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Cybersecurity startup funding trends. VCs get into tech's largest exits through pre-IPO M&A.


I got 99 problems, but this ain't one...

Hi there,

Today's newsletter is a veritable cornucopia of data covering the top investors in backdoor unicorns (what the heck?), the crazy # of Asian $100M ecommerce rounds in 2015 and the billions going to cybersecurity startups.

In other news, Postmates is delivering paper copies of Vogue to your door according to AdAge. Have we finally found a way for the internet to save print media?




Flexus who? Can't we just talk about Gilt Groupe's $50 million down round?

Yesterday, Flexus Biosciences was acquired by Bristol-Myers in a deal worth upto $1.25 billion. The company raised just $38 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Celgene.

We tracked 15 articles talking about this mega-exit. Yup, just 15 articles about a unicorn exit of a company focused on anti-cancer therapeutics.

Anti-cancer therapeutics are just so boring, right?

I wonder if Flexus employees at least get to use Slack?

VC bloggers - where are the women & the Europeans?

We issued our Periodic Table of VC Bloggers a few weeks ago and outside of a threat of violence from Hunter Walk of Homebrew and a few Mendeleev fanboys who said things like "This periodic table doesn't have any periodicity" (I have zero idea what that even means), the reaction was very positive.

People also riffed and commented on the Periodic Table which was even more awesome.

Michael Young (@myoung), the CTO of Digg, created an OPML file of the 89 blogs on the Periodic Table to make it easy for you to import into Digg, Feedly, etc. Thanks Michael.

Katie Bolin (@katie_bolin) of Spark Capital challenged women VCs and angels to blog more and committed to writing weekly. Here's a recent post Katie wrote on approaches within the freemium space. Keep an eye on her blog.

Marcin Szelag (@marcinslezag) of Innovation Nest asked European VCs to step up their blogging game. He also analyzed the geography of the VC bloggers on the Periodic Table because he knew we're suckers for graphs. Here's a post by Marcin on the challenges of investing in marketing tech companies. He has committed to blogging daily so watch his blog as well.

If you've written about the Periodic Table of VC blogs or any of our other data, reports or research briefs, definitely let me know by responding to this email as we love featuring these in our newsletter.

Best,
Anand
@asanwal

Brains or bull market? It's a good time to be a VC

After a record year for VC in 2014, we analyzed the data around billion dollar exits and found that the number of lucky VCs (and skilled VCs) is increasing.
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Wearables take over $1.4B since 2009

Pebble raised over $1M in just over half an hour today. And on the investor funding front, wearable tech has been a huge recipient of funding too. See the funding trend.
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CB Insights Top Deal Searches

CB Insights users can query our database in powerful ways. See a few below or sign up free:

 

Asian eCommerce startups are hot - 10 $100M+ rounds in 2015 already
Asian eCommerce companies continue to pull in staggering amounts of money, with nearly $2B already raised across 75 deals in just the first 6 weeks of 2015. See the biggest deals this year to date.
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Backdoor unicorns - Which VCs got into tech's largest exits through pre-IPO M&A?
As valuations plump up, we analyzed which investors might have gotten exposure (aka equity) in unicorn exits by virtue of having their portfolio companies acquired by unicorns. See the data.
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Cybersecurity startups raise $7.3B over 1,028 deals
Cybersecurity has never been more important. Here's a new look at the most well-funded cybersecurity startups, active investors and financing trends through 2014
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The Blurb

A curated mix of articles on tech, media, what's next and recent news.

How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is? A long-winded, bold and detailed theory into where MH370 actually vanished to.
New York Magazine

Autocomplete fail. Did you send an email to a wrong address recently? You wouldn't be alone. Here's the bug affecting gmail auto-suggest.
Business Insider

'Nobody my age can afford to stay here forever.' London billboards are sharing perspectives on moving both to and from the rapidly changing city in honest and sometimes painful ways.
Citylab

Old-fashioned Snapchat. Ben Thompson of Stratechery says Snapchat, the mobile messaging app has an old-fashioned business model ready & willing to take the place of TV.
Stratechery

Old Indian village, birthplace of bouncers. The musclemen from Fatehpur Beri used to defend villages, now they have been led into the security business.
NY Times
 
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