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.

Coinbase wants to be Facebook Connect for crypto. The blockchain giant plans to develop “Login with Coinbase” or a similar identity platform for decentralized app developers to make it much easier for users to sign up and connect their crypto wallets. To fuel that platform, today Coinbase announced it has acquired Distributed Systems, a startup founded in 2015 that was building an identity standard for dApps called the Clear Protocol.

The five-person Distributed Systems team and its technology will join Coinbase. Three of the team members will work with Coinbase’s Toshi decentralized mobile browser team, while CEO Nikhil Srinivasan and his co-founder Alex Kern are forming the new decentralized identity team that will work on the Login with Coinbase product. They’ll be building it atop the “know your customer” anti-money laundering data Coinbase has on its 20 million customers. Srinivasan tells me the goal is to figure out “How can we allow that really rich identity data to enable a new class of applications?”

Distributed Systems had raised a $1.7 million seed round last year led by Floodgate and was considering raising a $4 million to $8 million round this summer. But Srinivasan says, “No one really understood what we’re building,” and it wanted a partner with KYC data. It began talking to Coinbase Ventures about an investment, but after they saw Distributed Systems’ progress and vision, “they quickly tried to move to find a way to acquire us.”

Distributed Systems began to hold acquisition talks with multiple major players in the blockchain space, and the CEO tells me it was deciding between going to “Facebook, or Robinhood, or Binance, or Coinbase,” having been in formal talks with at least one of the first three. Of Coinbase the CEO said, they “were able to convince us they were making big bets, weaving identity across their products.” The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Coinbase’s plan to roll out the Login with Coinbase-style platform is an SDK that others apps could integrate, though that won’t necessarily be the feature’s name. That mimics the way Facebook colonized the web with its SDK and login buttons that splashed its brand in front of tons of new and existing users. This turned Facebook into a fundamental identity utility beyond its social network.

Developers eager to improve conversions on their signup flow could turn to Coinbase instead of requiring users to set up whole new accounts and deal with crypto-specific headaches of complicated keys and procedures for connecting their wallet to make payments. One prominent dApp developer told me yesterday that forcing users to set up the MetaMask browser extension for identity was the part of their signup flow where they’re losing the most people.

This morning Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong confirmed these plans to work on an identity SDK. When Coinbase investor Garry Tan of Initialized Capital wrote that “The main issue preventing dApp adoption is lack of native SDK so you can just download a mobile app and a clean fiat to crypto in one clean UX. Still have to download a browser plugin and transfer Eth to Metamask for now Too much friction,” Armstrong replied “On it :)”

In effect, Coinbase and Distributed Systems could build a safer version of identity than we get offline. As soon as you give your Social Security number to someone or it gets stolen, it can be used anywhere without your consent, and that leads to identity theft. Coinbase wants to build a vision of identity where you can connect to decentralized apps while retaining control. “Decentralized identity will let you prove that you own an identity, or that you have a relationship with the Social Security Administration, without making a copy of that identity,” writes Coinbase’s PM for identity B. Byrne, who’ll oversee Srinivasan’s new decentralized identity team. “If you stretch your imagination a little further, you can imagine this applying to your photos, social media posts, and maybe one day your passport too.”

Considering Distributed Systems and Coinbase are following the Facebook playbook, they may soon have competition from the social network. It’s spun up its own blockchain team and an identity and single sign-on platform for dApps is one of the products I think Facebook is most likely to build. But given Coinbase’s strong reputation in the blockchain industry and its massive head start in terms of registered crypto users, today’s acquisition well position it to be how we connect our offline identity with the rising decentralized economy.

Noisy open offices don’t foster collaboration, they kill it, according to a Harvard study that found the less-private floor plan led to a 73 percent drop in face-to-face interaction between employees and a rise in emailing. The problem is plenty of young companies and big corporations have already bought into the open office fad. But a new startup called ROOM is building a prefabricated, self-assembled solution. It’s the Ikea of office phone booths.

