Terra is an ambitious crypto project to build a stable coin through e-commerce

Four of the world’s largest crypto exchanges are leading a $32 million investment in an ambitious venture out of Korea that’s aiming to develop a new stable coin using e-commerce as the lynchpin.

Global exchanges Binance Labs, OKEx, Huobi Capital, and Dunamu — the firm behind Korea’s Upbit — have all poured capital into Terra, a crypto project whose founding team is headed by Daniel Shin, founder and president of TicketMonster — the $1.7 billion Korean e-commerce firm that has been owned by both Living Social and Groupon.

This is the first time global exchanges have come together on a deal, and the stellar line-up of investors includes Polychain Capital, China’s FBG Capital, Hashed, 1kx, Kenetic Capital and Arrington XRP — the crypto fund from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington .

The deal is a token-based investment round, as opposed to equity. Shin told TechCrunch that Terra plans to hold a private sale in a couple of weeks to add additional capital to this “highly strategic” set of investors. The company will eschew a public sale with retail investors, but it plans to hit exchanges — you guess which ones… — in the coming months.

Terra co-founder Daniel Shin also started Korean e-commerce unicorn Ticket Monster

Yet another stable coin

Stable coins, for the uninitiated, are tokens that are designed to remain at the same price… stable, as the name suggests.

They’re typically pegged to the U.S. dollar and are highly sought after in the world of crypto, where stability is hard, nay impossible, to find. Today, stable coins are mostly used for trading and exchange-related purposes and Tether, the controversial project backed by Bitfinex, is probably the best-known. There’s plenty of criticism around Tether, and research has suggested that Bitcoin’s phenomenal rise in late 2017 — when its value it a record high of nearly $20,000 — was fuelled by Tether manipulation.

Arguably, Tether is the best example of a stable coin, and since it is propped up by the injection of hundreds of millions of dollars on a routine basis, it would be fair to say that the concept has never worked.

That viewpoint might be a little cynical, and Terra believes it can make the concept work through mass adoption of its token. Its gateway for that is to leverage e-commerce in Asia.

While Terra is marketed as a stable coin in its whitepaper and other documents, it would be fair to see it as more of a fintech platform — think Alibaba’s Alipay on the blockchain. That’s because the project is kicking off by working with a slew of e-commerce firms across Korea and other parts of Asia.

Shin explained that Terra aims to complement existing payment solutions by offering its own Stripe -like payment option that would allow customers to pay using its coin (a name hasn’t been decided on yet). For merchants, that could mean circumventing existing payment networks like Visa, which take a cut of all revenue. On the other side, the project could help offer incentives for consumers to buy using the token, for example, through discounts that don’t add to the e-commerce platform’s cash burn.

Because buying crypto and using wallets still isn’t mainstream — and it is a clunky experience — there’s also the potential for consumers to earn tokens when they use platforms, Shin said. The token would be spendable across all supported e-commerce services.

Already, Terra has secured quite a list of partners. There are 15 e-commerce services signed up — including Woowa Brothers, Qoo10, Carousell, Pomelo, and Tiki — which between them boast a cumulative 40 million customers and some $25 billion in annual transaction volume.

Shin said the project is targeting Asia because it is the world’s most active crypto region. He believes that Terra can take a slice of the payments behind the partner businesses — he’s targeting payment GMV in the region of “tens, if not hundreds, of millions of U.S. dollars” before the end of 2019 — and in doing so set itself up for becoming a stable token by virtue of usage.

Of course, it also has its own stability engine. That features a second token — Luna — which Shin said acts as collateral by accumulating revenue by taking the small transaction fee incurred when spending the Terra token. Shin said an algorithm will use Luna to buy back the Terra token in high season to keep the price stable, while it will burn a portion of tokens to maintain stability during periods of recession. A more detailed explanation of the ‘reserve ratio’ can be found in the Terra whitepaper.

Singapore’s Carousell is among the e-commerce partners slated to work with Terra

Alipay on the blockchain

What makes Terra particularly interesting is that the intention is to build the next Alipay.

Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial, which runs Alipay, may be little known in the U.S. and Europe, but it is dripping with ambition. It is tipped to go public in the next year or two, and already it is valued at over $100 billion following a recent $14 billion funding round.

