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To answer that question, Crunchbase took a look at founders and CEOs across several groupings of startup unicorns. The research included the most heavily funded private companies, newly minted unicorns and companies that recently crossed the $5 billion valuation mark.

The short answer? Yes, immigrants are still heavily represented in the ranks of U.S. unicorn founders and CEOs. They hail from multiple continents, and are leading companies in sectors from e-commerce to crypto to pharmaceuticals.

The long answer? Yes, but maybe less so. Early data indicates the proportion of high-valuation U.S. startups founded or led by immigrants may be trending down some. One factor is the growth of startup hubs outside the U.S., making it easier for founders to launch companies in their home country. The other, most notorious factor: the hurdles of securing a visa as a would-be startup founder.

“There is no visa specifically for someone who wants to start a company,” according to , founding partner at , a Silicon Valley-based firm that invests in U.S. startups with immigrant founders.

While U.S. student enrollment of foreign nationals roughly doubled from 2007 to 2018, there hasn’t been a corresponding strategy to speed or simplify graduates’ pursuit of a green card, Mehta said. And although that issue predates Trump’s election, the current administration hasn’t helped, deciding not to implement an Obama-era .

Still, a striking percentage of funded private companies that crossed the $1 billion valuation threshold this past year are immigrant founded. Below, we take a look at 19 such companies, along with a look founders’ countries of origin.

We also look at the most heavily funded, highest-valuation private companies overall with immigrant founders and CEOs.

The big picture

If investors are backing fewer immigrant-led U.S. startups, it may be because there are fewer available to back. For the 2018-19 period, U.S. immigration declined to 595,000 people—the lowest level since the 1980s, according to one oft-cited . It’s a level that leaves even some members of the Trump administration’s inner circle concerned that immigration levels are to support economic growth.

Of course, one needn’t be a new immigrant to launch a high-flying startup. Many of the successful founders on our lists above immigrated years or decades before their companies took flight. The lists, overall, include immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children as well as those who came later, commonly to attend universities.

Lastly, we should keep in mind that immigration, like unicorns, venture funding and startup valuations, has historically been rather cyclical. The issues confronting immigrant founders today may very well fade away or morph into something completely different in coming years.

Illustration: .

GPs invest the money of LPs. Performance is measured by metrics like TVPI, DPI and IRR. In pitches, founders and their funders may talk up low CACs and high LTVs. And with the exception of “seed” (which is a semantic morass best addressed separately) the rounds are labeled, alphabetically, starting with Series A, then Series B, followed by Series C, and so on through the alphabet.

It’s Series A rounds we’ll focus on here.

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What is a Series A round, really? These days, it’s kinda hard to tell. Not so long ago, one could pretty reliably define “Series A” as the first priced round of financing from institutional investors raised by a privately held company. In other words, it was the first round at which a valuation was assigned and the deal was funded by professional investors. But now, it’s increasingly common for seed rounds to be priced. And, these days, a majority of new venture firm formation is initiated by professional money managers specifically targeting seed-stage deals.

Suffice it to say that a Series A is a Series A when founders and their backers agree that a round is a Series A and agree to call it such. It’s all very postmodern, like so many things these days.

Despite these caveats, however, the size of Series A rounds tend to follow a pattern. To show this, we analyzed 2,539 Series A rounds raised by U.S.-based startups between 2018 and late January 2020. The data was sourced from Crunchbase. We segmented the data by the amount of money raised (in USD) and location, and plotted the results in a histogram displaying the number of Series A deals raised within each round size “bucket.”

A majority of Series A rounds are less than $9 million. The median Series A round from this sample set is $8.6 million, nationwide.

There is a very long tail of deals on the right-hand side of the distribution, extending well into the territory of “supergiant” venture rounds. The data we sampled for this analysis has 32 rounds of $100 million or more, mostly closed by biotechnology companies. But self-driving car technology upstarts (like ), so-called iBuyer real estate companies (like and ) and automation companies (like robotics company and robotic process automation shop ) are in the mix as well.

Nationwide, the distribution of Series A size is somewhat bimodal. Despite a wide spectrum of deal size, there are clusters of rounds around certain values. Of the deals sampled, 15 percent are between $4 million and $6 million, and roughly 9.3 percent of sampled deals are in the $9,000,001 to $10,000,000 range.

Not every startup fundraising market has the same distribution of deal sizes at Series A. Patterns of Series A round size reflect the local dynamics of a particular market.

The 310 Series A rounds raised by New York City-based companies looks similar to the nationwide sample.

Recently, the median Series A deal size in New York City has hovered right around $10 million, a little larger than nationwide figures.

The median Series A deal in San Francisco (just the city, not Silicon Valley or the Bay Area as a whole) is also $10 million.

The distribution of round size in San Francisco and New York is “pointier” (e.g. has more kurtosis) than the last major market we’ll review here: the combined markets of Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Here we see the influence of industry composition in a given area. Boston and Cambridge are home to many life sciences and “deep tech” ventures, all of which require large up-front investment to build viable companies.

How much is just right for a startup’s Series A?

How much money should a company raise in its Series A round? The answer, as with all things in life, is that it’s complicated and it depends.

