Traditionally, startups whose private valuations number in the tens of billions are racing to go public.
Capital Gains: Gargantuan late-stage funding rounds are the new black
Billion dollar rounds for Airbnb, Uber and Didi.
Todd Bernard / Recode
That’s not been the case over the last couple years.
Airbnb and Uber are the latest companies to buck convention, instead opting to raise giant late-stage debt funding rounds. And Uber’s chief China rival, Didi Chuxing, finished a whopping $7.3 billion round at a $28 billion valuation.
More on that, and other funding headlines from Silicon Valley, below:
- Didi Chuxing, the most popular ride-hailing service in China and Uber’s chief global competitor, finished up a $7.3 billion funding round at a $28 billion valuation. A few weeks back, Didi raised $4.5 billion in equity from investors (including Apple) and received the remaining $2.8 billion from lenders.
- To keep up with Didi, Uber is continually raising tons of money. It recently took in $3.5 billion in equity funding from the Saudi Arabian government. And now it’s looking to get $2 billion in loans to give it more cash without further diluting its cap table.
- Airbnb wants to add other kinds of travel services to its home rental booking platform, and it eventually plans to go public. Those are a couple good reasons why it raised $1 billion in debt financing, adding to its already substantial cash pile. The company raised $1.5 billion last year at a $25.5 billion valuation.
- A few years ago, Twitter was thinking about buying Soundcloud. Instead, it’s now investing $70 million in the music streaming service that’s in dire straits similar to Twitter’s own problems.
- Chinese tech giants Tencent and Lenovo are part of a $50 million investment round in the augmented reality startup Meta, which makes a headset akin to Microsoft’s HoloLens (Bloomberg).
- Crisis Text Line is a charity-startup hybrid thing that offers over-the-phone, text message- and social-media-based peer counseling. The company raised $23.8 million from Reid Hoffman, Melinda Gates, the Ballmer Group and Omidyar Network.
- Eyeview, which builds custom video ads based on who is looking at them, raised $21.5 million in a new round led by the Israeli firm Qumra Capital.
- Common is a startup that rents entire buildings and then sublets the rooms out as "co-living" spaces. The company just raised $16 million in a Series B round led by 8VC, with additional funding from Circle Ventures, Solon Mack Capital, the LeFrak Organization, Maveron, Lowercase Capital, Slow Ventures and Pierre Lamond (The Real Deal).
- Talkspace, which "believes that affordable therapy is as easy as an online platform" and offers a therapy service over an app, raised $15 million in funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Spark Capital, SoftBank, TheTime and Metamorphic Ventures (TechCrunch).
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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