Alipay is China’s dominant mobile payment service, and it has spawned a digital bank, lending products and more. Ant claims over 500 million users, and it has spent close to $1 billion on a series of aggressive expansions across Asia and beyond as it aims to replicate its formidable Chinese business outside of the country.

Shin explained that he believes Terra could do the same in Asia where, like Alipay, it will try to leverage e-commerce (in this case its partner businesses) to go beyond payments and into financial services.

Shin explained that the plan is to roll out with initial e-commerce partners in Korea during Q4 of this year, before widening to cover Southeast Asia and beyond in 2019. One year later — 2020 — is when he believes Terra will have the required base to welcome developers and third-parties.

“Many projects open up a developer platform prior to adoption,” he explained in an interview. “Once we have tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of users is when we’ll open up.”

Exactly what that platform will look like is unclear at this point. Terra is designing a multi-chain structure in order to accommodate numerous chains with its stable coin concept, but it is yet to decide which will primary and therefore the platform for third-party development. Ethereum has tended to be that canvass, but the project is a challenging phase right now so holding out isn’t necessarily a bad thing at this point.

Terra is a hugely ambitious project in the field of often-impossible ideas that is crypto.

Taking on Alipay head-to-head is tough, developing a stable coin is impossible, but doing both lengthens the odds further still. But yet Shin and his team have won the backing of a collective of top names in the crypto space. That, if nothing else, is a good reason to keep an eye on this project.

The odds may be long but, as Shin explains it, you can readily argue that there is upside to having so many big-name partners on board.

“The worst case scenario with this project is a reverse ICO with over 10 e-commerce companies,” he explained. “But the best possible outcome is that we build a platform that competes with Alipay on the blockchain.”

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Very Good Security makes data ‘unhackable’ with $8.5M from Andreessen

“You can’t hack what isn’t there,” Very Good Security co-founder Mahmoud Abdelkader tells me. His startup assumes the liability of storing sensitive data for other companies, substituting dummy credit card or Social Security numbers for the real ones. Then when the data needs to be moved or operated on, VGS injects the original info without clients having to change their code.

It’s essentially a data bank that allows businesses to stop storing confidential info under their unsecured mattress. Or you could think of it as Amazon Web Services for data instead of servers. Given all the high-profile breaches of late, it’s clear that many companies can’t be trusted to house sensitive data. Andreessen Horowitz is betting that they’d rather leave it to an expert.

That’s why the famous venture firm is leading an $8.5 million Series A for VGS, and its partner Alex Rampell is joining the board. The round also includes NYCA, Vertex Ventures, Slow Ventures and PayPal mafioso Max Levchin. The cash builds on VGS’ $1.4 million seed round, and will pay for its first big marketing initiative and more salespeople.

“Hey! Stop doing this yourself!,” Abdelkader asserts. “Put it on VGS and we’ll let you operate on your data as if you possess it with none of the liability.” While no data is ever 100 percent unhackable, putting it in VGS’ meticulously secured vaults means clients don’t have to become security geniuses themselves and instead can focus on what’s unique to their business.

“Privacy is a part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. We should be able to build innovative applications without sacrificing our privacy and security,” says Abdelkader. He got his start in the industry by reverse-engineering games like StarCraft to build cheats and trainer software. But after studying discrete mathematics, cryptology and number theory, he craved a headier challenge.

Abdelkader co-founded Y Combinator-backed payment system Balanced in 2010, which also raised cash from Andreessen. But out-muscled by Stripe, Balanced shut down in 2015. While transitioning customers over to fellow YC alumni Stripe, Balanced received interest from other companies wanting it to store their data so they could be PCI-compliant.

Very Good Security co-founder and CEO Mahmoud Abdelkader

Now Abdelkader and his VP from Balanced, Marshall Jones, have returned with VGS to sell that as a service. It’s targeting startups that handle data like payment card information, Social Security numbers and medical info, though eventually it could invade the larger enterprise market. It can quickly help these clients achieve compliance certifications for PCI, SOC2, EI3PA, HIPAA and other standards.

