Varun Anand’s Post

Really proud to partner with the team at Clay. Congrats again to Kareem Amin, Varun Anand, and the team on such incredible traction and amazing fundraising story. There are some things that make them a standout in our minds:   1. Founder-led focus and ownership from two amazing founders, Kareem + Varun 2. Clarity on who it’s for and what it does 3. Focused on delivering one place for all things GTM data vs. sprawling your stack of data providers 4. The rise of the “GTM Engineer” deliver value first, focus on making people love Clay — few companies we work with prioritize the customer obsession-factor more than they do. It’s their true “win the customer at all costs” North Star 5. Build an incredible community — how often do you see non-employees of Clay posting on LI? It’s INSANE!! (Prioritizing customer love allows for this) 6. Build an incredible reputation to focus on value-based efforts for people to justify more adoption of Clay (look at the logos on their website — you must show true value to acquire those types of businesses, especially at their stage) These guys are just getting started!!

We are 💪🏼 preparing for the Demo day, a crucial milestone in our startup's journey! On June 7th, while Sandra Leonor was enjoying her birthday 🎂, I had the pleasure of hosting the Rocket Sessions and being nostalgic. 😆 Manuel Barbosa joined us on a session that provided a few insights to our startups on fundraising strategy, from an investor perspective. After that, we took time to do a pitch practice group session with the cohort, preparing for the Demo Day and other potential future pitching opportunities - thanks to our founders who did their pitch (Jsonify, StrategyScout, Humaned, True Odysseys and ZEN8). A few key conclusions: 💰 Raising capital is like any sales & marketing process - you should plan and prepare for it; 💡 Every investor is different and has their own way of dealing with meetings; 📌 Make sure to have a call-to-action at the end of your conversations with investors, and don't forget to add them to your investors' report to stay on the radar; 🔁 Give investors a reason to re-engage. The Demo Day of this Spring Batch is approaching, and we can't wait to see our founders show their progress to our partners, investors, and mentors! João, Head of Portfolio at Unicorn Factory Lisboa.

The closer a startup gets to IPO, the more its valuation is based on current revenue instead of the promise of future growth. This is reflected in how the implied revenue multiple falls with each successive round, until by Series E a startup should be broadly in alignment with the public market it is about to enter. Deeptech companies, especially hardware, can command what appear to be extremely high multiples early on (it's not unusual to see early stage AI companies with revenue multiples of 100+), as their ability to generate revenue at scale comes after a lengthy period of R&D. In this article, Jason M. Lemkin shares his thoughts on the data from Carta, graphed out by Michael Ho, offering a neat representation of the disruption to valuations over the last few years: ➡️ https://lnkd.in/e2UhGQEv #Startups #VC #Fundraising

How to fundraise when your deep tech startup sounds like sci-fi - https://lnkd.in/gYHFfaAW - Your pitch may well be the first time a VC has even heard of a concept, so how can they possibly work out how to invest in your idea when it sounds like sci-fi? - ShipWr3ck - \<div\>Your pitch may well be the first time a VC has even heard of a concept, so how can they possibly work out how to invest in your idea when it sounds like sci-fi?\</div\> ~ Shared by https://shipwr3ck.com/

It’s been a big year for Captions, and it’s only July. Building on this momentum, we’re excited to announce our $60M Series C, led by Index Ventures. That brings our total capital raised to $100M, which we’ll be investing in AI video research right here in New York City. We built Captions to make it easy for anyone, anywhere to tell their story with a video — we believe that AI unlocks new possibilities to generate and edit talking videos, and that AI will change the future of video as we know it. Looking at the past year, there’s a lot to be proud of: we hit 10M+ global creators, launched a collection of world-first generative features, and our customers created over 3M videos each month — telling diverse stories, transcending language barriers, and even falling in love, as profiled in the New York Times. Our team also grew from 15 to 60 here in New York City. We’re thrilled to welcome back returning investors Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital, and new investors Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and Jared Leto to this round. We’re grateful for your support. Read more about our fundraise in Bloomberg News, covered by Rachel Metz. If you’re interested in joining a fast-moving team that’s defining the future of AI in video, check out our careers page: https://lnkd.in/gYQ-B8mm —we’d love to talk.

You can see from the post below how good Elliott Gaspar is at making financial forecasting easy to understand. You can expect more delightfully simple explanations designed to demystify what it takes to attract angel investors for your startup when we co-host our webinar "Beyond the pitch deck" next Friday (24th) at midday. Hope to see you there 👇 Link to book in Elliott's post

The Matthew Effect in Series A Valuations: A tale of haves, and have nots. Series A SaaS pre-money valuations have essentially doubled since 2019. But this growth isn't uniform: • Top performers (top 25%) reached $76M+ in the first half of 2024 • Median valuations have stagnated at $44M • Bottom quartile have lingered at $30M Key observations: • # of Series A rounds plummeted 43% from 332 (H1 2021) to 145 (H1 2024) • 2023 was an outlier; first half of 2024 data mirrors first half of 2022 We all know there's a Series A crunch, but does that mean the second half of 2024 will look more like the first half of 2023 (a tightening in valuations)? Although this graph is labeled as "SaaS startups," it would not shock me if most of the capital skewing this chart was categorized as ai. Anyone else seeing similar patterns across other sectors?

The valuation gap is real in AI. Founders need to be super thoughtful to both focus on growth and valuation and the factors that contribute driving it including: Brand, tech/IP, recurring revenue, a scalable/predictable CAC customer success, new markets, etc. #AI #Valuation #Growth&Valuation

We all left wild overvaluations in 2021 where they belong...right? Maybe not. There's a strange dichotomy happening right now in startups, exemplified by the Series A data we pulled below. On the one hand, fundraising difficulty has shot upwards in recent quarters, limiting the total number of rounds raised. On the other hand, we are inundated with headlines of (mostly AI) companies raising at truly boom-times valuations. I think the graphic does a great job of illustrating our current confusing moment. In H1 2019, the 50th percentile for pre-money valuations was $26M (Series A SaaS companies only, primary rounds). The 95th pct at that time was $96M. Now that's a pretty large gap. We're talking a 3.7x jump from the middle to the top end. But today things are even more skewed. 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗔 𝗦𝗮𝗮𝘀 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗛𝟭 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰 • 50th pct: $44M • 95th pct: $203M • Gap: ~4.6x That 4.6x gap is the largest of the past 5 years and likely the past 10, though I don't have full data to prove it. Now perhaps the 95th percentile Series A company today is vastly different from their counterpart in 2021 or 2022. Maybe they have a much firmer financial foundation. Perhaps they're even peeking around a corner at profitability. Certainly they're likely to have AI in their name or domain. But I can't help but feel like we might have exchanged one bubble for another. Here's hoping the Series A outliers of today fare better! #cartadata #SeriesA #valuations #fundraising #startups #founders ---------- Data, data, everywhere - and not a drop to drink. Unless you're subscribed to the Data Minute newsletter! Sign up at the link in graphic for excellent startup visualizations delivered every Thursday morning.