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’ Kia Kokalitcheva.

led the equity financing, which included participation from new investors and (the global investments and partnerships arm of The Times Group of India). Existing backers , and also pitched in.

The Series C round brings Santa Monica, Calif.-based Headspace’s since its inception in 2010 (was it really founded a decade ago?!) to $168.2 million, according to Crunchbase data. The company declined to disclose at what valuation the latest round was raised. It closed on a $36.7 million in June 2017.

To rise above the hype around meditation, Headspace claims to be “the most science-backed digital mindfulness product in the market.” As an example of that, the company says it’s currently in progress on over 70 clinical research studies with institutions such as and .

Over the years, it’s branched out from its consumer app into different product lines including “Headspace for Work,” its B2B segment that counts , , and among its 600 enterprise customers. It’s also offering “Headspace Health,” an effort to integrate mindfulness into health care. In general, the company says its goal is to help its users apply mindfulness to improve their health via content around stress, anxiety, sleep and focus, among other things.

Growth

Since its founding, Headspace said it has experienced over 62 million downloads in 190 countries and has more than 2 million paid subscribers.

In addition to growing its direct-to-consumer business,Headspace says it will continue to invest in its Headspace for Work segment, which has seen its revenue double year over year from 2017 to 2018 and most recently in 2019. It also plans to continue putting money into its health care segment. I’ve reached out for more specifics regarding its financials and will update this piece if I get them.

In 2019, the company launched localized versions of the app in French and German, and appointed former executive as head of its European division to lead expansion in that region. Also last year, Headspace launched in Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. It expanded into Asia through strategic relationships with partners such as The Times of India. The company plans to use its new capital in part to continue expanding internationally.

Investors talk

, founding partner of blisce/ said, Headspace’s aim with its offerings “resonates deeply with blisce/’s core belief that it is possible to both ‘Do Good’ while also building a strong business with sustainable growth.”

, CEO of of India, notes that Headspace co-founder began his mindfulness journey as a monk in India, and as such, he is “excited to bring things full circle through” a strategic partnership.

Of course, Headspace is not alone in the meditation app space. Last February, announced the close of an $88 million Series B round that propelled it into unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation. In July, it announced a $27 million extension to that round.

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From ride-hailing apps to driverless car technology, transportation startups have attracted unprecedented sums of investment capital from auto manufacturers in recent years. In the past few quarters, that trend has been accelerating.

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An analysis of Crunchbase data shows that since the beginning of 2019, the world’s largest car and truck manufacturers have led financing rounds valued at more than $6 billion. Over that period, they’ve participated in more than 50 deals for several million dollars and up, indicating an expanded willingness to pump significant sums into rounds.

“It has been a continuation of the trends for many of the automakers that have been particularly active over the past few years,” said , a partner at Detroit-based transport venture firm . “In 2019 and 2020, however, it has been interesting to see a few automakers—particularly those in Asia—aggressively ramping up their innovation efforts.”

Below, we take a more detailed look at where Big Auto is putting its capital, which companies are spending the most and where the current investment path is headed.

Hot Sectors, Big Rounds

First, let’s look at where the money’s going. The sectors driving away with the largest sums of automaker capital include autonomous driving technology, electric cars, batteries and ride-hailing.

We break out the largest funding recipients in Big Auto-led rounds in the chart below. (See full list of.)

For the most part, the same subsectors have been attracting automaker interest for years, but the funding dynamics have changed some in recent quarters.

In particular, we’re seeing more partnerships and joint investments involving multiple automakers. Examples include ’s participation in a $1.15 billion May round for ’s self-driving unit, , and Volkswagen’s $2.6 billion round for -backed .  Even longtime rivals and BMW are teaming up by launching a .

“I’m not sure 5 to 10 years ago we would have imagined Ford and Volkswagen coming together to collaborate on electric and autonomous vehicles, or Daimler and BMW’s collaboration on mobility services,” Stallman said.

However, as the true cost of launching electric and autonomous vehicles—and competing against and on mobility services—has come into greater clarity, these partnerships make quite a bit of sense.

Another broad trend is a move toward components developers. The years 2016 to 2018 were active for acquiring full-stack autonomous vehicle technology companies, Stallman noted. But more recently, automakers are turning their attention to enabling and component technologies that align with in-house architectures. This isn’t broadly reflected in the largest deals chart above, but looking at a , it’s a more visible trend.

