Weekly update #45
Welcome to this edition of the weekly newsletter. The idea behind this is to gather all the information in the startup ecosystem in one place, with a special focus on the fintech market.
Before jumping to the main topics for this week, I am exploring partnerships with the newsletter. So this edition is sponsored by Notion , which is offering a 6-months free plan of its plus product to all founders submitting an application for their startups program.
In order to redeem the free trial, submit an application using this link https://ntn.so/michelemattei , select Michele Mattei as partner and include the following partner key: STARTUP4110P62416. I really hope it will be helpful for many founders out there!
Coming back to us, I’ve been reading a very interesting analysis this week, made by Michael Ho and based on Carta 's data, on the valuation multiple in startups round in Q2 2024. Here my main takeaways.
The idea behind the analysis is to take data from the round in Q2 from Carta about median valuation, time between rounds and the concept of venture scale to see how valuation multiples change round by round. The first metric I found very interesting was the median pre-money of priced seed rounds, that after many quarters of decline finally reached a new high at $15 million for primary rounds, potentially indicating a possible uptrend in the market.
The topic about primary and bridge rounds is surely a very interesting one, and the second metric that I found very interesting was the amount of bridge rounds in Q2. As you may know, in the last year and a half we saw many bridge rounds in the industry, as many startups tried to stay alive bringing in more money when possible to get a longer runway. But what we see here is that on all stages we saw a decline in terms of numbers, frequency and percentage of bridge rounds. Again a positive indication of recovery.
Also very interesting, how much ARR do startups usually have when raising money? Out of all Carta’s data, 29% of startups raising at least a $4 million seed round had between $150k and $500k, while 28% had between $500k and $1M. At the same time, 17% of them were pre-revenue.
The final outcome of this very interesting analysis is this table. Taking in consideration the venture scale curve, you can see here the median ARR and median valuation at each stage, seed to series E. What I find more interesting is the seed valuation multiples, a very wide 15-60x, that I find maybe slightly too high on the upper hand. While I am more in line with series B and series C, where I find those multiples very realistic.
A couple of notes here on those data. There was a significant increase in Median Series D and E+ valuations in Q2 2024, influenced by a relatively low number of deals, especially when compared to Seed (492 deals), Series A (415 deals), and Series B (185 deals). This lower deal volume for Series D and E+ rounds has skewed the valuation multiples much higher for these stages this quarter. In terms of timing, consider a Series C raised in Q2 2024, it indicates that 27 months prior (using Q1 2024 data), the company raised a Series B. However, this suggests that Series A was raised only 20 months before that (based on Q1 2022 data) and the Seed round was raised 19 months before Series A (using Q2 2020 data). This totals 66 months on the Venture Scale curve, which is notably shorter than the 80 months we would calculate if we consistently used Q1 2024 data for all the time intervals.
Before jumping to the latest news, a quick update from my side. As I told you, I will start a small series of podcasts to interview fintech founders and VC managers active in the ecosystem. This week, finally, I will release the first episode of this series, an interview with Noam Inbar , partner at Viola FinTech , where we talked about the VC industry, the fintech market and many more. If you want to be the next guest, feel free to drop me a line on Linkedin!
Anyway we saw some very interesting news in the market this week. Revolut launched BillPay, a tool for CFO, and will introduce mortgages in Ireland in 2025, while Robinhood introduced stock lending in the UK and Satispay integrated with Stripe in Italy. A lot of acquisition this week, mostly from Saudi, with Tabby acquiring Tweeq , and Tarabut acquiring Vyne in the UK. But the biggest one was by far Salesforce acquiring Own Company for $1.9 billion. In the VC industry, Pruven Capital raised a $378.5 million second fund, and SET Ventures doubled the size of its first fund for their second one to $200 million. The italian ecosystem comes back from vacation in september, and we saw Validia securing $2.2 million, Skillvue (formerly Algo AI) closing a $2.5 million round and Buddyfit being acquired by Gymondo . Finally, a lot of very interesting funding rounds from fintech startups like Bridge , Validus , Ziina ???? , Ume , Fido , Cercli (YC S23) , Palm , Neon , Drip Capital and many more.?
But let's take a closer look at the main news of the last seven days:
领英推荐
Closed deals
Insights on the VC industry
News on the market
A special look in the Italian market
And here some useful resources for everyone involved in the ecosystem:
Events you don’t want to miss
You have a cool event you want to mention or to sponsor? Feel free to send me a DM.
Startups raising funds
Take also a look at the last edition of the newsletter, Weekly update #44
Founder at AngelSpan/The Legacy Funds
2 个月Some researchyou might want to explore - https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/joemilam1_there-has-been-some-interesting-comments-activity-7240097500773130240-qepv?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Series A prep for seed stage founders | former VC & exited founder | Click 'visit my website' to register for my next free Seed to Series A live training session ??
2 个月Hey Michele Mattei thanks for the detailed breakdown ??
Investor | VC | Advisor | Connector | Enabler
2 个月Impressive lineup of fintech advancements and fundraising events unfolded.
Thank you for the mention Michele Mattei!