Extra Crunch Tuesday: The global inequity in venture financing is staggering

Extra Crunch Newsletter

Tuesday, March 16, 2021 • By Walter Thompson and Annie Siebert

Welcome to Extra Crunch Tuesday Image Credits: Nigel Sussman I knew African founders lacked the same access to capital as entrepreneurs based in Europe or the United States, but the numbers are far less favorable than I thought. According to Dauda Barry, CEO of Adaplay Esports, African startups have raised $500 million so far in 2021. If that trend continues, he estimates that the region’s tech companies will exceed the $1.4 billion they raised in 2020. For perspective: “Stripe raised more yesterday than Barry had reported for the entire African continent this year,” Alex Wilhelm noted in today’s column. Digging deeper, he pulled numbers from Crunchbase and PitchBook to track VC activity in Africa over the last three months. Once he filtered private equity funding from non-equity investments, the numbers were “staggering.” “I am surprised that more VCs aren't investing in Africa,” says Alex. “It smells like investing arbitrage.” Thanks very much to those of you who have responded to our member outreach efforts. If you’d like to share your feedback about Extra Crunch directly with us, we’re listening. Have a great week, Walter Thompson Senior Editor, TechCrunch @yourprotagonist Read more

Farmland could be the next big asset class modernized by marketplace startups Image Credits: Pgiam / Getty Images Companies that help farmers raise money for agricultural development projects are revolutionizing the way farm and forestland are acquired, developed and commercialized across the United States. While private equity has gotten a lot of press for expanding the size of their farmland investments, those investments are still dwarfed by the size of the potential farm industry in the U.S., meaning there's still plenty of opportunity for investors to provide additional capital. Read more

TC Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising Sponsored by TechCrunch Use code ECNEWSLETTER to save 20% on a two-day virtual bootcamp for founders and investors! Read more

The NFT market is just getting started, but where is it headed? Image Credits: Beeple under a CC BY 4.0 license. The crypto art craze might seem silly and expensive, but it could empower artists from emerging economies and underrepresented groups to access the global art market in ways that they couldn't before. Can it outlive the hype? Read more

Olo raises IPO range as DigitalOcean sees possible $5B debut valuation Image Credits: jayk7 / Getty Images That Olo raised its IPO price is not a huge surprise, given the software company's rapid growth and profits. In the case of DigitalOcean, we have more work to do as its approach to growth is a bit different. Read more

Stripe's epic new valuation and the value-capture gap between public and private markets Image Credits: Nigel Sussman Stripe's $600 million round values the payments and banking software company at $95 billion, near the top end of the valuation range at which the company was said to be raising funds back in November 2020. Sadly, Stripe is still being coy with growth metrics. The Exchange digs in, no matter how vague. Read more

Julia Collins and Sarah Kunst outline how to build a fundraising process Julia Collins, the first Black woman to co-found a venture-backed unicorn, and investor Sarah Kunst offer fundraising pointers on Extra Crunch Live. Kunst says good design is critical, but: If you're not a graphic designer, then any incremental minute that you're spending on trying to make your deck pretty is a waste of time. You need to be focusing on content. Hire somebody, pay them a tiny bit of money to be able to do a nice graphics pass on your deck, and it's going to make it a lot easier for people to to get the information that you need them to know. Read more

How nontechnical talent can break into deep tech Image Credits: Getty Images Startup hiring processes can be opaque, and breaking into the deep tech world as a nontechnical person seems daunting. This column offers tactical advice for finding, reaching out to, cultivating relationships with and working at deep tech companies as a nontechnical candidate. Read more

US-listed SPACs have a new target: Latin American tech companies Image Credits: blackdovfx / Getty Images There has been an unprecedented IPO boom of tech companies in the Brazilian stock exchange. Now, new special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are raising money in Nasdaq with a mandate to buy Latin American private growth companies, which would be completely unthinkable just a year ago. Read more

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