Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column on Extra Crunch but is free and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. It’s nearly here. Happy Saturday, everyone. I do hope that you are in good spirits and good health. I am learning to nap,whicht has become a requirement in my life after realizing that the news cycle would never slow down. And because my partner and I adopted a third dog who likes to get up early, please join me in making napping excellent for adults so we can all rest up for Vaccine Summer. On work topics, I have a few things for you today, all concerning data points that matter: Q1 2021 M&A data, March VC results from Afric, and some surprising (to me, at least) podcast numbers.
On the first, Dan Primack shared a few early first-quarter data points via Refinitiv that I wanted to pass along. According to the financial data firm, global M & M&A activity hit $1.3 trillion in Q1 2021, up 93% from Q1 2020. U.S. M&A activity also reached an all-time high in the first quarter. Why do we care? Because the data helps underscore just how hot the last three months have been. I’m expecting venture capital data itself for the quarter to be similarly impressive. But as everyone is noting this week, some cracks are appearing in the IPO market as the second quarter begins, making Q2 2021 a very different beast. Not that the venture capital world will slow, especially given that Tiger just reloaded to the tune of $6.7 billion.
On the venture capital topic, African-focused data firm Briter Bridges reports that “March alone saw over $280 million being deployed into tech companies operating across Africa,” driven partly by “Flutterwave’s whopping $170 million round at a $1 billion valuation.” The data point matters as it marks the most active March the African continent has seen in venture capital terms since at least 2017 — and I would guess ever. African startups tend to raise more capital in the second half of the year, so the March result is not recorded for a single month. But it’s bullish and helps feed our general sentiment that the first quarter’s venture capital results could be significant.
And finally, Index Ventures’ Rex Woodbury tweeted some Edison data, namely that “80 million Americans (28% of the U.S. 12+ population) are weekly podcast listeners, +17% year-over-year.” The venture capitalistaddedd that “62% of the U.S. 12+ population (around 176 million people) are weekly online audio listeners.” As we discussed on Equity this week, the non-music streaming audio market is being bet on by many players in light of Clubhouse’s success as a breakout consumer social company in recent months. Undergirding the stakes by Discord and Spotify, and others are those data points. People love to listen to other humans talk. Far more than I would have imagined as a music-first person. How nice it is to be back in a time when consumer investing is neat. B2B is great, but not everything can be enterprise SaaS. (Notably, however, it appears that Clubhouse is struggling to hold onto its hype.)
Look, I can’t keep up with all the damn venture capital rounds
TechCrunch Early Stage was this week, which went rather well. But having an event to help put on did mean that I covered fewer rounds this week than I would have liked. So, here are two that I would have typed up if I had had the spare hours:
- Striim’s $50 million Series C. Goldman led the transaction. Striim, pronounced stream, I believe, is a software startup that helps other companies move data around their cloud and on-prem setups in real time. Given how active the data market is today, I presume that the TAM for Striim is dee.? Quickly flowing? You can supply a better stream-centered word at your leisure.
- Kudo’s $21 million Series A. I covered Kudo last July when it raised $6 million. The company provides video chat and conferencing services with support for real-time translation. It had an excellent COVID-era, as you can imagine. Felicis led the A after taking part in the seed round. I’ll see if I can extract new growth metrics from the company next week. One to watch.
And two more rounds you might have missed that you should not. Holler raised $36 million in a Series B. Per our own Anthony Ha, “[y]ou may not know what conversational media is, but there’s a decent chance you’ve used Holler’s technology. For example, if you’ve added a sticker or a GIF to your Venmo payments, Holler manages the app’s search and suggestion experience around that media.” I feel old. And in case you are not paying enough attention to Latin American tech, this $150 million Uruguayan round should help set you straight.
Various
Finally, this week, some good news. If you’ve read The Exchange for any time, you’ve been forced to read me prattling on about the Bessemer cloud index, a basket of public software companies I treat with oracular respect. Now there’s a new index on the market. Meet the Lux Health + Tech Index. Per Lux Capital, it’s an “index of 57 publicly traded companies that together best represent the rapidly emerging Health + Tech investment theme.” Sure, this is branded to the extent that, akin to the Bessemer collection, it is tied to a particular focus of the backing venture capital firm. But what the new Lux index will do, as with the Bessemer collection, is to track how a specific form of the venture is tracking the public comps for their portfolio.