Most Active Investors

There’s wide variation among automakers in startup round counts. Several are, on average, participating in more than one sizable deal a month. Others are more sporadic.

Below, we take a look at the most active by deal count since the beginning of last year:

One key takeaway is that we’re seeing more startup capital coming from large auto manufacturers in Asia.

in particular has upped its game. The Korean auto giant wasn’t much involved in the startup space before 2017, according to Crunchbase data. In the last few years, however, the company has backed at least 35 rounds, including 18 since the beginning of 2019.

, meanwhile, tied with BMW as the second most active investor. The count for Toyota included several supergiant rounds of $100 million.

It’s also worth pointing out companies not in the rankings. , for instance, hasn’t been doing much startup investing, presumably preferring to innovate in-house. is also not active in venture-stage investing, nor are France’s or Japan’s and .

The Road Ahead

While automakers did a lot of startup investing in 2019, they didn’t do much acquiring.

There were a few deals: Honda bought Drivemode, a Silicon Valley developer of smartphone apps for drivers, in its first startup acquisition to date; Tesla snapped up , a computer vision startup; and PSA Group acquired , a platform for car rentals and parking it had previously backed.

Big Auto is, however, increasingly competing with Big Tech in the transport space. Just last week, for instance, bought , a developer of technology with applications in the automotive space, and over the summer picked up , a developer of autonomous driving software. also has made some transport acquisitions, as have Uber and other ride-hailing players.

Interest from Big Tech is a concern, as the most valuable technology companies are worth many multiples more than the biggest automakers, making M&A an unlevel playing field.

That said, automakers’ investment activity shows they’re serious about keeping abreast of innovation in spaces that impact them by putting more money than ever toward stakes in startups, even if they’re not buying them whole.

Main photo courtesy of Florian Steciuk via Unsplash.

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According , a Seattle-based technology publication, the deal was in the $200 million range, but precise figures were not reported.

Apple, for its part, didn’t have much to say on the matter. The company delivered its standard response when asked about the deal by GeekWire: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

What is Xnor.ai and what does it do? According to , its technology “runs deep learning models efficiently ​on edge devices such as phones, IoT devices, cameras, drones, and embedded CPUs.”

An archived snapshot of the company’s website explains the basics of its technology. “Traditional deep learning models for convolutional network uses 32-bit precision floating point operations processed on GPUs, which are generally cost prohibitive for everyday products. Xnor reduces the precision down to a single bit and processes it using binary operations like XNOR and pop-count, which are standard instructions on low cost CPU platforms.”

The company’s website also stated that “[m]odels already developed include detection, recognition, tracking, segmentation, face recognition, scene classification, pose estimation, image enhancement, emotional recognition, and voice command.”

Researchers at Xnor.ai developed an object detection model they called (aka YOLO), which the company licensed to enterprise customers including internet-connected home security camera company Wyse.

9to5Mac that Wyse told its customers that its Person Detection feature will be temporarily unavailable “due to the unexpected termination of our agreement with our AI provider.” Wyse plans to build out this feature in-house. It’s unclear how many other customers may be affected by the acquisition.

Xnor’s is not the first acquisition Apple has made in the machine learning sector. In August 2016, Apple acquired Turi, which was also based in Seattle, reportedly for around $200 million as well.

Xnor was founded in late 2016 by and as a spinout from the Allen Institute For Artificial Intelligence (AI2), which was founded and backed by late Microsoft executive Paul Allen. AI2’s first successful spinout was , a natural language processing workflow technology company which for an undisclosed amount.

Xnor raised $14.6 million in prior venture backing, according to Crunchbase data. Its last round, led by , was announced in May 2018.

This is Apple’s first disclosed acquisition of 2020.

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The tech behemoth recently acquired , a Redwood City-based digital health startup for an undisclosed amount, according to citing “a person familiar with the deal” and . (When we say recently, it’s believed the acquisition actually took place in late 2018, according to CNBC, but was only recently leaked.)

Founded in 2015, Tueo Health raised over its lifetime, according to its Crunchbase profile. The company, whose name comes from the Latin word “meaning to observe, care for, and maintain,” is focused on asthma management.

According to conducted by Stanford University with two of the startup’s co-founders, Tueo’s “system includes a non-contact sleep sensor and a smart phone application that given [sic] parents access to data and guidance about their child’s condition.”

We’ve reached out to Apple and will update the story if the company gets back to us.

Presumably, Apple is interested in incorporating the startup into its products and most likely into the Apple Watch.