VGS’ innovation comes in replacing this data with “format preserving aliases” that are privacy safe. “Your app code doesn’t know the difference between this and actually sensitive data,” Abdelkader explains. In 30 minutes of integration, apps can be reworked to route traffic through VGS without ever talking to a salesperson. VGS locks up the real strings and sends the aliases to you instead, then intercepts those aliases and swaps them with the originals when necessary.

“We don’t actually see your data that you vault on VGS,” Abdelkader tells me. “It’s basically modeled after prison. The valuables are stored in isolation.” That means a business’ differentiator is their business logic, not the way they store data.

For example, fintech startup LendUp works with VGS to issue virtual credit card numbers that are replaced with fake numbers in LendUp’s databases. That way if it’s hacked, users’ don’t get their cards stolen. But when those card numbers are sent to a processor to actually make a payment, the real card numbers are subbed in last-minute.

VGS charges per data record and operation, with the first 500 records and 100,000 sensitive API calls free; $20 a month gets clients double that, and then they pay 4 cent per record and 2 cents per operation. VGS provides access to insurance too, working with a variety of underwriters. It starts with $1 million policies that can be much larger for Fortune 500s and other big companies, which might want $20 million per incident.

Obviously, VGS has to be obsessive about its own security. A breach of its vaults could kill its brand. “I don’t sleep. I worry I’ll miss something. Are we a giant honey pot?,” Abdelkader wonders. “We’ve invested a significant amount of our money into 24/7 monitoring for intrusions.”

Beyond the threat of hackers, VGS also has to battle with others picking away at part of its stack or trying to compete with the whole, like TokenEx, HP’s Voltage, Thales’ Vormetric, Oracle and more. But it’s do-it-yourself security that’s the status quo and what VGS is really trying to disrupt.

But VGS has a big accruing advantage. Each time it works with a clients’ partners like Experian or TransUnion for a company working with credit checks, it already has a relationship with them the next time another clients has to connect with these partners. Abdelkader hopes that, “Effectively, we become a standard of data security and privacy. All the institutions will just say ‘why don’t you use VGS?’”

That standard only works if it’s constantly evolving to win the cat-and-mouse game versus attackers. While a company is worrying about the particular value it adds to the world, these intelligent human adversaries can find a weak link in their security — costing them a fortune and ruining their relationships. “I’m selling trust,” Abdelkader concludes. That peace of mind is often worth the price.

Berkshire Hathaway reportedly agrees to buy stake in One97, owner of Paytm

Berkshire Hathaway has reportedly agreed to buy a stake in One97, the owner of India’s largest digital payments service Paytm . This would mark the first time the investment firm has invested in an Indian startup. According to Indian financial news site Mint, which first broke the news, Berkshire Hathaway, the investment firm headed by Warren Buffett, is set to buy shares worth about $300 million to $350 million, at a valuation of about $10 billion to $12 billion.

Another report in Bloomberg says Berkshire Hathaway will acquire a 3% to 4% stake in One97.

Paytm’s investors already include SoftBank, which led a $450 million round in Paytm earlier this year, and Alibaba. Already India’s largest digital wallet and payment service with 230 million registered users, Paytm has recently focused on adding a host of new mobile services that could potentially turn it into a WhatsApp competitor, including a messenger and games.

A spokesperson for One97 declined to comment. TechCrunch has also contacted Berkshire Hathaway.

Japanese fintech startup Paidy lands strategic investment from Visa

A month after announcing its $55 million Series C, Japanese fintech startup Paidy has snagged a strategic investment from payment giant Visa.

Paidy didn’t disclose how much Visa put into its business, which has raised over $80 million to date, but it did say that it will work with the credit card giant to develop “new digital payment experiences” in Japan.

For those in need of a refresher, the Paidy service is aimed at making it easier to shop online in Japan, which is the world’s fourth largest e-commerce market with high credit card penetration but yet many consumers opt for cash on delivery.

The startup asserts that cash accounts for some 40 percent of the country’s 16.5 trillion yen ($148 billion) annual e-commerce spend because credit card payments are cumbersome and cash is just more simple. It’s certainly true that whipping out your card and keying in digits is a pain, while Japanese systems layer on other security checks that make the process more tedious.

