The new round was led by Highland Europe, with participation from existing investors GV, EQT Ventures and C Capital. Music group Swedish House Mafia also participated.

Nothing, founded in 2020, launched its Phone (1) product last year. Even amid declining cell phone sales, the product sold out and never made the U.S. Its new Phone (2) — set for a July 11 launch — will make the U.S. market and is highly anticipated.

“In just over two years, we’ve assembled one of the strongest teams in the industry and sold over 1.5 million devices worldwide,” co-founder and CEO Carl Pei said in a release. “It’s clear that there’s real demand for an innovative challenger in the consumer tech industry, and with this new round of financing, we’ve never been better positioned to realize our vision to make tech fun again.”

Growing fast

The London-based startup is not small by any means, with more than 450 people across seven offices worldwide. The company made $200 million in revenues in 2022 and is on pace to exceed that this year, TechCrunch reports.

Aside from its phones, the company also has released earbuds and a sound stick. The company has sold more than 1.5 million devices, per the report.

Part of the company’s fast success is undoubtedly due to its engagements with its customers. It has raised nearly $14 million in crowdfunding and attracted more than 8,000 investors in those rounds.

Nothing also has ongoing sustainability initiatives and promises its new phone will have a lower carbon footprint than the first iteration.

Founded in 2020, the company has raised more than $250 million to date, per the company.

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Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. How are you today?

Kale: My nitrogen levels are a bit low this morning, so we’re monitoring them closely, but I feel well-lit and properly hydrated.

Great. So let’s get to it. Our data says VC investors plowed $4.5 billion into agtech startups last year, and 20% of that went to indoor farming startups. Plenty and Gotham Greens raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Are you excited about your field’s success?

Kale: Oh, yes, we’re the future of food. Indoor farmers use AI to make granular adjustments to water, electricity and heat so we always feel nice and cozy. 

You do look very comfortable up there.

Kale: Plus, indoor farming saves on water and other resources, and you can grow us anywhere, saving on shipping costs. I’ve got family growing in a grocery store in Seattle. Everyone seems to like it there — except for the cilantro, but those guys are total snobs.

Yes, you’re a real plant of the people. Ever think of growing outside?

Kale: What? What? (shudders with rustling leaves) Out there? With all that … weather?

Sure. Why not?

Kale: Excuse me, have you been outdoors? I’ve heard things: It’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s too bright, it’s too cloudy … and don’t even get me started on the bugs. 

Kale’s a pretty hardy plant, right? You’d be fine.

Kale: Well, I won’t have it. I wasn’t optimally cultivated to be a mid-morning snack for rabbits. Here I’ve got my carbon-dioxide monitoring system, fan coil chiller and AI-enabled robots. That’s all I need. Plus my nutrient tubes, humidifiers and phyto-light system. 

Sounds like growing kale indoors can be challenging.

Kale: I’ll admit some of us can be a bit temperamental, but we’re worth every drop of enriched water. There’s more to life than butter lettuce. 

Clearly AI-assisted agtech as a whole has great potential, but I understand that indoor farming is mostly limited to herbs and leafy greens. Isn’t that a problem?

Kale: No. People should eat more salad. 

Maybe so, but indoor farming still seems expensive and hard to scale. Late last year, indoor farming only made up around 14% of total funding in agriculture. 

Kale: Oh, you make my leaves wilt with such talk. We’re finished. Quick, my nitrogen atomizer!

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The startup raised a $270 million Series C led by Inovia Capital at a valuation of $2.2 billion.

Other investors in the round include some big corporate names — Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures1, DTCP and SentinelOne — as well as financial institutions and VC firms Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, Thomvest Ventures and Index Ventures. 

Cohere builds large language models that allow AI to learn from new data, and can be customized and put into applications for features like interactive chat or to generate text.

Umesh Padval, a venture partner at Thomvest Ventures, told Crunchbase News his firm made the investment for a handful of reasons, including Cohere’s engineering and management teams, its multicloud and hybrid cloud approach and its significant strategic channels option — as well as the market in general.

There is a “massive market opportunity in LLM space which is exploding,” Padval said. “Cohere has all the elements which would make them successful.”

AI trends

The Cohere round illustrates two trends right now in AI — big money and some of that money from big-name tech companies.