According to CNBC, Apple has only made two other healthcare-related purchases, including the 2016 buy of and the 2017 acquisition of , a sleep sensor maker.

Below is a chart of the number of known startup acquisitions the Cupertino-based company has made since 2011. CEO that Apple actually has been buying companies “every two to three weeks” and “has acquired 20 to 25 companies in the past six months.” However, Apple has notoriously kept quiet about many of its purchases, explaining the deal count difference between what Crunchbase has on record and what Tim Cook has told the press.

As you can see in the table below, the company has announced (or leaked) five known acquisitions since the beginning of this year alone, according to Crunchbase data. In March, it picked up , a machine learning startup that helps deliver user-specific content. And in February, Apple acquired not one, but two, startups: (formerly ToyTalk), an eight-year-old AI voice startup, and UK-based , a three-year-old digital marketing startup.

As Apple continues to attempt to diversify and not be so reliant on iPhone sales, we expect we’ll continue to see more acquisitions of startups, especially those focused on services, in the near future.

Disclosure: The author’s husband works for Apple in the Austin office.

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The Cupertino giant just acquired, a machine learning startup that helps deliver user-specific content, . The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it’s that the Laserlike acquisition will be used to bolster Siri capabilities.

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Laserlike was started by three ex-Googlers, Steven Baker, Anand Shukla, and Srinivasan Venkatachary. Mountain View-based Laserlike says on that it will “deliver high quality information and diverse perspectives” to its users through its artificial intelligence-powered web search.

Apple buying a small company is no surprise – according to Crunchbase data Apple has 106 companies over its lifetime. In 2018 alone, it acquired seven.

In 2019, Apple’s appetite continues to grow. Only three months into the year, it has already acquired three companies: PullString, DataTiger, and now Laserlike. Our EIC Alex Wilhelm wrote about the two previous acquisitions here).

While DataTiger focuses on digital marketing, PullString works with artificial intelligence and will help with “Siri, HomePod and voice strategy.”

Apple did not immediately respond to Crunchbase News’ request regarding the new acquisition. However, I’m guessing deal dynamics moved pretty fast: In May 2018, Laserlike’s Venkatachary : “Apple is promoting us today as App of the day! Pretty thrilled. Check out our app and send us feedback.”

Fast forward 45 weeks, and it’s clear that Apple’s enthusiasm has transitioned from vocal support to hard investment. Not bad.

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Apple, like the rest of the companies that complete the Big Five, likes to buy smaller companies from time to time. Buying smaller companies allows cash-rich companies to trade checking-account rounding-errors for access to interesting personnel, new tech, and nascent markets. All that at a dollar cost that doesn’t even begin to impact cash hoards.

According to Crunchbase, Apple in its lifetime has . The tech giant has been particularly acquisitive since the beginning of 2018, making nine acquisitions over the past year, including two mentioned startup buys in the past week alone.

Here’s what you need to know about Apple’s two most recent deals:

• On Feb. 15, 2019, Apple acquired (formerly ToyTalk), an eight-year-old AI voice startup that has raised $44.8 million from the likes of , and . According to , the company gives Apple “the talent it needs to make talking toys a part of Siri, HomePod and its voice strategy.”

• One day before the PullString deal was announced, Apple also picked up UK-based , a three-year-old digital marketing startup that had raised an undisclosed seed round in 2017. A Bloomberg noted that the buy could “boost the company’s (Apple’s) digital marketing and make it more relevant to customers.” Indeed, 9to5Mac that DataTiger claims to put “data to work,” and thus increase marketing retention and monetization.

While Apple and its compatriots wage Titanomachy against the rising decacorn class, every cohort of the largest tech shops like to buy smaller firms. Indeed, our own Jason Rowley recently took a dive through the acquisition patterns of unicorns. Among his findings was the fact that, at least concerning known deals, Airbnb, Automattic, and Pinterest were the most acquisitive as of this February.

Whether or not Apple will continue its startup spree isn’t clear (we wouldn’t bet on it), but if it did, it could help provide some middle-market liquidity to the startup market that has been lacking since Yahoo stopped buying everything that couldn’t stand on its own two feet.

One can dream.

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It’s been an earnings season . But the third quarter run isn’t over. This week both and will report recent financial performance. And there are a few IPOs on deck to boot.

