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Rivian raises another $2.5B, pushing its EV war chest up to $10.5B
Rivian announced Friday that it has closed a $2.5 billion private funding round led by Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, D1 Capital Partners, Ford Motor and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc.
Third Point, Fidelity Management and Research Company, Dragoneer Investment Group and Coatue also participated in the round, according to Rivian.
“As we near the start of vehicle production, it’s vital that we keep looking forward and pushing through to Rivian’s next phase of growth,” Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said in a statement. “This infusion of funds from trusted partners allows Rivian to scale new vehicle programs, expand our domestic facility footprint, and fuel international product rollout.”
D1 Capital Partners founder Dan Sundheim said the firm is excited to increase its “investment in Rivian as it reaches an inflection point in its commercialization and delivers what we believe will be exceptional products for customers.”
Rivian has raised roughly $10.5 billion to date. The company did not share a post-money valuation.
The electric automaker, which now employs 7,000 and is preparing to deliver its R1T pickup truck in September, last raised funds in January. That round brought in $2.65 billion from existing investors T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., Fidelity Management and Research Company, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Coatue and D1 Capital Partners. New investors also participated in that round, which pushed Rivian’s valuation to $27.6 billion, a source familiar with the investment round told TechCrunch at the time.
The news comes just a day after Rivian confirmed it plans to open a second U.S. factory. It also follows Rivian’s decision to delay deliveries of its R1T truck and R1S SUV from this summer to September due to delays in production caused by “cascading impacts of the pandemic,” particularly the ongoing global shortage of semiconductor chips.
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Brazil’s Loft adds $100M to its accounts, $700M to its valuation in a single month
Nearly exactly one month ago, digital real estate platform Loft announced it had closed on $425 million in Series D funding led by New York-based D1 Capital Partners. The round included participation from a mix of new and existing investors such as DST, Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Fifth Wall and QED, among many others.
At the time, Loft was valued at $2.2 billion, a huge jump from its being just near unicorn territory in January 2020. The round marked one of the largest ever for a Brazilian startup.
Now, today, São Paulo-based Loft has announced an extension to that round with the closing of $100 million in additional funding that values the company at $2.9 billion. This means that the 3-year-old startup has increased its valuation by $700 million in a matter of weeks.
Baillie Gifford led the Series D-2 round, which also included participation from Tarsadia, Flight Deck, Caffeinated and others. Individuals also put money in the extension, including the founders of Better (Zach Frenkel), GoPuff, Instacart, Kavak and Sweetgreen.
Loft has seen great success in its efforts to serve as a “one-stop shop” for Brazilians to help them manage the home buying and selling process.
Image Credits: Loft
In 2020, Loft saw the number of listings on its site increase “10 to 15 times,” according to co-founder and co-CEO Mate Pencz. Today, the company actively maintains more than 13,000 property listings in approximately 130 regions across São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, partnering with more than 30,000 brokers. Not only are more people open to transacting digitally, more people are looking to buy versus rent in the country.
“We did more than 6x YoY growth with many thousands of transactions over the course of 2020,” Pencz told TechCrunch at the time of the company’s last raise. “We’re now growing into the many tens of thousands, and soon hundreds of thousands, of active listings.”
The decision to raise more capital so soon was due to a variety of factors. For one, Loft has received “overwhelming investor interest” even after “a very, very oversubscribed main round,” Pencz said.
“We have seen a continued acceleration in our market share growth, especially in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two markets we currently operate in,” he added. “We saw an opportunity to grow even faster with additional capital.”
Pencz also pointed out that Baillie Gifford has relatively large minimum check size requirements, which led to the extension being conducted at a higher price and increased the total round size “by quite a bit to be able to accommodate them.”
While the company was less forthcoming about its financials as of late, it told me last year that it had notched “over $150 million in annualized revenues in its first full year of operation” via more than 1,000 transactions.
The company’s revenues and GMV (gross merchandise value) “increased significantly” in 2020, according to Pencz, who declined to provide more specifics. He did say those figures are “multiples higher from where they were,” and that Loft has “a very clear horizon to profitability.”
