‘This is insanity’: Startups end year in a deal frenzy

And still, Boufarhat said, “Investors are reaching out almost daily.”

At the onset of the pandemic, warnings of startup doom abounded. Those largely faded after the initial shock of the coronavirus wore off.

Startups like Discord and Robinhood are raising more money at sky-high valuations and then getting inundated with new funding offers. Venture capitalists are fighting to get into deals. And as delivery service DoorDash and home rental startup Airbnb prepare to go public this week, the bonanza of initial public offerings is likely to enrich and fuel Silicon Valley’s startup boom even more.

“Almost every hot company right now is being pursued like mad,” said Matt Murphy, an investor at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. “More than ever, there is this flight to being in the assets at any price.”

The boom is not just being driven by higher demand for digital products and services. Low interest rates are pushing investors to seek returns in ever-riskier assets. Venture firms have raised record levels of capital. A soaring stock market has enabled more IPOs. Big tech companies are making bold acquisitions. Even Bitcoin has reached a new high.

That helped startups amass $36.5 billion in funding in the third quarter, up 30% from a year earlier, according to CB Insights, which tracks private financing. Startups have raised 223 “mega-rounds” of $100 million or higher so far this year, on pace to surpass last year’s total, according to Pitchbook.

The average valuations for more mature startups also spiked to a high of $584 million, according to Pitchbook. And 81 IPOs raised $28.5 billion in the third quarter, the busiest period for listings since 2000, according to Renaissance Capital.

“I haven’t seen anything like this in over 20 years,” said Eric Paley, an investor at venture firm Founder Collective. “The party is as loud, and the drinks are flowing as freely as the dot-com boom, despite that we’re all drinking at home and alone.”

While some startups have retrenched in the pandemic, far more have found themselves on the right side of the economy’s “feast or famine” split. With the coronavirus compressing years of tech adoption into a few months, lesser-known software companies focused on areas like cloud computing, financial technology and collaboration tools have thrived. Wall Street recently offered warm welcomes to public listings from fast-growing software startups such as Snowflake, Asana, JFrog, Sumo Logic and Unity.

The world underestimated just how big the already-huge tech industry could become, said Roseanne Wincek, an investor at Renegade Partners. “More and more people are waking up to that,” she said.

On Wednesday, DoorDash plans to list its shares and go public at a valuation as high as $35.3 billion, more than double its last private valuation. The company increased its proposed price range to $90 to $95 a share Friday, up from $75 to $85. The listing may help redeem SoftBank, the swashbuckling mega-fund that was humbled last year by a spate of bad investments in startups such as real estate company WeWork.

Airbnb, which was crippled by the travel shutdowns in the spring, then plans to go public the next day. On Monday, the company raised the proposed price range on its listing to $56 to $60 a share, up from $44 to $50 a share previously. That could increase its valuation to as high as $42 billion, or 32% above where it was before the pandemic.

Private startups normally raise funding every 12 to 18 months, but with investors furiously competing to give them money, that timeline has now shrunk to three to six months, entrepreneurs and investors said. Some startups are even closing back-to-back rounds of funding at higher valuations.

After Discord, a social media platform, raised money in June valuing it at $3.5 billion, investors immediately called to give the company more funding, said one person with knowledge of the company. Now Discord is in talks to raise more and to double its valuation to $7 billion, said two people with knowledge of the talks, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Discord declined to comment. TechCrunch first reported on its new funding.

Instacart, a grocery delivery company, also raised two blockbuster rounds of funding this year, more than doubling its valuation to $17.7 billion. Robinhood, the stock trading app, has pulled in $1.25 billion in four different funding rounds this year, valuing it at $11.7 billion.

In a pandemic, investors have found it difficult to impress entrepreneurs with posh dinners or celebrity-laden parties. But they have gained an edge by moving the fastest.

Rahul Vohra, an entrepreneur who also backs young startups, frequently hears a company’s pitch, conducts diligence, signs a deal and wires the money all in the same day, he said.

“There’s no point in sitting on the deal,” Vohra said. Waiting a week means the deal could get more expensive or become overcrowded with other investors, costing him a chance to invest, he said.

In late summer, Addition, an investment fund, approached Snyk, a security software startup, about taking more money. Within 48 hours of meeting, Snyk signed a funding agreement. The funding, raised just eight months after Snyk’s last round, valued the company at $2.6 billion, or 80 times its annual recurring revenue of roughly $30 million.

“They used speed to their advantage,” said Peter McKay, Snyk’s chief executive. “Investors who are waiting for someone to raise a round — that’s almost too late.”

Henrique Dubugras, chief executive of Brex, a startup that provides credit cards to other startups, said he had also had more unsolicited calls from investors. Early in the pandemic, Brex laid off 62 employees and closed a restaurant it operated in San Francisco’s South Park. But in June, business started rebounding, he said. Calls from venture capitalists soon followed.

“I’ve honestly never seen it as aggressive as it is right now,” Dubugras said. He said Brex was not currently planning to raise more funding.

The froth has created a sense of unease among some investors. Paley said some of Founder Collective’s portfolio companies had raised “breathtaking” financing rounds that felt risky.

“When people congratulate us, we are sheepish about whether these nosebleed valuations are good for us or the founders,” he said.

But there’s little point in declaring the sky is falling, other investors said. Who would listen? For more than a decade, prominent investors have tried to warn against startup spending, valuations and bubbles. In that time, the tech industry has only gotten bigger, richer and more powerful.

Some investors pointed to Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture firms, which sent a dramatic “Black Swan” memo in March telling companies to prepare for a difficult year. Six months later, Roelof Botha, a Sequoia partner, said at a virtual TechCrunch conference that he hadn’t anticipated how much this era would benefit tech companies. Sequoia declined to comment.

That same week, three Sequoia-backed startups held lucrative IPOs. The firm will most likely see new windfalls this week because of its investments in DoorDash and Airbnb. Sequoia also owns shares in Zoom, the videoconferencing company that has gone from a $1 billion valuation to $116 billion in less than two years.

(Author-Erin Griffith/(c.2020 The New York Times Company)