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So let’s quickly get our minds around the upcoming market signals that will help set sentiment during the rest of the third quarter. Bear in mind that great reports from Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon have been contrasted by nasty reactions to Twitter, Facebook, and Netflix’s own quarterly reports.

The could be melting.

Regardless, here’s your micro cheat sheet of what to keep in mind over the next five days:

• Apple earnings on Tuesday.������ “typically the least exciting period for Apple,” but the company’s report will include a host of mind-bending numbers. Investors revenue $52.3 billion in the period, including 42 million iPhones sold. The street also $2.16 in per-share profit, up from $1.67 in the year-ago quarter.
• Square earnings on Wednesday. Square has been a public-market rocket ship. Its arc has been hot. Now Square has to keep the streak alive. Investors $0.12 in per-share profit and revenue of $367.9 million. We’ll see if Jack’s other project can avoid a 20 percent correction.
• Tesla earnings on Thursday. This is the week’s real goat rodeo. Everyone in tech ���Ի���finance will have their eyes glued to the Musk Show, which, after all, is either going to skyrocket and turn profitable this year () or . Either way, investors are just under $4 billion in revenue and a loss of around $2.81 per share.
• Sonos IPO on Thursday. The venerable Sonos is hoping to get out while the market is welcoming. Not a bad idea. The hardware company’s debut will give us another quick check on the state of the IPO market that has welcomed the odd Bloom Energy offering and an awkward Domo flotation. (Catch up on our prior coverage here.)
• The Arlo Technology offering. I am proud to report that Crunchbase News has so far produced a full 55 words on the matter. We’ll have a quick primer up when it prices, so don’t worry about being behind.

Of course, other companies will report their second-quarter results and news will crop up. But the above should give you a bit of a map to the end of the first month of the third quarter. Good luck!

From The :

Bitmain Technologies, the world’s largest cryptocurrency mining company, is reportedly considering an initial public offering in Hong Kong or an overseas market with U.S. dollar-denominated shares. Beijing-based  is also said to be raising further cash at valuation around $14 billion.

Chip designer ARM Holdings has agreed to buy analytics provider for around $600 million, according to a Bloomberg story citing unnamed sources. Silicon Valley-based Treasure, founded in 2011, previously raised $54 million in venture funding.

Startups vie to disrupt homebuying

So far this year, investment in North American residential real estate startups has already surpassed totals for all of 2017. Leading the funding surge are Opendoor and other companies looking to shake up the way homes are bought and sold.

WeWork is just one of SoftBank’s real estate plays

Speaking of big real estate bets, take a look at SoftBank. The heavy-spending startup investor has been a repeat investor in WeWork and, most recently, its WeWork China subsidiary. SoftBank has other real estate and building companies in its portfolio too, indicating an sustained appetite for large deals in the space.

Viacom is acquiring , a media company targeting Generation Z, in a deal reportedly valued around $25 million. The purchase marks a steep drop in valuation for Los Angeles-based Awesomeness, which had been valued at $650 million in 2016.

The quarterly results of Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet were impressive, with each firm bringing in both more revenue and profit than analysts had expected. And, as we explored at the time, the companies managed to come up with their wins in unique fashion. And so it goes this time around as well.

Since then, Facebook and Apple reported their own results, continuing the trend of top- and bottom-line beats from the leading United States-based tech outfits.

The Big 5, as we call them, are now worth not merely $3 trillion, a milestone we marked some time ago, but roughly $3.3 trillion, more than 10 percent higher than that previous high-water mark.

“What is going on?” is a fine question to ask. First, let’s quickly remind ourselves about what the first three-fifths of the Big 5 recently accomplished, and then dive into the results of the last two firms.

These happy days in tech won’t last forever, but in the third quarter of 2017, it was a good time to be an incumbent platform company.

First Three

To briefly review, the first of the Big 5 to report had notable quarters. To keep this short and reasonably sweet, we’ll move in bullet points for now:

