With a hot IPO market and a world accelerating its shift to digital technologies amidst a pandemic, it’s a busy time for late-stage startups. Happily, the current moment is generating a wave of leaks and news. So much so, it’s actually been pretty hard to keep up.
In honor of the somewhat crazy week we’ve had, I’ve compiled the biggest and best bits of unicorn news, with two final items concerning companies that are not quite unicorns. Our goal is to get caught up so we can start next week sufficiently informed.
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As always with this sort of work, we’ll have to handle each entry quickly. But if you want to know what’s up lately with the most valuable private companies, this should provide a working summary.
We’ll start with the Gong round, talk Palantir, peek at Stripe, chat about Airbnb’s results, detail a few other revenue milestones that were new to us, discuss Robinhood trading volume, gander at some Coinbase product news and a few other items, wrapping with a note on recent funding rounds from Parsable and Coda.
The theme, in case you were hoping for a unifying thread, is that the good times that took temporary flight in March and April, are back.
Today, it’s nearly hard to recall the fear that took over startup-land; sure, there are warning signs about cloud growth rates, but for many unicorns, we still live in boom times.
Let’s begin.
A blessing of unicorns
As promised, we’re starting with the Gong round, which my dear friend Ron Miller covered for TechCrunch. The sales tech software company put together a $200 million round at a $2.2 billion valuation after raising several other rounds in recent quarters. As Ron reports, the company’s growth has been torrid, with 1,300 customers and 2.5x revenue growth “this year alone.” But most critically, Gong’s CEO Amit Bendov said that “there’s a lot of liquidity in the market.” Yep.
Next up: Palantir may direct list. Which is a bit odd for a company with such a long and storied fundraising history, but, hey, who cares? At least if Palantir direct lists, we won’t hear endless whining about how it was mispriced by some jerk who once again hoodwinked an entire company, its board and its shareholding base. We care more that Palantir goes public so that we can read its docs more than we care about the format of its debut, but the news still matters.
Stripe has hired GM’s CFO as it staffs up its C-suite. CNBC has a great run-down of the private company’s recent hires. If it looks like IPO prep and sounds like IPO prep, and so forth, maybe it’s IPO prep? Let it be, because we want to see its numbers.
Airbnb’s recent financials have leaked. Bloomberg got the numbers: Revenue fell to $335 million in Q2, off “at least” 67% from the at least $1 billion that Airbnb racked up in Q2 2019 (other reporting says $1.2 billion). Ouch. Bloomberg also reports that Airbnb had $842 million in Q1 revenue. Ouch. In terms of losses, Airbnb had an adjusted loss of $341 million in Q2 2020 and an EBITDA deficit of $400 million. Ouch. As we’ve noted, however, there’s been some better news in June and July for Airbnb, and its IPO could be back on. Still, what a rough quarter.
Moving on, The Information dropped a lot of financial data on some AI-first startups, a few data points of which are required chewing for us: Databricks’ Q3 2020 revenue is expected to land around $85 million, up from $50 million in Q3 2019 and $25 million in Q3 2018. DataRobot’s revenue grew from $45 million in 2018 to $85 million in 2019. Scale AI expects Q4 revenue of around $20 million.
Robinhood wants you to know that most of its users are not day traders. And that they make more trades each day than its rivals’ users. It’s a little hard to square that circle, but you can do so by presuming that Robinhood users are big on buying stuff they never sell, or something. Whatever the case, Robinhood users are pulling off 4.3 million trades each day. That’s a lot. Like, a lot. E-Trade does 1.1 million, by comparison.
TikTok-Microsoft is cool, but do you know what is really cool? The new TikTok-India story.
Coinbase launched a product to let folks use some of their crypto holdings IRL through a lending product. This could be a hit with the crypto-rich who also don’t want to cash out any of their holdings. How big of a market that is is not clear, but it’s fun to see Coinbase building new stuff. We’re kidding, go public, Coinbase.
Our final unicorn entry involves BigCommerce, which is worth just under $5 billion as a public company this morning. That data point makes the following headline pure comedy: “Before BigCommerce’s 200% IPO pop, Intuit offered $1.5 billion for the software company.” So much for the M&A market, ya’ll. That is hilarious.
Near-unicorn news
Parsable raised $60 million, bringing its total money raised to over $130 million. The company helps “digitize industrial front-line workers,” we reported. That’s smack-dab in the middle of the digital transformation acceleration stuff that we’ve been reporting on for months. And it indicates that the most interesting software companies of the future might not be those that serve us nerds, but could instead help folks with real jobs.
What is Parsable worth? Forbes and Pitchbook disagree on its valuation, but if the company can grow like I think it can, Parsable is a round, or maybe two at most from a $1 billion valuation. Put it on your short list.
For our final entry, Coda, which just raised $80 million. (Check out our recent interview with the CEO here.) It’s now worth $636 million. Companies that fit into the future-of-work bucket are hotter than Australian sand on a summer’s day. Seeing Coda take advantage of its current temperature is not a surprise. But with the company not sharing revenue numbers, we’re curious. How far can Coda get on $80 million more? Hopefully by the time it raises again, the startup is knocking on the door of the $100 million ARR club.
And with that, we’re officially caught up. Great work! You made it!