Paidy’s answer is an account tied to a customer’s phone number or email address that sits as a payment option at e-commerce checkouts. Payment itself requires entry of a confirmation code, and that’s it. Added to the simplicity, Paidy also offers various payback options to effectively give users the features of a credit card.

The company claims there are 1.5 million active Paidy accounts and it is aiming to grow that figure to 11 million by 2020. The main rocket for reaching that ambitious target is onboarding large retailers who integrate the service into their online sales process. That’s a tactic that has worked well for Paidy so far, but it’s also clearly an area where Visa’s network can be massively beneficial, especially if they are joint products on offer.

With Paidy operating like a virtual credit card system that rivals plastic cards, Visa has seen enough to warrant coming on board the project, according to Chris Clark, Visa’s Asia Pacific regional president.

“We have been following Paidy’s progress and the enhanced shopping experience they provide at the time of purchase. In Japan there is enormous opportunity to bring consumers more options to pay, whether all at once or in instalments, especially when shopping across multiple channels,” Clark said in a statement.

Paidy counts Itochu Corporation, Goldman Sachs, Eight Roads — the investment arm of Fidelity — SBI Holdings, SBI’s FinTech Business Innovation LPS, Arbor Ventures and SIG Asia as existing investors.

Alibaba confirms it raised $3B for its newly consolidated local services business

Alibaba has confirmed that it has raised $3 billion for its new-look local services business after it united its Koubei local services business with Ele.me, the on-demand delivery business it recently acquired.

The company said it put the capital into the business alongside SoftBank, according to a note within its financial results that were released today. TechCrunch understands that the actual amount raised may increase as existing Koubei investors have an option to be a part of the new round, while new backers may also be added. Bloomberg previously reported the consolidation and investment.

From the filing:

We have established a company to hold Ele.me and Koubei as our combined flagship local services vehicle, which we plan to separately capitalize with investments from Alibaba, Ant Financial and third-party investors. As of the time of this announcement, we have received over US$3 billion in new investment commitments, including from Alibaba and SoftBank. As a result of this reorganization, subject to closing conditions, we will consolidate Koubei, which would result in a material one-off revaluation gain when the transaction closes.

Koubei, the company’s local services platform, got a $1.1 billion injection in early 2017 and is predominantly focused on enabling local commerce. Other investors besides Alibaba include Silver Lake, CDH Investments, Yunfeng Capital and Primavera Capital.

Ele.me, meanwhile, first landed an investment from Alibaba two years ago. The e-commerce giant bought it out in April in a deal that valued Ele.me at $9.5 billion. Ele.me is a key piece of Alibaba’s recent partnership with Starbucks — the on-demand service will be used to deliver coffee to Starbucks customers across China as the U.S. coffee giant seeks out new growth opportunities and competes with rival services.

The deal may be a footnote in Alibaba’s Q1 earnings report but it is representative of a new battle that’s taking place to own China’s ‘local services’ market. That is on-demand services such as groceries deliveries, takeouts, movie tickets and other commercial activities within local areas.

Meituan Dianping, a firm backed by Alibaba rival Tencent, has led the charge into local services. The company was formed from a merger deal involving China’s two largest group deals sites in 2015 and it has since raised significant capital, including a $4 billion round two years ago.

Meituan’s next act is an IPO in Hong Kong, and the ambitious firm has expanded into ride-hailing to take on Didi Chuxing, bike-sharing via a $2.7 billion acquisition of Mobike, and even Southeast Asia, where it invested in ride-hailing startup Go-Jek.

Local services — and in particular food delivery — remains its core focus. Alibaba is betting that pairing Koubei with Ele.me, throwing in a couple of billion and adding a dash of SoftBank can give it a strong rival that can compete for China’s ‘online to offline’ market. Another war is brewing.

Alibaba shrugs off China concerns as revenue jumps 61%

Mail digitizing service Earth Class Mail acquires receipt digitizing service Shoeboxed

Earth Class Mail, a company that digitizes your physical mail so you don’t have to go to the mailbox every day, today announced that it has acquired receipt scanning and expense tracking service Shoeboxed.

The reason Earth Class Mail would be interested in Shoeboxed is pretty obvious, given that both companies focus on taking the pain out of dealing with paper. Both services will continue to operate as usual, though we’ll likely see some deep integrations between the two over time.