The $3495 ROOM One is a sound-proofed, ventilated, powered booth that can be built in new or existing offices to give employees a place to take a video call or get some uninterrupted flow time to focus on work. For comparison, ROOM co-founder Morten Meisner-Jensen says “Most phone booths are $8,000 to $12,000. The cheapest competitor to us is $6,000 — almost twice as much.” Though booths start at $4,500 from TalkBox and $3,995 from Zenbooth, they tack on $1,250 and $1,650 for shipping while ROOM ships for free. They’re all dividing the market of dividing offices.

The idea might seem simple, but the booths could save businesses a ton of money on lost productivity, recruitment, and retention if it keeps employees from going crazy amidst sales call cacophony. Less than a year after launch, ROOM has hit a $10 million revenue run rate thanks to 200 clients ranging from startups to Salesforce, Nike, NASA, and JP Morgan. That’s attracted a $2 million seed round from Slow Ventures that adds to angel funding from Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen. “I am really excited about it since it is probably the largest revenue generating company Slow has seen at the time of our initial Seed stage investment” says partner Kevin Colleran.

“It’s not called ROOM because we build rooms” Meisner-Jensen tells me. “It’s called ROOM because we want to make room for people, make room for privacy, and make room for a better work environment.”

Phone Booths, Not Sweatboxes

You might be asking yourself, enterprising reader, why you couldn’t just go to Home Depot, buy some supplies, and build your own in-office phone booth for way less than $3,500. Well, ROOM’s co-founders tried that. The result was…moist.

Meisner-Jensen has design experience from the Danish digital agency Revolt that he started before co-founding digital book service Mofibo and selling it to Storytel. “In my old job we had to go outside and take the call, and I’m from Copenhagen so that’s a pretty cold experience half the year.” His co-founder Brian Chen started Y Combinator-backed smart suitcase company Bluesmart where he was VP of operations. They figured they could attack the office layout issue with hammers and saws. I mean, they do look like superhero alter-egos.

“To combat the issues I myself would personally encounter with open offices, as well as colleagues, we tried to build a private ‘phone booth’ ourselves” says Meisner-Jensen. “We didn’t quite understand the specifics of air ventilation or acoustics at the time, so the booth got quite warm – warm enough that we coined it ‘the sweatbox.’”

With ROOM, they got serious about the product. The 10 square foot ROOM One booth ships flat and can be assembled in under 30 minutes by two people with a hex wrench. All it needs is an outlet to plug into to power its light and ventilation fan. Each is built from 1088 recycled plastic bottles for noise cancelling so you’re not supposed to hear anything from outsides. The whole box is 100 percent recyclable plus it can be torn down and rebuilt if your startup implodes and you’re being evicted from your office.

The ROOM One features a bar-height desk with outlets and a magnetic bulletin board behind it, though you’ll have to provide your own stool of choice. It actually designed not to be so comfy that you end up napping inside, which doesn’t seem like it’d be a problem with this somewhat cramped spot. “To solve the problem with noise at scale you want to provide people with space to take a call but not camp out all day” Meisner-Jensen notes.

A Place To Get Into Flow

Couldn’t office managers just buy noise-cancelling headphones for everyone? “It feels claustrophobic to me” he laughs, but then outlines why a new workplace trend requires more than headphones. “People are doing video calls and virtual meetings much, much more. You can’t have all these people walking by you and looking at your screen. [A booth is] also giving you your own space to do your own work which I don’t think you’d get from a pair of Bose. I think it has to be a physical space.”

But with plenty of companies able to construct physical spaces, it will be a challenge for ROOM to convey to subtleties of its build quality that warrant its price. “The biggest risk for ROOM right now are copycats” Meisner-Jensen admits. “Someone entering our space claiming to do what we’re doing better but cheaper.” Alternatively, ROOM could lock in customers by offering a range of office furniture products. The co-founder hinted at future products, saying ROOM is already receiving demand for bigger multi-person prefab conference rooms and creative room divider solutions.

The importance of privacy goes beyond improved productivity when workers are alone. If they’re exhausted from overstimulation in a chaotic open office, they’ll have less energy for purposeful collaboration when the time comes. The bustle could also make them reluctant to socialize in off-hours, which could lead them to burn out and change jobs faster. Tech companies in particular are in a constant war for talent, and ROOM Ones could be perceived as a bigger perk than free snacks or a ping-pong table that only makes the office louder.