Pencz and Florian Hagenbuch founded Loft in early 2018 and today serve as its co-CEOs. The aim of the platform, in the company’s words, is “bringing Latin American real estate into the e-commerce age by developing online alternatives to analogue legacy processes and leveraging data to create transparency in highly opaque markets.” The U.S. real estate tech company with the closest model to Loft’s is probably Zillow, according to Pencz.
In the United States, prospective buyers and sellers have the benefit of MLSs, which in the words of the National Association of Realtors, are private databases that are created, maintained and paid for by real estate professionals to help their clients buy and sell property. Loft itself spent years and many dollars in creating its own such databases for the Brazilian market. Besides helping people buy and sell homes, it offers services around insurance, renovations and rentals.
In 2020, Loft also entered the mortgage business by acquiring one of the largest mortgage brokerage businesses in Brazil. The startup now ranks among the top-three mortgage originators in the country, according to Pencz. When it comes to helping people apply for mortgages, he likened Loft to U.S.-based Better.com.
This latest financing brings Loft’s total funding raised to an impressive $800 million. Other backers include Brazil’s Canary and a group of high-profile angel investors such as Max Levchin of Affirm and PayPal, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and David Vélez, CEO and founder of Brazilian fintech Nubank. In addition, Loft has also raised more than $100 million in debt financing through a series of publicly listed real estate funds.
Loft plans to use its new capital in part to expand across Brazil and eventually in Latin America and beyond. The company is also planning to explore more M&A opportunities.
This article was updated post-publication to reflect accurate investor information.
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Mexican unicorn Kavak raises a $485M Series D at a $4B valuation
Kavak, the Mexican startup that’s disrupted the used car market in Mexico and Argentina, today announced its Series D of $485 million, which now values the company at $4 billion. This round more than triples their previous valuation of $1.15 billion, which established them as a unicorn just a couple of months ago in October of 2020. Kavak is now one of the top five highest-valued startups in Latin America.
The round was led by D1 Capital Partners, Founders Fund, Ribbit and BOND, and brings Kavak’s total capital raised to date to more than $900 million. Kavak recently soft-launched in Brazil, and this new round of funding will be used to build out the Brazilian market and beyond, said Carlos García Ottati, Kavak’s CEO and co-founder. The company plans to do a full launch in Brazil in the next 60 days, García said, and we can expect to see Kavak in markets outside Latin America in the next 24 months, he added.
“We were built to solve emerging market problems,” García said.
Kavak, which was founded in 2016, is an online marketplace that aims to bring transparency, security and access to financing to the used car market. The company also offers its own financing through its fintech arm, Kavak Capital, and counts more than 2,500 employees and 20 logistics and reconditioning hubs in Mexico and Argentina.
“In Latin America, 90% of the [used car] transactions are informal, which leads to a 40% fraud rate,” said García, who experienced these challenges firsthand when he moved to Mexico from Colombia a couple of years ago and bought a used car.
“My budget allowed me to buy a used car, but there was no infrastructure around it. It took me six months to buy the car, and then the car had legal and mechanical issues and I lost most of my money,” he said. Kavak buys cars from individuals, refurbishes them and offers warranties to buyers.
“Instead of buying a new car, they can buy a better car that still has all the warranties. It’s a really aspirational process,” said García. The company, which really amounts to four companies in one given its areas of focus, was built to be comprehensive by design in order to meet the various gaps in the market, García said.
“When you’re building a business here [Latin America], you need to build several businesses because so many things are broken,” he said. That’s why the financing option, for example, has been a key to their success, according to García.
Financing has traditionally been hard to come by in Brazil, and as García said, the used car market lacks infrastructure there, too. That being said, Brazil is Latin America’s fintech hub, and the space has made leaps and bounds over the last 7-10 years with companies such as Nubank, PagSeguro, Creditas, PicPay, and others leading the way. As a result, credit cards and loans are more widely available today in the region, offering competition for Kavak Capital. While Kavak has localized some of its product for the Brazilian market — namely building out a Portuguese language version of the app and website — García said the markets are very similar.
“In Brazil, you still have the same problems that you have in Mexico, but Brazil is a little more developed, especially in fintech, which is light years ahead of Mexico,” he said.
With the Brazilian product heading to the races, García said they already have plans for other regions, though he declined to name them.
“80% of people in emerging markets don’t have access to a car,” García said of the global market size. “We want to go into big markets where customers are facing similar problems and where Kavak can really change their lives,” he added.
