Our favorite vacation rental company Airbnb raised a $1B mega-round – the largest VC financing for a US-based startup so far in 2017. This values the company at approximately $31B. The company turned profitable in the second quarter of 2016, having now raised close to $3.5B in total funding so far. Despite being in solid financial health, there doesn’t seem to be a push to IPO anytime soon.
Another solid round that closed this week was Instacart – the on-demand grocery delivery app based out of San Francisco, CA. They closed a $400M round led by Sequoia Capital, an early initial investor in the company. This brings the company valuation to $3.4B, marking this round the second largest VC funding round to date this year. This new valuation is a 62% premium to the price our investors got back in our 2016 SPV-18 NSTCRT (Instacart) deal.
Another company we love is Spotify, the music streaming service based out of Sweden who announced they hit a new milestone of 50 million paid subscribers (and counting), up from 40M late summer. This week, they acquired audio detection startup Sonalytic – a London-based audio detection company that can identify songs, mixed content and audio clips. It’s not entirely clear what the company’s plan are for integrating Sonalytic with their service, but Spotify said they will be using the audio detection feature to improve personalized playlists, as well as create some new products with the company’s help. InvestX investors have invested in Spotify four times over the past two years.
Feature photo courtesy of Pitchbook.