Shoeboxed, which launched eleven years ago, currently digitizes over five million documents per year for its over 1 million customers in 90 countries. Its main market is small businesses in the U.S., though, which make up 500,000 of its users.

“When we started in 2008 and put the first iPhone app in the app store to scan receipts; there was one other powerhouse around helping small business go digital — Earth Class Mail,” the company’s CEO and co-founder Tobias Walter tells us. “The combined power of our two companies will be a massive shift for small businesses to finally become paperless and say goodbye to old workflows that cost them hours of their productivity. I could not be happier with the new home we found for the company, the team, and our customers!”

What sets Earth Class Mail apart from the United States Postal Service’s Informed Delivery service is that it not only scans the outside of the envelopes that you are about to receive but that you can also give the company permission to scan all the documents inside, too (and the price you pay for the service depends mostly on how many of these full scans you want per month). While Oregon-based Earth Class Mail had to file for bankruptcy protection in 2015, its new leadership team turned the company around. The company says that its annual run rate is now $10 million, up 20 since Jess Garza become its new CEO last December.

Walter also notes that users would occasionally send unopened envelopes, too, but the company wasn’t allowed to open them. These customers can now easily become Earth Class Mail users.

Over the course of its existence, Shoeboxed only raised a moderate amount of funding, with a $580,000 Series A round led by Novak Biddle Venture Partners in 2008 (when Series A rounds were still much smaller than today) and a $1.4 million Series B round in 2011. The financial details of today’s acquisition were not disclosed.

Braavo raises $6M for its app financing business

Braavo, a startup that provides financing to mobile app developers, is announcing that it has raised $6 million in Series A funding.

The might not seem like much compared to the $70 million that Braavo announced raising last year, but that was debt financing, used to loan money to developers. This new round is equity financing, used to fund Braavo’s own operations and growth.

Co-founder Mark Loranger told me Braavo was founded in 2015 in response to the “new dynamics” of mobile app businesses. And it’s worked with developers including Verv, Fanatee and Pixite.

“The data is there to create ways to provide financing to companies that otherwise would have to raise more [venture funding] and dilute themselves,” Loranger said.

For its first financing product, Braavo looks at Apple App Store and Google Play data, specifically the amount of money already earned by an app but not yet paid out. It can then provide an advance on some of that revenue.

Loranger described Braavo’s newer product as “more exciting” and “more data-driven.” It looks at user acquisition, user engagement and revenue, projecting how revenue would grow if a developer had more money for user acquisition — and then it can provide debt financing for that growth.

Braavo gets paid back as “a fixed percentage of future earnings,” Loranger said, so its incentives are aligned with the developers: “We only make our money back as they earn more revenue in the future.” And if app revenue doesn’t grow as anticipated, that just means Braavo gets paid back more slowly.

“We’ve never, ever lost a dime,” he said.

The company is also announcing the launch of a new analytics product that will allow businesses to track key metrics like the lifetime value of their customers.

Loranger said this will be available for free to anyone to anyone with a “revenue-generating mobile app business.” Rather than charging for the product directly, the goal is to “create more success for mobile app business that may end up qualifying for funding.”

The new round brings Braavo’s total equity financing to nearly $8 million. It was led by e.ventures, with participation from SWS Venture Capital (founded by Green Dot CEO Steve Streit) and Shipt CEO Bill Smith.

RDMD attacks rare diseases with data mined from health records

You wouldn’t expect a medical app to get its start as a Snapchat competitor. Neither did video chat startup TapTalk’s founder Onno Faber. But four years ago he was diagnosed with a rare disease called Neurofibromatosis Type 2 that caused tumors leading Onno to lose hearing in one ear. He’s amongst the one in ten people with an uncommon health condition suffering from the lack of data designed to invent treatments for their ails. And he’s now the co-founder of RDMD.

Emerging from stealth today, RDMD aggregates and analyzes medical records and sells the de-identified data to pharmaceutical companies to help them develop medicines. In exchange for access to the data, patients gets their fragmented medical records organized into an app they can use to track their treatment and get second opinions. It’s like Flatiron Health, the Google-backed cancer data startup that just got bought for $2 billion, but for rare diseases.