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OneStream raises $200M, now valued at $6B after its enterprise-focused financial software sees a surge of use
Digital transformation is the name of the game these days, and companies that are enabling businesses to take a leap into the future, by helping them tackle their most complex operations, are reaping the rewards. In the latest development, OneStream, a startup that provides a toolkit of services to enterprises to help them run financial operations (for example, reporting, planning, tax and more), has raised $200 million in primary equity. The funding values OneStream at $6 billion.
D1 Capital Partners led the financing, with participation from Tiger Global and Investment Group of Santa Barbara (IGSB), the company said. Tiger Global and D1 appear to share at least one common backer, Tiger Management, which may be one reason why you see them together in many big deals.
The company plans to use the funding to continue building out the tools that it provides to customers, and to keep up with demand for its services as more customers replace legacy applications and very basic, spreadsheet-based operations.
“We remain sharply focused on delivering innovative planning, reporting and analysis solutions designed to help our customers succeed for today’s fast-paced and increasingly complex business environment,” said Tom Shea, CEO of OneStream Software, in a statement. “The valuation we received is great recognition of the value our employees and stakeholders have helped to create, as well as the exciting opportunities ahead for OneStream.”
To put these large numbers into some context, OneStream was valued at $1 billion only two years ago, when KKR took a majority stake in the company worth more than $500 million. The company’s CFO, Bill Koefoed, has confirmed to us that KKR will continue to be “substantially OneStream’s largest shareholder and remains a very supportive investor”. The company meanwhile appears to be holding off any plans for going public for the time being — despite some possible hints that it was considering that move.
“OneStream is currently focused on delivering 100% customer access, continuing to grow the business and creating value for stakeholders,” Koefoed said. “IPO is a potential exit and OneStream is preparing to be a public company. However, there is no specific timeline.”
The growth in valuation, meanwhile, reflects the surge of business that OneStream has seen in the last two years, and in particular in the last 12 months, as companies have been compelled to update their systems to work more efficiently and flexibly amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact it has had around in-person interactions. OneStream said annual recurring revenue grew 85% in 2020, with customers growing by 40% to 650 enterprises.
The company’s focus is specifically in the area commonly called corporate performance management (CPM), which includes a number of the financial corporate operations that a company runs behind the scenes to keep its business ticking.
Some of these would have fallen to a range of software providers, and much of the work would have been carried out by way of on-premise solutions, with companies like SAP, Oracle Hyperion and IBM dominating the space with all-in solutions, and others like Anaplan and Blackline providing point solutions addressing specific aspects of those functions.
But as with other areas of enterprise services, the advances of technology and software have created opportunities to take a lot of that functionality into the cloud and to run the processes across a single system to improve analytics and efficiency, and that has provided an opportunity to the likes of OneStream.
The impact of the pandemic should not be underestimated in this trend, and it was one that OneStream was able to nail because its software can be used across disparate teams and can draw a direct line to helping companies manage their finances better. And unlike a lot of tech companies that raise venture funding, one interesting detail with OneStream is that it has extended its customer base well outside the realm of technology companies and other early adopters. Those using its software include the likes of Fruit of the Loom, McCain (the frozen fries king) and AAA, but also Takeaway.com, the Carlyle Group and many others.
“The pandemic accelerated OneStream’s business given that it was a wake-up call for many companies that had not digitally transformed their key finance processes,” said Koefoed. “As a result, we have seen increased demand from companies who were using spreadsheets or legacy CPM applications to manage their financial close, consolidation, reporting, planning and forecasting processes… They are better able to keep their finance teams connected and collaborating while physically dispersed. In addition, we have seen many organizations increasing the frequency of their forecasting and scenario modeling from quarterly or monthly to weekly and daily in some cases, especially during the early days of the pandemic when modeling revenue and cash flow was critical.”
For investors, the interest more specifically was how OneStream managed to add more customers away from competitors in the last year.
“OneStream’s platform delivers exceptional customer value,” said Andrew Wynne, a principal at D1 Capital Partners, in a statement. “Management’s intense focus on customer success has enabled OneStream to capture significant market share from incumbents, while posting strong growth in both revenue and customer acquisition. We believe OneStream has both the vision and product required to be a dominant force in its industry.”
