Should there be some law against raising three times in one year?

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman

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Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Every quarter we dig into the venture capital market’s global, national and sector-based results to get a feel for what the temperature of the private market is at that point in time. These imperfect snapshots are useful. But sometimes, it’s better to focus on a single story to show what’s really going on.

Enter AgentSync. I covered AgentSync for the first time last August, when the API-focused insurtech player raised a $4.4 million seed round. It’s a neat company, helping others track the eligibility of individual brokers in the market. It’s a big space, and the startup was showing rapid initial traction in the form of $1.9 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

But then AgentSync raised again in December, sharing at the time of its $6.4 million round that the valuation cap had grown by 4x since its last round. And that it had seen 4x revenue growth since the start of the pandemic.

All that must sound pretty pedestrian; a quickly growing software company raising two rounds? Quelle surprise.

But then AgentSync raised again this week, with another grip of datapoints. Becca Szkutak and Alex Konrad’s Midas Touch newsletter reported the sheaf of data, and The Exchange confirmed the numbers with AgentSync CEO Niji Sabharwal. They are as follows:

• Present-day revenues of less than $10 million, but with ARR growing by 6x in 2020 after 10x expansion in 2019.
• No customer churn to date.
• Its $25 million Series A valued the company at $220 million, which Konrad and Szkutak describe as “exactly 10x AgentSync’s valuation from eight months ago.”

That means AgentSync was worth $22 million when it raised $4.4 million, and the December round was raised at a cap of around $80 million. Fun.

Back to our original point, the big datasets can provide useful you-are-here guidance for the sector, but it’s stories like AgentSync that I think better show what the market is really like today for hot startups. It’s bonkers fast and, even more, often backed up by material growth.

Sabharwal also told The Exchange that his company has closed another $1 million in ARR since the term sheet. So its multiples are contracting even before it shared its news. 

2021, there you have it.

Meet Conscience.vc

Also this week I got to meet Ariana Thacker, who is building a venture capital fund. Her route to her own venture shop included stops at Rhapsody Venture Partners, and some time at Predictive VC. Now she’s working on Conscience.vc, or perhaps just Conscience.

Her new fund will invest in companies worth less than $15 million, have some form of consumer-facing business model (B2B and B2B2C are both fine, she said), and something to do with science, be it a patentable technology or other sort of IP. Why the science focus? It’s Thacker’s background, thanks to her background in chemical engineering and time as a facilities engineer for a joint Exxon-Shell project. 

All that’s neat and interesting, but as we cover zero new-fund announcements on The Exchange and almost never miniprofile VCs, why break out of the pattern? Because unlike nearly everyone in her profession, Thacker was super upfront with data and metrics.

Heck, in her first email she included a list of her investments across different capital vehicles with actual information about the deals. And then she shared more material on different investments and the like. Imagine if more VCs shared more of their stuff? That would rock.

Conscience had its first close in mid-January, though more capital might land before she wraps up the fundraising process. She’s reached $4 million to $5 million in commits, with a cap of $10 million on the fund. And, she told The Exchange, she didn’t know a single LP before last summer and only secured an anchor investor last October.

Let’s see what Thacker gets done. But at a minimum I think she’ll be willing to be somewhat transparent as she invests from her first fund. That alone will command more attention from these pages than most microfunds could ever manage.

A whole bunch of other important shit

The week was super busy, so I missed a host of things that I would have otherwise liked to have written about. Here they are in no particular order:

• FalconX, a startup that powers crypto-trading on other platforms, raised $50 million this week. The round comes after the company raised $17 million last May. Tiger Global led the round, natch, as it has led nearly every round in the last month. 
• The FalconX round matters as the company grew from what we presume was a modest trading and revenue base into something much larger. Per the company, in “less than a year” the company’s “trading volume” grew by 12x and its “net revenue” grew 46x. That’s a lot. 
• Privacera also raised $50 million this week. Insight Partners led the round. The deal caught my eye as it promised a “cloud-based data governance and security solution.” That reminded me of Skyflow, a quickly growing startup that I thought might have a similar product. Privacera CEO Balaji Ganesan politely corrected my confusion in an email saying that “Skyflow is like a vault for customer data. They replace customer data with tokens. Our focus is on data governance, so it is broader. We don’t store customer data within our solution.” Fair enough. It’s still an interesting space.
• And then there’s Woflow, which VentureBeat actually got to before I could. I chatted with the company this week, but sadly have more notes than open word count today. So let it suffice to say that the company’s model of selling structured merchant data is super cool. And the fact that it has linked up with customers in its first vertical (restaurants) like DoorDash is impressive.
• Its round was led by Craft Ventures, a firm that has been pretty damn active in the API-powered startup landscape in recent months. More to come on Woflow.

Various and Sundry

Closing, I learned a lot about software valuations here, got to noodle on the epic Roblox direct listing here, dug into fintech’s venture successes and weaknesses, and checked out the Global-e IPO filing. Oh, and M1 Finance raised again, while Clara and Arist raised small, but fun rounds.

Alex

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