firm, with 73 companies in a far-flung portfolio, is far from typical. Unlike many of its peer VC firms, Point Nine has no significant weighting toward the German capital. The […]
Venture capital is often thought of as a practitioner’s business, where hustle, research, technical expertise and a nose for investing combine to sniff out the best startups. Could be this axiom is ready to change. That is according to a pair of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, who say they came up with an analytics-driven […]
Funds from Spark Capital, Insight Venture Partners and Battery Ventures top a decade-old portfolio of venture funds from Washington State Investment Board’s Pathway and Invesco holdings. The portfolio is made up of 2006 and 2007 vintage funds and favors larger and mid-sized capital pools with an early or multi-stage approach to investing. Nearly half of […]
Some blockchain companies planning ICOs or token sales are scrutinizing their regulatory compliance efforts after the Securities and Exchange Commission released an investigative report relating to digital tokens. The SEC’s investigative report, released July 25, examined an ICO from May 2016, when tokens offered on the virtual organization known as the DAO, a decentralized autonomous […]
Blockchain and crypto-currency investing is hot again, and one of the most active firms in the space is the Digital Currency Group. To date, the New York-based firm has invested in 105 companies in 27 countries. So far this year it has backed at least 12 new deals and completed six or seven follow-ons. The […]
Venture investors are welcoming recent government action in the cryptocurrency sector as an injection of clarity that can help to distinguish scams from legitimate companies. On July 25, the Securities and Exchange Commission released an investigation into a May 2016 token sale where about $50 million of the digital currency ether, which is used in […]
There is a truism in venture: While enterprise investing follows a linear path, with each new development leading to the next, consumer investing steers through a turbulent sea of peaks and valleys, sometimes with little link between them. The industry appears to be in one of those consumer valleys right now. Following great waves of […]