Going forward, it sounds like the company will continue to build on what it has already established. That will include more business into Asia Pacific alongside its current operations in North America and Europe, Koefoed said. It will also use its foothold in finance and providing services to the finance department to make inroads into other areas that link closely to money management: money spending and revenue generation, with tools to plan and operate in areas like HR, IT, sales, marketing, supply chain management “and other areas to ensure alignment and optimal resource allocations,” he added.
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Uruguayan payments startup dLocal quadruples valuation to $5B with $150M raise
Cross-border payments startup dLocal has raised $150 million at a $5 billion valuation, less than seven months after securing $200 million at a $1.2 billion valuation.
This means that the five-year-old Uruguayan company has effectively quadrupled its valuation in a matter of months.
Alkeon Capital led the latest round, which also included participation from BOND, D1 Capital Partners and Tiger Global. General Atlantic led its previous round, which closed last September and made dLocal Uruguay’s first unicorn and one of Latin American’s highest-valued startups.
DLocal connects global enterprise merchants with “billions” of emerging market consumers in 29 countries across Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. More than 325 global merchants, including e-commerce retailers, SaaS companies, online travel providers and marketplaces use dLocal to accept over 600 local payment methods. They also use its platform to issue payments to their contractors, agents and sellers. Some of dLocal’s customers include Amazon, Booking.com, Dropbox, GoDaddy, MailChimp, Microsoft, Spotify, TripAdvisor, Uber and Zara.
In conjunction with this latest round, dLocal has named Sumita Pandit to the role of COO. Pandit is former global head of fintech and managing director for JP Morgan, and also worked at Goldman Sachs.
“Sumita is a highly respected and accomplished fintech investment banker, and she’s played a pivotal role advising some of the world’s most successful fintech companies as they’ve scaled to become global leaders,” said dLocal CEO Sebastián Kanovich in a written statement.
Meanwhile, former COO Jacobo Singer has been promoted to president of dLocal.
The company plans to use its new capital to enhance its technology and continue to expand geographically.
Alkeon General Partner Deepak Ravichandran believes that emerging markets represent some of the fastest growth opportunities in digital payments.
“However, as global merchants look to access these markets, they are often faced with a complex web of local payment methods, cross-border regulations, and other operational roadblocks,” he said in a written statement. “dLocal’s unique platform empowers merchants with a single integrated payment solution, to reach billions of customers, accept payments, send payouts, and settle funds globally.”
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Squarespace raises $300M at a staggering $10B valuation
Squarespace has raised $300 million in a round of funding that values the company at a staggering $10 billion valuation.
New backers include Dragoneer, Tiger Global, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Spruce House. Existing backers Accel and General Atlantic also participated.
Squarespace founder & CEO Anthony Casalena said the fresh capital will advance the company’s growth initiatives and help it scale its product suite.
The move comes less than two months after the company filed confidentiality to go public via a direct listing or initial public offering.
Squarespace, which has helped millions create their own websites, was founded in 2003 and bootstrapped until a $38.5 million Series A in 2010 that was co-led by Accel and Index Ventures.
The online website creation and hosting service — which has now expanded into e-commerce by hosting online stores — then raised another $40 million round in 2014. But it is perhaps best known for its epic 2017-era $200 million secondary round that General Atlantic financed. That round was raised at a $1.5 billion pre-money valuation. That means it has effectively upped its valuation by more than five times in just over three years.
At that time, TechCrunch reported that Squarespace was a profitable company, with revenues increasing 50% in the prior year, to about $300 million. Execs are declining to comment on the company’s latest funding round beyond a post on its website.
New York City-based Squarespace has over 1,200 employees spread across its headquarters and offices in Dublin, Ireland; Portland, Oregon; and Los Angeles, California.
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Shippo raises $45M more at $495M valuation as e-commerce booms
This morning Shippo, a software company that provides shipping-related services to e-commerce companies, announced a new $45 million investment. The new capital values the startup at $495 million. TechCrunch is calling the new funding a Series D as it is a priced round that followed its Series C; the company did not award the round a moniker.
