'Investor Confidence Is Booming': VCs Poured $69 Billion Into Startups in the First Quarter of 2021
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
It is a great time to be a startup founder, with soaring valuations and investors tripping over themselves to get a piece of startups. As hot as the startup scene was last year, it has gotten even hotter this year, with a slew of megadeals pumping even more money into the biggest startups as they prepare to go public in the frenetic IPO market.
Overall, investors poured $69 billion into tech companies last quarter, a staggering 92.6% increase over the same quarter last year, according to data released Wednesday by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association.
Three-quarters of all investment flowed to late stage rounds, the highest percentage since 2010. There were 167 megadeals of $100 million or more, for a total of $41.7 billion raised in the first quarter. By comparison, megadeals accounted for $76.6 billion raised during all of last year.
In the Los Angeles area, SpaceX hauled in another $850 million in February. There was also ServiceTitan's $500 million financing last month, which makes the Glendale company that makes software for plumbers and carpenters worth $8.3 billion.
Culver City-based Sweetgreen raised $156 million in February, though the healthy fast casual chain was reportedly forced to do a flat round after the pandemic year that saw its revenues plummet.
At the other end of the startup life cycle, investors nationally focused on quality over quantity. There were only 722 first financings reported, which is a historically low number, but those deals averaged $4.7 million a piece, which was a new record high.
That benefited companies like Artie, a video game platform developer that pulled in $10 million in a seed round this February.
In total, 315 Los Angeles startups raised a total of $6.7 billion in the first quarter, a slight decrease in the number of venture investments but a 75% increase in deal value over the same quarter last year.
As has historically been the case, Los Angeles trailed not only the Bay Area in deal value ($25.5 billion) but also New York ($10.2 billion) and Boston ($7.9 billion).
The dot.LA VC Sentiment Survey also found higher valuations. Seventy-seven percent of respondents said they saw higher valuations last quarter, but that did not stop them from closing deals.
The billion dollar question is whether, with so much money sloshing around, we are in a bubble that is going to burst. That is hard to judge now; it takes years to know if startups will succeed – whether they will be the next Airbnb or the next Quibi.
But by at least one metric there are fewer quality startups to go around. Dropbox, the secure document sharing platform that many startups use to share pitch decks, said this month the demand for decks continues to outpace the number of investment opportunities that are available. Founders are also shopping their decks around more, which is an indication they have more options of where to get capital and can be choosy.
In other words, it is very much a founder's market.
"We knew the first quarter would represent the beginning of a rebound, but I don't think anyone expected VC and startup activity to be this high; investor confidence is booming and beginning to outpace the supply of startups seeking fundraising," Russ Heddleston, DocSend co-founder and CEO, said in a post sharing the data.
However, investors contend that the market frenzy is not just driven by a flood of capital but also dramatic shifts in consumer behavior over the past year.
"In 2020, consumers spent over $860 billion online with U.S. merchants, an astonishing 44% year-over-year increase," said Deborah Benton, founder and managing partner of Willow Growth Partners, an early-stage VC firm that invests primarily in digital first brands that are benefiting from an accelerated shift to online shopping.
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