Now RDMD is announcing it’s raised a $3 million seed round led by Lux Capital and joined by Village Global, Shasta, Garuda, First Round’s Healthcare Coop, and a ton of top healthtech angels including Flatiron investors and board members. The cash will help RDMD expand to build out its product and address more rare diseases.

RDMD founders (from left): Nancy Yu and Onno Faber

We believe that the traditional way rare disease R&D is done needs to change” RDMD CEO Nancy Yu tells TechCrunch. The former head of corp dev at 23andme explains that, “There are over 7,000 rare diseases and growing, yet <5% of them have an FDA-approved therapy . . . it’s a massive problem.” 

While data infrastructure supports development of treatments for more common diseases like cancer and diabetes, rare diseases have been ignored because it’s wildly expensive and difficult to collect the high-quality data required to invent new medicines. But “RDMD generates research-grade, regulatory-grade data from patient medical records for use in rare disease drug R&D” says Yu. The more data it can collect, the more pharma companies can do to help patients.

Trading Utility For Patient Data

With RDMD’s app, a patient’s medical data that’s strewn across hospitals and health facilities can be compiled, organized and synthesized. Handwritten physicians’ notes and faxes are digitized with optical character recognition, structuring the data for scientific research. RDMD lays out a patients’ records in a disease-specific timeline that summarizes their data that can be kept updated, delivered to specialists for consultations, or shared with their family and caregivers.

If users opt in, that data can be anonymized and provided to research organizations, hospitals, and pharma companies that pay RDMD, though these patients can delete their accounts at any time. Since it’s straight from the medical records, the data is reliable enough to be regulation-compliant and research-ready. That allows it to accelerate the drug development process that’s both lucrative and life-saving. “It normally takes millions of dollars over several years to gather this type of data in rare diseases” Yu notes. “For the first time, we have a centralized and consented set of data for use in translational research, in a fraction of the time and cost.”

So far, RDMD has enrolled 150 patients with neurofibromatosis. But the potential to expand to other rare diseases attracted a previous pre-seed round from Village Global and new funding from angels like Clover Health CEO and Flatiron board member Vivek Garipalli, Flatiron investor and GV (Google Ventures) partner Vineeta Agarwala, Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal, former 23andme president Andy Page, and the husband and wife duo of former Instagram VP of product Kevin Weil and 137 Ventures managing director Elizabeth Weil.

“Onno and Nancy realized there’s an opportunity to do in rare diseases what Flatiron has done in oncology — to aggregate clinical data from patients, and to leverage that data in clinical trials and other use cases for biotech and pharma” says Shasta partner Nikhil Basu Trivedi. RDMD will be competing against pharma contract research organizations that incur high costs for collecting data the startup gets for free from patients in exchange for its product. Luckily, Flatiron’s exit paved the way for industry acceptance of RDMD’s model.

“The biggest risk for our company is if we lose our focus on providing real, immediate value to rare disease patients and families. Patients are the reason we are all here, and only with their trust can we fundamentally change how rare disease drug research is done” says Yu. RDMD will have to ensure it can protect the privacy of patients, the security of data, and the efficacy of its application to drug development.

Hindering this process is just one more consequence of our fractured medical records. Hopefully if startups like RDMD and Flatiron can demonstrate the massive value created by unifying medical data, it will pressure the healthcare power players to cooperate on a true industry standard.

Global unicorn exits hit multi-year high in 2018

Unicorn exits are taking flight.

With the IPO window wide open, an apparent record number of venture-backed companies privately valued over $1 billion have launched public offerings this year. Crunchbase data shows 23 unicorn IPOs globally so far in 2018, well outpacing full-year totals for 2016 and 2017.

Collectively, this year’s newly public unicorns are doing pretty well too. Most priced shares around or above expectations. We’re also seeing a lot of impressive aftermarket gains. At least six are currently valued at more than $10 billion.

Meanwhile, unicorn M&A volumes are chugging along as well, with at least 11 deals so far this year. Big transactions like Walmart’s $16 billion acquisition of Flipkart and Microsoft’s $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub have helped boost the totals.

It all adds up to some enormous numbers. We’ll delve into those in more detail below, focusing on year-over-year comparisons, geographic breakdown, biggest exits and more.

