Lume Weekly Private Market News & Notes 8.28.2022

Covers news about startups, private deals, technology, and innovation in the private market

📊 Stats of the Week 📊

💰 Fundraising 💰

BitGo secures $100M in Series C round at $1.75B valuation (Aug 16)

• Crypto custodian BitGo has raised $100M at a valuation of $1.75B. The company has seen a 60% increase in new clients, as well as a 20% growth in assets under custody.  

Mitra Chem announces first close of $60M Series B round Led by GM (Aug 16)

• Mitra Chem, a producer of lithium-ion battery materials, announced it reached a $40M first close of a $60M Series B funding round led by GM.

Teamshares raises $245M to scale small business employee ownership (Aug 18)

• Teamshares buys small businesses from retiring owners, grants 10% ownership of the business’s stock to employees after closing, and progressively increases employee ownership to 80% within 20 years. The company raised $245M to date.

Ramp announces $300 million in new funding at $5.8B valuation (Aug 22)

• Fintech startup Ramp has raised $300M in a funding round at a post-money valuation of $5.8B, 28% lower than the last round. According to TechCrunch. In March, co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman said that the company saw its revenue grow by 4x last year but was not yet profitable. The company had crossed $100M in annualized revenue before March of 2022 and says it has passed $300M in annualized revenue.

Koverly raises $7.6M for B2B BNPL (Aug 22)

• Koverly, a provider of a B2B payments solution, raised $7.6M in Seed funding. The company currently processes $200M annualized volume for both domestic and international payments. It is currently on target to originate $70M in new loans over the next year.

Gympass raises $85M in Series F at $2.4B valuation (Aug 23)

• Gympass, a corporate wellness platform, announced it has raised $85M in a Series F funding round at a valuation of $2.4B. The round was led by EQT Growth. According to the company, it now supports 15K corporate clients after an 80% YoY increase. It has 2M+ employee subscribers and 300M all-time check-ins on the platform in July.

AI startup Hugging Face raises $235M from investors, including Salesforce and Nvidia (Aug 24)

• Hugging Face has raised $235M in a Series D funding round. The startup allows companies to store and use AI software and hosts open-source AI models that developers can use for AI applications. This round which had participation from Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce, values Hugging Face at $4.5B. The company has 10,000 customers, it claims, and more than 50,000 organizations on the platform. And its model hub hosts over 1 million repositories.

🗞 Others 🗞

Elon Musk's SpaceX turns profit in the first quarter as revenue soars (Aug 17)

• SpaceX's surging revenue helped it turn a profit in the first quarter of 2023. The company generated $55M in profit on $1.5B in revenue during the January-to-March period. In 2022, revenue doubled to $4.6B, helping the company reduce its loss last year to $559M from $968M, the WSJ reported.

Klarna reported that GMV was up 14% across Europe in the last quarter (Aug 28)

• Klarna reached more than 100 million European users. Gross merchandise value (GMV) increased 14% year over year (YoY) in Q2 2023, outpacing e-commerce’s 1% growth, per Salesforce data.

Instacart files to go public (Aug 28)

• Grocery delivery service Instacart has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) to list stock on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol “CART”. In its filing, the company said that for the six months ended June 30, revenue increased 31% to $1.48B, on net income of $242M, compared to a net loss of $74M in the year-ago period.

OpenAI launches a ChatGPT plan for enterprise customers (Aug 28)

• OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise, a business-focused edition of the company’s AI-powered chatbot app. According to The Information, OpenAI reportedly spent upward of $540M to develop ChatGPT. According to some estimates, ChatGPT is costing OpenAI $700,000 a day to run.

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