If pre-seed is all about raising enough to get a minimum viable product or service out into the wild, and a seed round is meant to give a company enough runway to dial in on something close to product-market fit, then a Series A round is there to fund the ongoing development of a repeatable, scalable business model. At least that’s typically how it goes.

How much a company needs to raise depends on the business it’s pursuing, the sector it’s in and where it’s based. In its Series A round, $5 million might feel like a comfortable cash cushion for a SaaS business to raise, but for a hardware startup that might barely cover the cost of sourcing materials and spinning up production, with little left over for logistics and fulfillment. A company in a high-cost market like San Francisco will need to raise more money than similar companies based in more affordable locales. Additionally, a founder might decide on a rough cadence for fundraising; whether expecting to raise the next round in 18 or 24 months (assuming all goes well) determines how much will need to be raised today.

The fact is there is no “right” amount to raise. Nice round numbers like $5 million or $10 million look tidy on a cap table and sound good to the press, but there’s nothing magical about raising a nice round number. Companies should raise what they need to achieve the set of objectives they and their investors decide on. Any less and you run the risk of starving a company before it ever leaves the nest. Much more than that and you get recklessness.

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For this first installment, we’re concentrating on industries that attracted both high funding totals and a lot of individual funding rounds. The methodology, which we’ll detail more below, 1 focuses most heavily on North American startups and attempts to avoid the distortive effects of single supergiant rounds on funding totals.

We ended up focusing on four sectors that are attracting rising funding: Fintech, real estate, insurance and automation. All are seeing particular traction at the late stage, where checks are largest.

Below, we unpack the numbers and trendlines for each industry in more detail:

Fintech And Banking

This seems to be the year that every startup decided to become a bank. And every venture capitalist decided to write a check to one or more of those startups.

Much of the funding went to “neobanks,” a fancy term to describe upstart digital banks working on everything from savings and checking accounts to mobile debit cards. Many are focused on bringing banking services to both consumers and businesses that have previously been underserved by traditional banks.

Investors are apparently banking on some big returns. Companies focused on fintech, banking and mobile payments in North and South America brought in $11.7 billion in 2019, per Crunchbase (see ). That’s up from $9.2 billion in all of 2018, per Crunchbase.

It wasn’t just a handful of giant investments either. This year’s funding was spread across more than 700 known rounds for startups.

Still, supergiant rounds did help boost the totals. One of the best known upstart banking brands, , pulled in an astonishing $700 million across two mega-rounds this year, pushing its valuation to $5.8 billion. Brazil’s , meanwhile, raised a whopping $400 million in a single July round.

Real Estate And Property Management

The single biggest headline generator in the venture-backed real estate space for 2019 was undoubtedly the implosion of WeWork and its ill-fated IPO. But setting that debacle aside, other trendlines for the real estate startup sphere this year have been pretty positive.

As of early December, investors had into an assortment of U.S. startups. The largest funding recipients include , the furnished workspace rental provider, , the online home-selling platform, and , a tech-enabled real estate brokerage. Altogether, those three companies raised nearly $1.2 billion in funding rounds this year alone. Other potentially less capital-intensive areas of ‼����DZ�ٱ𳦳�” also attracted investors’ favor, including a bevy of property management software providers.

Insurance

Insurance is a startup sector that’s been growing steadily for a few years now, and it hit its highest funding levels to date in 2019.

As of mid-December, U.S. companies in the insurance and insuretech categories secured just over $4.75 billion in seed through late stage funding (see ). That’s up from $3.4 billion in 2018.

A huge wave of seed-stage insurance startups launched three to five years ago, and that’s one of the reasons big financings and investment totals are rising so much. Hot companies in that cohort are rapidly maturing, and they’re seeking ever-larger later-stage rounds. Corporate venture arms of established insurance companies are also active in the space, contributing to rising valuations.

, a provider of health plans for Medicare recipients, closed the largest funding round, a $500 million Series E. , which offers car insurance with rates tied to driver behavior, raised $350 million, while , a home and renter’s insurance provider, pulled in $300 million.

Automation

Automation is essentially shorthand for getting technology to do something that used to require a human. In the dawn of the industrial age, this generally entailed huge, heavy machines voraciously sucking down fuel. Today, it’s likely a software program capable of running on a pocket-sized device.

To that end, automation software developers are securing rising sums of venture capital. In 2019, U.S. companies in the space pulled in $2.89 billion in known funding, per Crunchbase data. (See ), exceeding 2018 levels. This year’s total is expected to rise higher in coming months as more late-reported funding rounds get added to the database.

Familiar names topped the list of largest funding recipients. , which develops software to automate repetitive tasks for office workers, pulled in $568 million in Series D financing, bringing total funding to date to $1 billion. Rival , meanwhile, closed on a fresh $290 million last month.

It’s Not All Up

Overall, 2019 is shaping up as yet another really strong year for U.S. venture funding. The rise of supergiant funding rounds, a robust fundraising environment for well-regarded venture firms, and growing momentum across a host of hot sectors are all factors contributing to keeping the investments flowing.

But while this piece highlights standout sectors, it wasn’t all rosy in startup-land this year. That’s why, for the next installment in this end-of-year series, we’ll look at sectors that posted significant declines in 2019.

For now, though, we’ll end on an optimistic note, observing that while everything was up, automation, real estate, fintech and insurance all posted pretty impressive venture funding tallies.

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