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| | | “Fortune favors the bold” is a phrase that comes to mind several times each week while editing Extra Crunch stories, but I’m not referring to one of John Wick’s tattoos. Building and funding companies is not work for faint-hearted people; this week, we spoke to an investor who’s “self-quarantining” due to coronavirus concerns after a business trip to Singapore and a telecom CEO who decided to go all-in on building his own satellite-assembly operation because the global supply chain didn’t meet his company’s needs. Also: a closer look at Boston’s sizzling-hot startup market, an investigation of GGV’s “mom-and-pop” shop investment thesis in Southeast Asia, a dive into China’s VC slowdown and much more news you can use. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch | | The movement to promote diversity and inclusion in tech started gaining traction in 2013 after software engineer Tracy Chou publicly pushed startups to release demographic data about their employees. Years later, “tech companies are taking diversity seriously, but the same cannot be said for the venture capital industry,” writes Megan Rose Dickey. Noting that “there is a lack of diversity all around” when it comes to the investor community, she says it’s time for “venture capital firms to play their part in the advancement of diversity and inclusion in tech.” Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: RyanJLane / Getty Images | | Voodoo Games offers players basic game experiences that challenge much of the conventional thinking around gaming and product design. Instead of pouring time and money into “design-driven” experiences, their single-purpose games show that there’s more than one way to build a consumer-facing company. How do their strategies apply to other products? Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Rio Helmi/LightRocket / Getty Images | | Online shopping in Southeast Asia is still relatively limited: most retail transactions occur in small neighborhood stores and are paid for in cash. But GGV Capital is betting that startups which help these moms-and-pop stores “digitize operations, tap into better supply chains and serve as delivery points” will boost e-commerce in the region. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Trudie Davidson / Getty Images | | Employees at Boston-based startups Toast and Flywire were surely high-fiving each other last week at the news that their companies erach raised big rounds within days of each other. Is more VC flowing into the region’s startups than expected? “We've pulled some recent, and historical data from Boston to figure out what's up,” writes Alex Wilhelm. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images / Getty Images | | Whatever lesson WeWork was supposed to teach, it doesn’t appear to have made much impact. It was reasonable to expect that founders might dial back their fundraising goals and investors would be less eager to open their wallets. But a report from Fenwick and West suggests that any pessimism is unwarranted after “a sharply warm and welcoming Q4 2019.” Read more | | | |
| |  | | Toronto-based Kepler Communications announced plans to create its own satellite assembly operation in its hometown; a maverick move, considering that most space startups contract out that work to existing manufacturers. Given the company’s initial goal of getting 140 small satellites in orbit, CEO and co-founder Mina Mitry told TechCrunch that supply chain limitations and an abundance of local talent made his backyard the best place to build, even as U.S.-based space startups grab headlines. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: PAU BARRENA / Getty Images | | GSMA’s decision to cancel World Congress 2020 in Barcelona in light of the coronavirus outbreak was a prudent move. Bringing almost 100,000 people together to do business in the shadow of a poorly-understood public health crisis would have been a logistical nightmare. But given the availability of videoconferencing, the impact of air travel on climate change and the ability to ship prototypes around the world in day, how relevant are shows like MWC going forward? Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Paul MIller/Bloomberg / Getty Images | | After returning from a business visit to Singapore, “I’m actually kind of self-quarantining myself in my own house,” VC Brendan Wallace told us. Co-founder of Fifth Wall Ventures, Wallace spoke to TechCrunch about how the coronavirus is impacting life (and business) in Asia and shared what he could about two upcoming funds that will focus on opportunities in real estate and carbon impacts. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: simonkr / Getty Images | | Spending on cloud infrastructure reached $30.2 billion in revenue for Q4 2019, according to analyst firm Canalys. Usually, cloud revenue is “hard to parse because companies often lump cloud revenue into a single bucket regardless of whether it's generated by infrastructure or software,” writes Ron Miller, but the Canalys report “attempts to measure the pure infrastructure results themselves without other cloud incomes mixed in.” Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Mirza Babic / Unsplash | | CB Insights reported 1,913 fintech deals in 2019 that were worth $34.5 billion, making 2019 the second-best year on record for fintech investing. Alex Wilhelm digs into the data to see whether the hot year favored early- or late-stage startups, how those investments are performing, and examines other takeaways from the last year in fintech. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Towfiqu Photography / Getty Images | | To learn more about the $450 million cybersecurity-focused fund just announced by ForgePoint Capital, we spoke to co-founder and managing director Alberto Yépez. ForgePoint’s Fund II arrives at an auspicious time, considering recent IPOs for CrowdStrike and Cloudflare which “have given cybersecurity a halo.” Read more | | | |
| |  | | “Heading into the new year, it wasn't known that the coronavirus, known as COVD-19, would shutter much of China, slowing its industrial output, its services industry and more. But heading into 2020, China's venture capital world was already in steep decline,” writes Alex Wilhelm. Read more | | | |
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