Nvidia, for instance, just became a trillion-dollar market cap company after its shares exploded thanks to demand for its chips used in AI. The company, like several other tech titans, has been placing bets into AI startups for years. The same can be said for Salesforce Ventures, which just last month participated in the $450 million Series C for Anthropic — a ChatGPT rival with its AI assistant Claude — which also included Google and Zoom Ventures.

Of course, the Cohere and Anthropic deals are not the only huge AI deals recently.

In April, AlphaSense, an AI-enhanced market intelligence platform, raised $100 million from investors that included CapitalG — Alphabet’s independent growth fund.

In March, Character.ai closed a $150 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. The Palo Alto, California-based AI startup allows people to create their own personalized AI chatbot using language models and deep-learning algorithms.

Also in March, San Francisco-based Adept AI raised $350 million in a Series B — at a reported post-money valuation of at least $1 billion.

Of course the craze started in January with news of Microsoft’s massive $10 billion investment into OpenAI — creator of ChatGPT.

Further reading:

• AI Investing Boom Is Not New To Tech Giants (At Least Not Their VC Arms)
• AI Craze Hits New Level As Anthropic Locks Up $450M, Builder.ai Closes $250M Round

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Energy Impact Partners and Sway Ventures co-led the round for San Diego-based Measurabl. Moderne Ventures, WVV, Suffolk Construction, Broadscale, Camber Creek, Salesforce Ventures1, Building Ventures, Constellation Technology Ventures, Concrete Ventures, RET Ventures, Colliers and Lincoln Property Co. also participated. 

Measurabl has now raised $172.6 million total, per Crunchbase.

The startup was co-founded in 2013 by CTO Lance Onken and CEO Matt Ellis, the former director of sustainability at commercial real estate brokerage giant CBRE. The company claims it’s the most widely used ESG platform for the real estate industry, with 37% of top asset managers using its platform to measure and manage the impact of $2 trillion worth of properties.

The company acquired a couple other startups in 2022 to help it build out its platform. It bought Hatch Data, a building energy and carbon management platform, as well as WegoWise, a platform for building managers to track energy and utility usage, that had raised $4.9 million per Crunchbase.

“The antidote to greenwashing is objective measurement and transparency,” Ellis said in a statement announcing Measurabl’s new raise. “This funding allows us to further enhance our market-leading ESG technologies, expand to new geographies, and ensure the real estate industry has the investment-grade data necessary to transition to a sustainable, profitable future for all.”

Sustainability draws huge VC dollars

ESG refers broadly to a set of criteria that evaluate the sustainability and ethical impacts of a company or investment, looking at factors including carbon emissions, labor practices, animal welfare, workplace diversity and inclusion efforts, supply chain transparency, executive compensation, and board composition. By one estimate, ​​ESG accounts for $1 out of every $8 in U.S. assets under professional management.

Billions of venture dollars have also gone to startups in the sustainability industry: $7.3 billion globally last year, just shy of the $7.4 billion they raised in 2021, Crunchbase data shows. Those figures are particularly significant, given that overall venture spending fell 35% globally last year from 2021’s record highs.

Startups that describe themselves as ESG-related specifically raised $480.9 million in venture backing globally last year, per Crunchbase, a huge leap compared to $95.2 million in 2021. 

Venture investors’ continued interest in ESG startups also comes despite new pressures on corporate sustainability efforts, which some prominent Republicans have criticized as politicized investing that leads to lower returns for the sake of virtue signaling.

Related Crunchbase Pro queries

• 2022 Venture Funding To Companies In The Sustainability Industry
• 2022 Venture Funding To Companies Related To ESG

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Over the past 25 years, two historic downturns stand out as possible comps. One is the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The other is the dot-com bubble, which popped in 2000 and 2001.

For tech investors wishing the current cycle would reverse, a repeat of the financial crisis doesn’t sound too bad. Tech stocks bottomed in early 2009, and by 2011, the tech-focused Nasdaq 100 index was back at its highest point in five years. After that, tech valuations went mostly straight up for the next 10 years. 

A replay of the dot-com bubble, on the other hand, looks more worrisome. After peaking in March 2000, it took the Nasdaq 15 years to get back to that level. 

