Top 4 Curated Venture Capital Weekly Update for Dec 28, 2022 💰
🗒️ Venture Capital Activity in Blockchain Surpasses 2021 Despite Rough Year
VettaFi: Bitcoin’s price has dropped by over 60% this year, but despite the fallout in the broad cryptocurrency market, blockchain projects are seeing inflows when it comes to venture capital funding.
While the pace of venture capital investment has slowed in 2022 for cryptocurrencies compared to 2021, interest in blockchain hasn’t waned. This comes despite the crypto market falling amid inflation and rising rates, as well as the fallout from the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.
“Blockchain venture capital funding has been on a downward slope since May 2022, and November was no different, with inflows declining even further,” a Cointelegraph article noted. “However, the total capital inflows for 2022 have surpassed 2021 by almost $6 billion.”
This could allude to the growing interest in the potential for blockchain technology apart from the cryptocurrency market. It underscores the ability of blockchain technology to function as its own mutually exclusive avenue for investment aside from underpinning cryptocurrencies.
“Despite a slowdown in crypto VC funding since May, the total funding for the year has exceeded the figure for 2021,” the article added. “Cointelegraph Research’s VC Database shows that a total of $36.1 billion has been raised in 2022, with less than two weeks of the year remaining. By contrast, the total funds raised in 2021 was $30.3 billion.”
🗒️ VC firms are getting stingier with startups. Tribe Capital’s struggles show why
Fortune: Venture firm Tribe Capital wrote to a select group of its co-investors earlier this month with some bad news.
Tribe was slashing its internal valuation of Canadian-British startup Invenia, on which it had bet $30 million, by 95%. Invenia co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Matthew Hudson had been “terminated” and a board-led investigation found he’d “secretly, systemically and repeatedly inflated the revenue and profitability of the company,” according to the memo, which was sent by Invenia board member and Tribe CEO Arjun Sethi.
Bloomberg News reviewed a copy of the memo, the contents and details of which, along with Hudson’s termination, haven’t previously been reported.
🗒️ How JetBlue, Alaska Airlines, and Amadeus Are Approaching Startup Investment in 2023
Skift: Executives from the venture capital arms of three large travel companies — JetBlue, Alaska Airlines, and Amadeus — each shared details with Skift about what they are focused on in 2023 and going forward.
Each of them have a strong interest in sustainability, consistent with the rest of the industry. All three companies recently invested in the same startup, Volantio, which is an optimization software platform that helps airlines more efficiently fill open seats, and it also reports on carbon emissions on a per seat basis.
But, sustainability is not all they’re looking at.
🗒️ Crypto Is Down Bad, But VCs Keep Pouring Money In
Decrypt: Given the contagion and chaos we have witnessed since Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX had a sudden multibillion-dollar coronary, you may be tempted to conclude the entire crypto industry is headed for the great Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the sky, and that nobody in their right mind could possibly still have faith in it.
And yet, even in the frigid cold of Crypto Winter, venture capital continues to pour in for certain lucky builders.
Analysts at Pitchbook report that crypto VC investment in 2022 (a brutal year across all tech) has outweighed that of both fintech and biotech, pulling in $6.5 billion over the last 12 months, $879 million of it in the last quarter.