“I don’t think the solution is to go back to a world of cubicles and corner offices” Meisner-Jensen concludes. It could take another decade for office architects to correct the overenthusiasm for open offices despite the research suggesting their harm. For now, ROOM’s co-founder is concentrating on “solving the issue of noise at scale” by asking “How do we make the current workspaces work in the best way possible?”

Google parent Alphabet has invested $375 million in next-gen health insurance company, Oscar Health. Google has been a longtime supporter of the six-year-old New York company, having previously invested in Oscar through its Capital G investment wing and Verily health and life sciences research wing.

“Alphabet has invested in Oscar over many years and has seen the company and its team up close. We’re thrilled to invest further to help Oscar in its next phase of growth,” an Alphabet spokesperson told TechCrunch.

That $165 million round raised back in March valued the health startup at around $3 billion. The new round maintains a similar valuation, while giving Alphabet a 10 percent share in Oscar. The deal also has longtime Google employee and former CEO Salar Kamangar joining Oscar’s board.

Oscar co-founder and CEO Mario Schlosser announced the news in an interview with Wired, telling the site, “We can hire more engineers, we can hire more data scientists, more product designers, more smart clinicians who can think about health care a different way. It’s the acceleration of that product roadmap that fascinates us the most. The second, more tangible piece, is that we’re launching new product lines.”

Part of that product expansion includes getting into Medicare Advantage in 2020, which is a deviation from the current offerings in the individual and employer insurance markets. Oscar started out by offering insurance for individuals, growing rapidly during the launch of the Affordable Care Act and then rolling into small business offerings with its product Oscar for Business. Medicare represents a new vertical for the company, adding to its existing focus on both the individual and employer insurance markets.

“Oscar will accelerate the pursuit of its mission: to make our health care system work for consumers,” Schlosser said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “We will continue to build a member experience that lowers costs and improves care, and to bring Oscar to more people — deepening our expansion into the individual and small business markets while entering a new business segment, Medicare Advantage, in 2020.”

Startup exit tallies commonly underestimate biotech returns. Unlike most tech deals, the biggest profits in bio often come long after an IPO or acquisition.

Take Juno Therapeutics, a publicly traded cancer immunology company that sold to pharma giant Celgene this year for $9 billion. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like a deal that would impact Juno’s early investors.

After all, Juno went public back in 2014. Though the Seattle company raised more than $300 million as a private company, pre-IPO backers had years to cash out at healthy multiples.

Yet some held on. Bob Nelsen, managing director of ARCH Venture Partners, Juno’s largest VC backer, told Crunchbase News that his firm was still holding nearly its entire 15 percent pre-IPO stake when Celgene bought the company.

In the end, the acquisition netted ARCH’s limited partners 23 times their money, bringing in close to a billion dollars. It’s an exceptional return, even by venture home run standards.¹

“We tend to distribute on milestones, not financing events,” Nelsen said of his firm’s approach to exiting a portfolio investment. That often means holding for years after an IPO awaiting positive clinical trial outcomes or other value-creating inflection points.

For public companies, that can be done over time or all at once, and usually comes in the form of company shares rather than cash.

So when is it an exit?

It’s outcomes like Juno that help explain why life sciences, despite bringing fewer first-day IPO pops and buzz-generating unicorn exits than the tech sector, still consistently attracts roughly a third of venture investment. Big exits do happen. But oftentimes it’s not with a lot of fanfare and usually not with a public market debut.

“I don’t think IPOs are ever an exit in biotech. It’s always a financing event,” Nelsen says. While ARCH may hold shares longer than the typical VC, he says it’s not uncommon to hang on the stakes for a while post-IPO.

That IPO-and-hold strategy appears to have worked out well for the firm on other occasions. Other portfolio companies that went public and were later acquired for multiple billions include Receptos, a drug developer, and Kythera Biopharmaceuticals, best known for an injectable to reduce chin fat.

Using Crunchbase data, we looked to see how common it is for a venture-backed biotech company to go public and then sell a few years later for multiple billions. We found at least eight examples of companies selling for $2 billion or more in the past five years that went public less than four years before the acquisition. (See list here.) Altogether, these acquisitions were valued at more than $47 billion.