Even the most enduring brands were slow to recover. Qualcomm stock took 20 years to get back to where it was in early 2000. It took Microsoft roughly 15 years. Cisco Systems has never retraced its bubble-era highs. 

As for the hot startups of the day, a large share have been relegated to the dustbins of history, alongside their sock puppet mascots, automated grocery delivery offerings, and next-gen fiber optic networks. 

Is this a downturn or a popped bubble?

Fast-forward a couple decades, and we see elements of history repeating. If we look at the past few quarters, much of what we’ve seen appears more reminiscent of the dot-com implosion than the financial crisis. Some of the key characteristics:

• Hot tech and tech-adjacent companies didn’t just go up incrementally. Many saw market caps increase several-fold over the course of just a year or two. Tesla, for instance, increased tenfold(!) between March 2020 and November 2021. Nvidia shares saw a sixfold increase over that time. Apple more than doubled. Google nearly tripled. And these were all already tremendously valuable companies before that.
• Companies debuting on the public markets were awarded bonkers valuations. Rivian, an electric carmaker with no mass-market product yet, went public at a valuation soon exceeding that of GM and Ford. Embark, a pre-revenue developer of self-driving truck technology, did a SPAC deal at a valuation over $5 billion before shutting down this year. Affirm, the buy now, pay later platform, debuted at 8x its current valuation … and the list goes on.
• Venture capital was on a historic binge. Global venture capital investment topped $643 billion at the peak in 2021, up 92% year over year. A whopping 586 new companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board.

So when things went down, they had far to sink. If we’re in a popped bubble, that’s bad news for those hoping to just wait out a recovery. 

Not quite Bubble 2.0

Bubbliness aside, this isn’t shaping up as a replay of the dot-com bubble. 

Spiking asset prices weren’t only happening in tech. At the market peak in late 2021, companies in numerous sectors were way up, including asset managers, energy and real estate.

Another difference: Several of the biggest tech companies have avoided steep declines or even increased in value in recent quarters. Apple, for instance, is still pretty close to its record high, as is Microsoft. And Nvidia just broke its record high, after a stellar earnings report last week. 

So, history won’t repeat itself exactly. But when it comes to the long list of relatively solid companies in SaaS and other sectors that saw valuations skyrocket to unsustainable levels, it wouldn’t be surprising if recovery was a long, slow slog.

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42xfund, an investment management firm in United Arab Emirates, led the funding round, and additional participation came from Northstar Group and SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

Aquaculture startups had its best funding year ever in 2022 when the sector raised $292 million across 42 startups, according to Crunchbase News. The industry has seen a steady incline in venture funding since 2013, when eFishery launched.

The company beganin 2013 as a one stop shop for the aquaculture industry in Indonesia. The company started with a programmable fish farm feeder that dispenses food for shrimp farms and quickly developed disease prevention systems for those ecosystems. 

The company has since expanded, providing an end-to-end e-commerce platform that allows fishers to buy niche products and gear and connects farmers with financial institutions that can provide flexible loans geared towards the fickle nature of aquaculture. The company also has a distribution system that makes it easy for homes and businesses to order fish and get it delivered fresh or frozen.

More importantly, eFishery has an online marketplace that allows fishers to sell their yield directly to distributors and agents, often at a fairer price than most markets. 

The environmental impact

That process is generally better for the environment by promoting fair trade wages for fisheries and lowering the carbon footprint of moving the fish product. 

But fish farming has long been considered an unsustainable environmental practice — certain farmed fish need to be fed wild fish to survive. Creating crowded, overpopulated zones of fish is a breeding ground for disease, and the waste they produce in such a small area can pollute the ocean. In Indonesia specifically, fish farms are partly responsible for mangrove deforestation.

Fishing, in general, has a significantly smaller carbon footprint than land animal agriculture (including products like cheese and dairy), and startups are moving into the space to develop more sustainable and scalable practices in one of the oldest jobs in the world.

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The funding also includes previous and new investors including a16z crypto, Bain Capital Crypto and Distributed Global. 

The San Francisco-based startup is building tools in support of Worldcoin, an Ethereum-based token currently in beta. Its World ID platform is attempting to create unique digital identities — based on blockchain technology — for people by scanning their eyes with a small orb.