• Microsoft’s revenue beat ($24.5 billion over a projected $23.56 billion), and earnings-per-share (EPS) beat ($0.84 over $0.72) came amidst the firm meeting its cloud computing revenue promise ahead of schedule. The company’s amalgamated “Commercial Cloud” run rate hit the $20 billion mark, implying – based on how Redmond tracks the metric – that the various constituencies of that cloud cohort generated at least $1.66 billion in revenue during the last month of the quarter. The firm had previously promised to reach the $20 billion run rate threshold sometime inside the next several quarters. Cloud matters for Microsoft because it’s the company’s route to mostly-predictable recurring revenue, making it the opposite of one-off license sales of Windows operating system.
• Amazon beat expectations with revenue of $43.7 billion (expectations: $42.14 billion) and EPS of $0.52 (expectations: $0.03). This demonstrated two things for the Seattle-based ecommerce-entertainment-cloud consortium: that it is not doomed to slow growth (on a percentage basis), and that it can make money even as it continues to grow. The firm’s year-over-year revenue growth rate accelerated from 29 percent in the year-ago quarter, to 34 percent in its most recent quarter. And that second number was reached from a higher footing. Of course, buying Whole Foods didn’t hurt, but Amazon managed to earn more profit at the same time that it accelerated growth, which in business is a winning competition.
• Alphabet’s $27.8 billion in revenue beat expectations of $27.2 billion, while its EPS came in at $9.57, miles ahead of the expected $8.33. What went so right? In the quarter, Alphabet’s Google unit managed to halt the sequential decline in its per-click revenue. Put more simply, in the third quarter, Google’s cost-per-click went up from the second quarter. It was still down on a year-over-year basis, but for Google, which has reported rising ad clicks and falling click prices for some time, the change was notable. Google sold more ads, and at a price that rose a full percent from the preceding quarter. That’s a sea change.

The path that each firm took to beating expectations was different, but each led to resounding success, at least when it comes to beating expectations. Of course, the Nasdaq Composite didn’t get to over 6,000 by accident, but Big Tech’s initial victory lap even at market highs was almost surprising.

But, it was an open question as to whether Apple and Facebook were positioned to match the previous three’s success.

Last Two

The streak continued. Apple and Facebook both managed to rocket through analyst estimates, capping off a quarter of across-the-board wins for tech’s largest domestic players.

We’ll repeat our prior formatting to save us from having to come up with something more creative:

• Apple , reporting revenue of $52.6 billion, over . Its EPS came in at $2.07 per share, ahead of estimates of $1.87. The firm’s iPhone, iPad, and Mac sales all rose during the quarter, while its Services revenue category reached $8.5 billion in top-line. Heading into the critical holiday quarter with better-than-expected results from the previous quarter and two new phones on the market, Apple seems to be on strong footing. Investors agreed. To that point, Apple is worth $174.67 per share today, putting its market cap (via Google Finance) at $902.2 billion. That’s spitting distance from $1 trillion.
• Finally, Facebook. Facebook, the youngest of the Big 5, reported , down from a year-ago growth pace of 59 percent. Still, its revenue of $10.3 billion beat expectations of $9.84 billion, and Facebook’s EPS of $1.59 was far ahead of the anticipated $1.28 figure. The company also continued to grow both its user base and revenue-per-user during the period. However, Facebook signaled that forthcoming efforts to help prevent the platform from being weaponized by antagonistic nation-states would ding its future profits.

While that final sentence might sound a bit out of place, it underscores something that I think we often forget. Namely how big these companies in fact are: Facebook has nearly 1.4 billion daily active users, Google is the key path to information for much of the world, Amazon wants to take over how you purchase everything, Microsoft is cementing its SaaS products in homes and offices around the globe, and Apple makes so much money that its earnings reports are almost hard to read.

But are the good times for the big shots good for everyone? Perhaps not.

What About Startups?

TechCrunch recently raised the question of “,” arguing that the wave of vibrant startup-led technology change has passed for the time being. Not that it won’t ever come back, of course, but ask yourself if the following declaration doesn’t sound about right:

“[w]e live in a new world now, and it favors the big, not the small. The pendulum has already begun to swing back. Big businesses and executives, rather than startups and entrepreneurs, will own the next decade; today’s graduates are much more likely to work for Mark Zuckerberg than follow in his footsteps.”

The piece details its own set of whys – after “back-to-back massive worldwide hardware revolutions” that “there is no such [new] revolution en route” – but our above work should supplement the argument. The biggest tech companies are only cementing gains and stacking cash when times are good and smaller, disruptive players have the most access to capital that they have had since the DotCom era. And if they can do that when times are good for everyone, what happens when feast turns to famine?

When the bull cycle flips, and it always does, imagine how it may affect the current, rather pleasant status quo. It isn’t too far a stretch to guess that the big companies will be sitting on profitable bottom lines with huge cash reserves when it happens. And they may do so while still-private, still-unprofitable concerns have to deal with waning interest from tech investors.

We’ll check back in after the fourth quarter closes.