Racking up post-IPO gains

It’s also not uncommon for biotech startups to grow into multi-billion dollar public companies a few years after IPO.

Using Crunchbase data, we put together a list of a dozen life science companies that went public in roughly the past five years and have recent market values ranging from $1.5 billion to nearly $9 billion. (This is a sampling, not a comprehensive data set, and was assembled based on exits of several top-tier life science VCs.)

On top was gene therapy juggernaut Bluebird Bio, which has seen a seven-fold rise in its stock price since going public five years ago. Next was Sage Therapeutics, a developer of therapies for central nervous system disorders, up more than six-fold since its IPO four years ago, reaching a market cap of nearly $8 billion.

Then on the device side there’s Inogen, a maker of portable oxygen concentrators for patients with respiratory ailments. It went public at a valuation of less than $300 million in 2014. Today it’s worth around $4.3 billion.

Yes, it’s true tech stocks can see massive gains a few years after going public, too. But the drivers are usually different. In tech, a company may see its stock jump after a big rise in sales, but it probably had sales in prior quarters. The business hasn’t fundamentally changed; it’s just improved.

Moreover, tech venture capitalists do generally consider an IPO an exit. While insiders usually can’t sell shares immediately, they’re typically comfortable liquidating when they can around the IPO price.

For bio, hitting key milestones changes the entire value proposition. A company can go from having no marketable product and no sales to quickly having one or both of those things.

Milestones and money

Returns from biotech startup M&A exits are also hard to pin down because of the widespread use of milestone payments. Buyers pay an upfront price with the agreement of more to come following favorable clinical trial results and a commercially successful therapy.

Often, it’s several multiples more to come if milestones are met. Take Impact Biomedicines, one of this year’s biggest private company exits. Celgene bought the company for $1.1 billion. However, the deal could be valued at up to $7 billion over time.

But the probability of hitting all the milestones seems low. To get the full $7 billion, global annual net sales of Impact’s therapies would have to exceed $5 billion. However, some milestones look more feasible, such as a $1.25 billion payment for obtaining regulatory approval.

This kind of deal structure is pretty common, and not just for M&A. A study by medical news site STAT analyzed nearly 700 biotech licensing deals and found that, on average, just 14 percent of the total announced value was paid out up front.

As with returns from post-IPO acquisitions, it’s hard to gauge just how well investors end up doing on these milestone-based purchases. The largest payoffs can be years down the road.

The opposite of tech

If it seems like the dynamics of a bio exit are, in many ways, the opposite of a tech exit, it’s worth considering how different the two sectors are at the early stages, too.

In the tech startup world, it’s common for a company to launch with an idea that sounds silly (tweeting, scooter sharing, air mattress rentals) and then suddenly be worth billions.

Bio companies are kind of the reverse. Practically every one sounds like a great idea (curing cancer, alleviating pain, treating neurodegenerative disease), and many turn out to be worth nothing. Investments that work out, however, may take a while, but eventually deliver in a big way.

1. Making 23 times your money back is exceptional at all stages of investment. However, when it does happen, it’s most common at the seed stage for investment, where investors put in single digit millions or less. In the case of ARCH, 23X it is a particularly high return because it encompasses all the rounds Juno raised before going public.

Facebook had a rough day yesterday when its stock plunged after a poor earnings report. What better way to pick yourself up and dust yourself off than to buy a little something for yourself. Today the company announced it has acquired Redkix, a startup that provides tools to communicate more effectively by combining email with a more formal collaboration tool. The companies did not reveal the acquisition price.

Redkix burst out of the gate two years ago with a $17 million seed round, a hefty seed amount by any measure. What prompted this kind of investment was a tool that combined a collaboration tool like Slack or Workplace by Facebook with email. People could collaborate in Redkix itself, or if you weren’t a registered user, you could still participate by email, providing a more seamless way to work together.

Alan Lepofsky, who covers enterprise collaboration at Constellation Research, sees this tool as providing a key missing link. “Redkix is a great solution for bridging the worlds between traditional email messaging and more modern conversational messaging. Not all enterprises are ready to simply switch from one to the other, and Redkix allows for users to work in whichever method they want, seamlessly communicating with the other,” Lepofsky told TechCrunch.