Shippo’s 2020 Series C, a $30 million transaction that was announced last April, valued the company at around $220 million. D1 Capital led both Shippo’s Series C and D rounds, implying that it was content to pay around twice as much for the company’s equity in 2021 than it was in 2020. (Recall that investors doubling-down on previous bets as lead investor in successive rounds is no longer considered to be a negative signal concerning startup quality, but a positive indicator.)
Why raise more money so soon after its last round? According to Shippo CEO and founder Laura Behrens Wu, her company made material progress on customer acquisition and partnerships last year. That led to a decision around the time of Shippo’s Q4 board meeting with her investors that it was a good time to put more capital into the company.
In a sense the timing is reasonable. As Shippo scales its customer base, it can negotiate better shipping deals with various providers, which, in turn, help it continue to attract new customers. Behrens Wu noted in an interview with TechCrunch that when her company was helping its early customers ship just a few packages, shipping companies it supports on its platform didn’t want to meet with the startup. Now armed with more volume, Shippo can recycle customer demand into partner leverage, improving its total customer offering.
Behrens Wu said that Shippo had secured such a partnership with UPS before it raised its new round.
Turning to growth, Shippo doubled its platform spend, or “GPV” last year. GPV is the company’s acronym for gross postage volume. It roughly tracks with revenue, TechCrunch confirmed. So Shippo likely doubled its top-line last year. That’s good. Shippo wants to do that again this year, Behrens Wu told TechCrunch. The startup will also double its headcount this year, adding around 150 people.
Now flush with more capital, what’s next for Shippo? Per its CEO, the startup wants to invest more in platforms (where Shippo is baked into a marketplace, for example), international expansion (Shippo only does a “little bit” of international shipping, per Behrens Wu), and double-down on what it considers its core customer base.
TechCrunch was curious about how broad Shippo might take its product from its original home in shipping labels. The startup said that there’s lots of room in the journey of a package, from pre-purchase on, where her company might expand into. However, Behrens Wu cautioned that such a broadening of product work is not an immediate focus at her company.
Let’s see how long the current e-commerce boom lasts and how far this new capital can take Shippo. If it doubles in size again this year we’ll have to start its IPO countdown sometime in mid-2022.
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Warby Parker, valued at $3 billion, raises $245 million in funding
Warby Parker, the optical e-commerce giant, has today announced the close of a $245 million funding round from D1 Capital Partners, Durable Capital Partners, T. Rowe Price and Baillie Gifford.
A source familiar with the company’s finances confirmed to TechCrunch that this brings Warby Parker’s valuation to $3 billion.
The fresh $245 million comes as a combination of a Series F round ($125 million led by Durable Capital Partners in Q2 of this year) and a Series G round ($120 million led by D1 Capital in Q3 of this year). Neither of the two rounds was previously announced.
In the midst of COVID-19, Warby has also pivoted a few facets of its business. For one, the company’s Buy A Pair, Give A Pair program, which has focused on vision services across the globe, pivoted to stopping the spread of COVID-19 in high-risk countries. The company also used their Optical Lab in New York as a distribution center to facilitate the donation of N95 masks to healthcare workers.
The company has also launched a telehealth service for New York customers, allowing them to extend an existing glasses or contacts prescription through a virtual visit with a Warby Parker OD, and expanded its Prescription Check app to new states.
Warby Parker was founded 10 years ago to sell prescription glasses online. At the time, e-commerce was still relatively nascent and the idea of direct-to-consumer glasses was novel, to say the least. By cutting out the cost of physical stores, and competing with an incumbent who had for years enjoyed the luxury of overpricing the product, Warby was able to sell prescription glasses for less than $100/frame.
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as throwing up a few pictures of frames on a website and watching the orders pour in. The company developed a process where customers could order five potential frames to be delivered to their home, try them on, and send them back once they made a selection.
Since, the company has expanded into new product lines, including sunglasses and children’s frames, as well as expanding its footprint with physical stores. In fact, the company has 125 stores across the U.S. and in parts of Canada.
Warby also developed the prescription check app in 2017 to allow users to extend their prescription through a telehealth check up.
In 2019, Warby launched a virtual try-on feature that uses AR to allow customers to see their selected frames on their own face.
The D2C giant, in its 10 years of existence, has balanced its technological innovation with its physical expansion, which could explain its newfound triple-unicorn status. These latest rounds bring Warby Parker’s total funding to $535.5 million.
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