How 2018 compares to prior years

First off, a bit of context. A lot of startup-related metrics are on track to hit multi-year or record highs in 2018. These are lofty times for supergiant funding rounds, venture capital fundraising and unicorn investment, to name a few. Given that pattern, it’s not surprising to see a pickup in unicorn exits too, including some really big names like Xiaomi, Spotify and Dropbox.

That said, if one focuses on anticipated exits, as opposed to the ones that already occurred, even this year’s phenomenal IPO streak may seem comparatively humdrum. There’s mounting excitement around the potential for even bigger offerings next year from Uber, Airbnb, Didi Chuxing and others.

If markets don’t implode in the next few months, and at least some of these household names make it to market, it’s likely 2019 will be an even bigger year for unicorn IPOs than 2018. Unfortunately, however, we don’t have hard data on the future, so we’re left comparing this year to the prior two in the chart below:

As you can see, we’re already well ahead of last year’s totals. On the IPO front, not only are the 2018 unicorn offerings more numerous, they’re also bigger. In 2017, out of 16 unicorn IPOs, there were two at initial valuations above $10 billion (Snap and online insurer ZhongAn). So far this year, there have been five.

Geography of unicorn exits

The exiting unicorns are also a geographically diverse bunch, with the U.S. and China accounting for the lion’s share and Europe trailing a distant third.

In the chart below, we look at the geographic breakdown in more detail:

While the U.S. produced the largest number of unicorn exits, they weren’t the biggest. Notably, this year’s most valuable IPOs and M&A deal involved companies based in Europe and Asia.

Of the six 2018 debuts currently valued at $10 billion or more, detailed below, only one, Dropbox, is a U.S. company. In the chart below, we look at who topped the rankings:

Adding it up

The grand tally of 2018 exits provides a clear counterpoint to skeptics (your author included), who questioned whether fast-growing unicorn populations and valuations would hold up with acquirers and public market investors.

It appears prices are keeping up nicely. The vast majority of U.S. unicorn exits this year, for instance, were close to or above private market valuations. Among U.S. IPOs the only big fizzle was Domo. While Dropbox looked like a “down round IPO” at first, strong aftermarket performance has the company above its highest reported private valuation.

The year’s largest unicorn IPO — China’s Xiaomi — also managed to slightly top its last reported private valuation, even after pricing shares for its June IPO far below initial projections.

All these giant exits add up. The unicorns that went public this year currently have a collective market capitalization north of $200 billion. Add in roughly $45 billion from M&A deals, and we’re talking close to a quarter of a trillion (!) dollars in post-exit value.

These big exits come as investors continue to funnel record sums into high-valuation private companies. So far this year, investors have poured more than $200 billion into venture and growth-stage startups, with more than $70 billion going into companies already valued at $1 billion or more.

In sum, we’re seeing big numbers all around — going in as investments and coming out as exits. Eventually, all parties wind down. But for now, this one rages on.

Movado Group acquires watch startup MVMT

The Movado Group, which sells multiple brands, including Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger and Hugo Boss, has purchased MVMT, a small watch company founded by Jacob Kassan and Kramer LaPlante in 2013. The company, which advertised heavily on Facebook, logged $71 million in revenue in 2017. Movado purchased the company for $100 million.

“The acquisition of MVMT will provide us greater access to millennials and advances our Digital Center of Excellence initiative with the addition of a powerful brand managed by a successful team of highly creative, passionate and talented individuals,” Movado Chief Executive Efraim Grinberg said.

MVMT makes simple watches for the millennial market in the vein of Fossil or Daniel Wellington. However, the company carved out a niche by advertising heavily on social media and being one of the first microbrands with a solid online presence.

“It provides an opportunity to Movado Group’s portfolio as MVMT continues to cross-sell products within its existing portfolio, expand product offerings within its core categories of watches, sunglasses and accessories, and grow its presence in new markets through its direct-to-consumer and wholesale business,” said Grinberg.

MVMT is well-known as a “fashion brand,” namely a brand that sells cheaper quartz watches that are sold on style versus complexity or cost. Their pieces include standard three-handed models and newer quartz chronographs.