Skip to main content

Pandemic forces fundraising founders to accept ‘discounts across the board’

Startup founders who are fundraising in this climate should expect venture investors to take a huge chunk out of their valuation expectations.

“What we’re seeing across the board is discounts,” says Mike Janke, co-founder of early-stage cybersecurity investment firm Datatribe.

Investors are still committing to new deals, he says, but they’re adding new terms and demanding lower valuations from companies as the cost of raising capital during the downturn. Janke, whose firm has several deals in the pipeline, says entrepreneurs should expect VCs to demand concessions like more frequent board meetings and large price cuts compared to what they’d previously seen.

“If you look at 2000 and 2008, venture always views [downturns] as the time to get good deals,” Janke says. “We’re looking at a 15% to 25% discount to do deals.”

In one instance, a company that turned down a $900 million acquisition offer is now in the process of raising a new round at a $500 million valuation, he says. “In 2019 it was just generally accepted that this company was worth over $1 billion.”

Deals are getting done, though. As the pandemic began to spread, Janke says most firms began triaging their portfolios to determine who would need to raise cash and who could remain afloat without an infusion. Now, firms are looking out and seeing what kind of opportunities there are in the broader market — if they can.

“Some of our peers in the Valley have up to 40% of their companies that need an infusion or some sort of bridge to get through,” says Janke. “These companies that had higher valuations that came out of the Valley have had to do more drastic cuts.” Startups that raised cash in markets outside the Bay Area have not had as much difficulty, he says, because they’re more efficient.



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3aG3pwf
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Max Q: Psyche(d)

In this issue: SpaceX launches NASA asteroid mission, news from Relativity Space and more. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/h6Kjrde via IFTTT

Max Q: Anomalous

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Last week wasn’t the most successful for spaceflight missions. We’ll get into that a bit more below. In this issue: First up, a botched launch from Virgin Orbit… …followed by one from ABL Space Systems News from Rocket Lab, World View and more Virgin Orbit’s botched launch highlights shaky financial future After Virgin Orbit’s launch failure last Monday, during which the mission experienced an  “anomaly” that prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, I went back over the company’s financials — and things aren’t looking good. For Virgin Orbit, this year has likely been completely turned on its head. The company was aiming for three launches this year, but everything will remain grounded until the cause of the anomaly has been identified and resolved. It’s unclear how long that will take, but likely at least three months. Add this delay to Virgin’s dwindling cash reserves and you have a foundation that’s suddenly much shakier than before. ...

What’s Stripe’s deal?

Welcome to  The Interchange ! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up  here  so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. —  Mary Ann Stripe eyes exit, reportedly tried raising at a lower valuation The big news in fintech this week revolved around payments giant Stripe . On January 26, my Equity Podcast co-host and overall amazingly talented reporter Natasha Mascarenhas and I teamed up to write about how Stripe had set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing or by pursuin...