As is often the case with these kinds of acquisitions, the company bought the technology  itself along with the team that created it. This means that the Redikix team including the CEO and CTO will join Facebook and they will very likely be shutting down the application after the acquisition is finalized.

After yesterday’s earning’s debacle, Facebook could be looking for ways to enhance its revenue in areas beyond the core Facebook platform. The enterprise collaboration tool does offer a possible way to do that in the future, and if they can find a way to incorporate email into it, it could make it a more attractive and broader offering.

Facebook is competing with Slack, the darling of this space and others like Microsoft, Cisco and Google around communications and collaboration. When it launched in 2015, it was trying to take that core Facebook product and put it in a business context, something Slack had been doing since the beginning.

To succeed in business, Facebook had to think differently than as a consumer tool, driven by advertising revenue and had to convince large organizations that they understood their requirements. Today, Facebook claims 30,000 organizations are using the tool and over time they have built in integrations to other key enterprise products and keep enhancing it.

Perhaps with today’s acquisition, they can offer a more flexible way to interact with platform and could increase those numbers over time.

Recruiting, hiring and retention can be one of the most costly parts of a company’s entire operation, and there’s a class of startups and companies that are increasingly getting funded to try to optimize one or more of those problems all at once — including a new big round for employee education platform Guild Education.

Guild Education is just one of an array of companies looking to capitalize on the opportunity to help employers educate their existing workforce and identify employees who might fill the talent gaps with a little bit of training — as well as having a nice retention perk as well. Guild Education helps employers work with nonprofit universities to provide employees with education across a variety of subject matter or credentials, ranging from high school completion and vocational programs to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. All this is designed to offer companies a way to ensure that employees feel like they have a vested interest in their future, and retain them with that kind of perk.

Guild Education said it has raised a $40 million financing round led by Felicis Ventures, with participation by Salesforce Ventures, Workday Ventures, Rethink Impact & Education, and Silicon Valley Bank. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Harrison Metal, and Cowboy Ventures also participated in the round, and Felicis’ Wesley Chan will be joining the company’s board of directors. The company says its programs are currently available to 2.5 million working adults and gives access to classes, programs and degrees at more than 90 universities and learning providers.

“Most of our companies see an ROI on the employee investment within the first year or two,” CEO Rachel Carlson said. “Here’s why: on an incremental basis, our programs simply need to cost less than the cost of losing a high performing employee and hiring and training their replacement. We accomplish that by partnering with affordable, nonprofit universities and focusing with them on dual retention: helping employees succeed at school and at work… Companies with frontline workforces struggle with annual turnover rates well above 50%. So for our companies, a 4-year retention rate is a phenomenal outcome, and they’re thrilled to see that employee move on to their next job after completing a degree.”

If the model sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because there have already been a number of successful companies creating a lot of buzz in the area — and clearly a lot of appetite for a business like Guild’s. Pluralsight, for example, gives companies a way to courses to employees to help them pick up new software engineering skills and went public earlier this year. It isn’t exactly the same model as Guild, but it does indicate that there is a pretty substantial opportunity for tools that help workforces further educate their employees, getting more value out of them and helping them advance in their careers. Given that the hiring and recruiting process can be a time-intensive and expensive one (there are even startups focusing machine learning efforts for recruiting), it might make sense to see if the right person for a job is already within a company. That helps companies get the skills they need and build loyalty with that employee.

While Guild Education is going after the larger companies out there to offer those perks, there’s another one that’s already interesting enough: the wave of contract employees that work with companies like Lyft or Uber, who also might want a similar perk but operate on a different model that isn’t full-time. Carlson said the startup works with companies like Lyft to figure out how to offer those kinds of education benefits to “gig economy” employees as well, though the benefits are traditionally designed for W2 employees since the benefit is non-taxable on both ends.

There will certainly be some competition from online course marketplaces like Udacity or Coursera, which look to offer another way for employees to pick up new skills on their own time and charge a monthly fee for that. But by going through employers to offer that benefit (to be sure, some companies like Lynda.com already do this), Guild Education may be able to streamline the process in such a way that employees get access to already known entities like nonprofit universities in order to get the education they seek.