“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” — Sun Tzu
The landscape of founders, investors, VCs, consumer activity, and the world as a whole has been altered and jolted in unprecedented ways. March has a lot to unfold and it’s easy to get caught up focusing solely on the COVID-19 pandemic, but our effort to help give founders a better chance of success has always been, and will always be, the focal point.
For Starters
We knew March would see some backpedaling from all sorts of founder and investor activity. Despite this, we have recorded 223 deals combining for a total of $9,562,800,000. The collected funds in March are even larger than last month’s funding total ($9,284,460,000) despite recording roughly 30 less deals.
These are funding merely announcements where capital could have been closed weeks/months ago. The next 3 months will be telling to see if investors are doing net new deals with companies that were not in their pipeline pre Covid-19.
Note: this is data collected from the Pro Rata Newsletter.
Overall, March’s range of deal values are as followed:
- Minimum: $1,200,000 (Funded by Kernel Capital, Infinity Capital)
- Mode: $10,000,000 (10 Deals)
- Median $16,000,000
- Average $43,665,753
- Maximum: $1,200,000,000 (Rumored to be funded by Amazon)
Global Review
The United Kingdom (again) holds the most recorded deals outside of the United States with 10.2% and a total of $719,100,000. China’s funding jumped from a little over $154M in February to $782M in March, largely from two deals funded by Hillhouse Capital/Liu Xiaodan and Temasek/Tencent.
The United States amassed a little over $5.1B in recorded deals. These investments stacked against last month’s show that we witnessed 25 less deals, but only ~$760M less in total funding.
Global Funding Outside of U.S.
Funding Inside of U.S.
Frequent Players
The larger Venture Capital firms seemed to dial back the number of individual investments they made over March. It’s believe that this is partially due to these big time firms shifting their focus to assisting their portfolio companies throughout these unsure times.
There were five individual firms with five recorded investments in March:
And Venrock was the only recorded investing firm with four total deals closed during the month.
High Rollers
Our March recorded deals were mostly around $10M. Some firms were willing to invest over $1B, as we saw in the Gojek fundraising. This single deal stands as one of the largest since the Coronavirus started its viral path in early January. Ironically, the largest recorded deal of February was an invested $700M into the mobile tech company, Grab. Gojek just finalized this $1.2B round of funding to take on Grab.
In China, we see a bounce back of activity, as the aforementioned two deals funded by Hillhouse Capital/Liu Xiaodan and Temasek/Tencent raised $292M and $300M, respectively. This could give hope for what is to come to many US and other countries’ founders and companies with the future evolvement of the Coronavirus livelihood.
Also, Quibi secured $750M of funding from Alibaba ahead of their launch. In a large group of investors led by Argo Infrastructure Partners, Wafra Inc, and Macquarie Group Ltd, we saw $320M invested into Tierpoint.
Wrapping Up
The $1.2B fund secured by Gojek was certainly an outlier. Overall, we capture the entire distribution of funding across March below:
March held difficult times for a very high majority of founders and startups. As it is well known throughout the startup world, there will be few victors from the coronavirus troubles. Startups all around the world will be faced by the same stress-test. Eli Cahan, from Techcrunch, explains the stress and many different measures that startups will be forced to take. These difficult times will offer windows of opportunity when the light clears, just as the Sun Tsu quote states at the beginning of the report.
In a time of frenzy, remote work is here for now and indefinite future.
March, for many startups, will be remembered as a month of countless challenges. And hopefully, moving forward, it is the one of the low points throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, when March 31st arrived, we still managed to see some traction in the investment world, which accumulated over $9.5B.
Any and all comments, suggestions and feedback would be much appreciated!
Stay healthy, stay persistent.