The startup has raised many questions surrounding AI, data and privacy. While such an identity platform could be useful as AI makes it more difficult to know who or what one is dealing with over the internet, the scanning of people’s eyes to create a digital identity and how that information could be used has raised privacy and data concerns.

Due to its decentralized nature and hopes to create true unique digital identities, Worldcoin also has been associated with being involved in the process of distributing a universal basic income if AI starts to eliminate massive amounts of jobs — something that also has caused debate.

“As we embark on the age of AI, it is imperative that individuals are able to maintain personal privacy while proving their humanness,” said Alex Blania, CEO and co-founder of Tools for Humanity. “In doing so we can help ensure that everyone can realize the financial benefits that AI is poised to deliver.” 

The company did not reveal a valuation, but an earlier report said it was looking to raise money at a $3 billion valuation.

Bucking the trend

While Tools For Humanity may have had a successful fundraise, that has not been the case for most crypto and Web3 startups.

Venture funding to VC-backed Web3 startups plummeted 82% in the first quarter of the year — dropping from $9.1 billion in Q1 of 2022 to only $1.7 billion, per Crunchbase data.

The funding number is the lowest total since the fourth quarter of 2020 — which saw only $1.1 billion — when many people had never heard of Web3.

VC-backed crypto startups saw just more than $800 million invested, the lowest total since more than $600 million was invested in Q1 2020.

Further reading:

Web3 Funding Continues To Crater — Drops 82% Year To Year

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A day after investors flooded $700 million into two AI startups — Builder.ai and Anthropic — Turkey-based AI marketing platform Insider locked up another $105 million.

Insider CEO and co-founder Hande Cilingir told Bloomberg the company’s valuation had increased “very much closer to $2 billion.”

The company previously raised a $121 million Series D at a $1.22 billion valuation in March 2022 — first minting it as a unicorn.

The new round was from existing investors, Qatar Investment Authority and Esas Private Equity.

In a space where every investor seems to fear being left behind, Qatar Investment Authority seems determined to not let that happen. The sovereign wealth fund led London-based Builder.ai’s Series D of more than $250 million on Tuesday.

Let’s go shopping

Insider offers a platform that allows its more than 1,200 customers to connect customer data across channels and systems, predict future behavior with an AI-enhanced engine, and provides an individualized customer experience.

The company plans to use the new cash for M&A dealmaking. In January, Insider made its first acquisition, buying Turkey-based messaging platform MindBehind.

“At Insider, we have successfully achieved hyper-growth via organic means, until now. Now, we are looking to achieve unparalleled levels of growth with an M&A-focused strategy,” Cilingir said in a release. “These funds will be used exclusively for the purpose of acquiring exceptional product companies to further complement our technology and create product synergies. 

“Unlike our $121 million Series D investment in 2022, which has bolstered our capital reserves for operational spending in the coming years, this latest round will specifically serve to fuel inorganic growth through M&A,” she added.

Founded in 2012, Insider’s total funding amount is now $274 million, per the company.

Further reading:

• AI Craze Hits New Level As Anthropic Locks Up $450M, Builder.ai Closes $250M Round

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A series of layoffs at online mortgage lender Better.com last year left thousands of former staffers scrambling to find a job. But not Anmol Sahai. He was thinking term sheets. 

Sahai, a 27-year-old Colorado native, joined Better in 2018 as a loan consultant, working his way into a post as legal analyst a year later. Alongside his job, Sahai was studying for a law degree at City University of New York. 

The combination of work and studies helped germinate the idea that culminated in his legal tech startup, Composure, when Sahai had trouble finding software geared for managing workflow at a busy and growing in-house legal department. 

After getting laid off from Better in August, Sahai, now a law school grad, had time to devote to startup building. In subsequent months, he and his team developed an initial product they’re pitching to in-house legal teams as a tool to streamline workflow and help manage incoming requests, documents and internal communications.

Gaining momentum

Sahai said momentum picked up in December, when the startup got initial backing from seed and early-stage investor Day One Ventures.

“That started accelerating things,” he said, noting that shortly afterward, co-founder and CTO Ilia Rogov, also a former Better employee, came on board. The company also landed its first enterprise client, along with some smaller customers.

Composure is now going out for a pre-seed round. There’s no hard target at the moment, but Sahai said comps for similar rounds usually fall in the $1 million to $3 million range. So far, the startup has raised a little over $300,000 from Day One and angel investors.

From suing to SaaS

Part of what makes in-house counsel workflow appealing from a startup perspective is that it is both complex and kind of repetitive.

Day-to-day workflow, as least for a larger organization, is likely to include both inbound and outbound litigation. Unfortunately, as companies scale, Sahai noted, eventually “it’s just a fact of life that someone’s going to sue you.” (Or vice versa.)

Beyond lawsuits, there’s usually a lot of in-house work around compliance and regulatory approval. This can be a particularly large workload for companies in heavily regulated industries like finance or health care. In addition, in-house legal teams have to devote resources to overseeing intellectual property protection, internal investments, and weighing in on terms for vendor and sales negotiations. 

The idea behind Composure is to make it easier to track the tasks and documentation involved in all those myriad responsibilities, and to divvy up workload accordingly. 

Starting in a downturn

While this is not the easiest time for startups to find funding, Sahai for now sees advantages in launching a company amid a market downturn. For one, out of necessity, everyone is focused on capital efficiency. That ought to have some long-term advantages.

Customers are also tightening their belts. As a first-time founder, Sahai said in the past year he’s realized how much resilience is required to keep a nascent venture afloat. Most queries end in rejection, with only the outliers culminating in a “yes.”  He compares the relentless forward push to football:

“You’re punting a lot. … And then, once in a while, you find a gap and you run it down for a touchdown,” he said.

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The popular fast-fashion startup based in China has reportedly raised $2 billion at two-thirds of its valuation, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The company rose through The Crunchbase Unicorn Board ranks during the pandemic, receiving a valuation of $100 billion and ranking just under the likes of TikTok owner ByteDance and SpaceX. But this new round of funding cut its valuation down to $66 billion. No big deal — it’s still the fourth-highest-valued startup in the world. 

Shein quickly won the hearts of American consumers as e-commerce and delivery exploded during work-from-home orders, and investors took note — in 2021, funding rose to more than $27 billion, around three times higher than the year before. 

The company has remained relatively quiet as rumors swirled that the e-commerce giant had a plan to raise money and, later on, go public. But while Shein contemplates its lofty plans, the company faces numerous obstacles to going public, including weaving through complex international regulations and declining activity in e-commerce.

E-commerce loses its luster

Funding toward e-commerce has seen a slow but steady rise in the last 10 years. 

That all changed in 2021, when the tech industry pinpointed e-commerce as a long-lasting consumer behavior much like working from home was. Funding jumped around 3x higher than 2020, and then immediately crashed to normal levels in 2022. Several big tech giants like Amazon and Meta were quick to build up their e-commerce services, only to lay off thousands of workers when those strategies didn’t play out. 

It’s unclear if Shein will face a similar, less drastic fate. The company reportedly garnered $23 billion in revenue in 2022, on par with other fast-fashion retailers like H&M and fashion conglomerate Inditex, which owns popular brands like Zara. But the e-commerce model isn’t as popular as it once was, and global regulations around environmental and sustainability laws could dwindle its popularity even further.

Stricter environmental regulations

Shein’s clothing is known for being extremely cheap — women’s shirts sell for as little as $2. The company has had to dodge questions over forced labor and environmental impacts of its production line. 

Despite telling U.S. congressional members Shein worked with third-party firms to audit its supply chain of forced labor, the company used cotton from Xinjiang (which has been cited for using forced labor) in at least two instances. In some instances, workers spent 18-hour days in the factories, or were given one day off a month, which violates China’s labor laws. 

The European Union is also setting strict sustainability standards on imports, taxing companies more based on how high their carbon footprint is. This could drive up the price of Shein-made items, or require the company to make changes to its supply chain in order to lower its environmental impact. 

If Shein does go through with its IPO, it has the potential to disrupt the $1.53 trillion apparel industry, but changing headwinds could ruin its course.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Shein raised money at a third of its previous valuation. We have updated the story to reflect the accurate number.

Related Crunchbase Pro queries:

• Global Funding Toward E-Commerce Startups

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