Rumors swirled over the weekend that was on the verge of closing on a buy of personal finance company . for about $7 billion in cash and stock. ( .)

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As the WSJ reported, such an acquisition would help propel Intuit further into the consumer finance space.

By Monday afternoon, Intuit had confirmed the news , saying it plans to buy Credit Karma for about $7.1 billion in cash and stock.

We thought this would be a good time to take a look at Credit Karma’s funding history. The San Francisco-based company has raised since its 2007 founding by , according to Crunchbase data.

Most recently, in March 2018, Credit Karma skipped an IPO and cashed out for some of its existing investors via from at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. With that deal, Silver Lake acquired a significant minority stake in the company from existing equity holders through an organized secondary process.

Credit Karma does a whole slew of things like help people keep up with, and improve, their credit ratings. It also helps people prepare and file their taxes, monitor their identities and track and manage vehicle information. It also uses advanced data modeling to analyze and identify the best financial products available for its members. As of 2018, it had originated more than $40 billion in credit products including credit cards, personal loans, mortgages, automotive financing and student loan refinancing.

And as of this month, Credit Karma says it has more than 100 million members in the United States, U.K. and Canada, including almost half of all U.S. millennials. Part of the company’s growth goes back to the fact that it offers all these things for free, making it easy for people to become members. The company makes its money when members take an offer through its site (such as for a credit card or a loan). In the case of a credit card, it gets a cut from the bank issuing that card, and in the instance of a loan, the company gets a cut from the lender who funds it.

In 2017 TechCrunch reported that the company earned the previous year and was profitable. In its statement today, Intuit noted that Credit Karma had “nearly $1 billion in unaudited revenue in calendar year 2019, up 20% from the previous year.”

Funding rewind

In 2008, put $500,000 in Credit Karma in an . The startup went on to raise $2.5 million in a (back when Series As were actually this small) financing that was led by and included participation from �� and , among others.

It took Credit Karma three and a half years to raise its next round: a March 2013 $30 million Series B investment led by . also put money in that round.

By the following year, the company had raised $155 million across two tranches of a Series C round, more than five times the round of its Series B the previous year. The second tranche of that Series C, led by SV Angel in September 2014, gave Credit Karma a $1 billion valuation.

In June 2015, the company raised a $175 million Series D financing at a pre-money valuation of $3.3 billion.

The deal going through is a validation for the fintech space, which only saw one IPO last year in ’s public debut.

As put it, (thanks to Axios for calling out this nice excerpt):

“Intuit could try to match all the tax data its TurboTax customers provide with the credit-scoring data that Credit Karma holds. That could let Intuit serve up better customer prospects to credit card issuers—and eventually let Intuit charge lenders more for access to its hoard of data.”

In confirming the deal, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi said the company’s��mission is “to power prosperity around the world with a bold goal of doubling the household savings rate for customers on our platform.

“We wake up every day trying to help consumers make ends meet,” Goodarzi continued. “By joining forces with Credit Karma, we can create a personalized financial assistant that will help consumers find the right financial products, put more money in their pockets and provide insights and advice, enabling them to buy the home they’ve always dreamed about, pay for education and take the vacation they’ve always wanted.”

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Read the front page of influential technology news aggregator this morning and you’d think that things are hot in startup land. , a financial technology startup focused on the African market, from Chinese and Japanese investors. There’s a . You can find as well.

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But if you started the day with a newspaper, you might have on startups looking to raise extra rounds and conserve cash, and the latest from the WeWork implosion as the coworking startup .

Both sets of news are correct, but they tell slightly different stories. We might summarize both story collections by saying that while individual actions in the startup market paint a bullish picture, sentiment in startupland isn’t as strong as it was last year; there’s more fear in the market.

Of course, we’ve been here before. There was the , and tech stocks fell off a cliff so hard in late 2018 that everyone with a slide deck and venture dreams got nervous. And you can find “startup winter” worries in , , , and, as we reported recently, 2019.

We raise all of this as a reminder that while some shrugging off macro (the global economic slowdown) and micro concerns ( implosion), there is reason to be worried. Investment patterns can shift quickly in private markets. But while all of that is true, there’s still plenty of optimism and dry powder in the market. Shake a stick, and you find a new venture fund (some recent news here, here), while private equity has .

It seems fair to say that while Nasdaq remains near record highs, there’s little chance that the constitutionally-optimistic — founders and their private backers — slow down, there’s enough concern to warrant caution from the sidelines.

Before It Closes

Some companies are taking advantage of today’s warm waters even as concerns rise and the holiday season approaches. Most recently, payment software company filed for an IPO on Friday. While the Bill.com IPO is a positive sign for startups in general, don’t be surprised if it isn’t quickly joined by other companies looking to debut; it would be surprising to see any more startups file to go public after this week, as most companies try to avoid a public market debut around the holidays.

In the meantime, startups may raise extra cash to raise their walls a bit. After all, why shouldn’t they? There’s so much money in the market, why not put it to good use if a company isn’t quite ready to go public.

But there is some real hope that the good times will last a bit longer. After all, there are still a bunch of unicorns that still need to go public (looking at you, and ). Postmates’ CEO said just last month that the company was waiting for the right market conditions to go public, as the markets haven’t been too friendly to unicorns like Uber and Lyft so far this year.

Heading into the end of 2019, there’s scant reason to expect a major correction in the short-term. So, we stay in the middle of caution and hope. How long we can stand on this particular edge, however, isn’t clear.

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���澱�Dz�’ reported this morning that consumer credit startup at a $2.9 billion post-money valuation. The Series F round takes the San Francisco-based company’s total funding over time to . Its last raise was a $200 million n December 2017.

, Fidelity, , and participated in the latest financing, according to Axios.

co-founder helped launch Affirm in 2012 to provide consumers a replacement for credit cards. The mobile app offers installment loans to consumers at the point of sale.

Also, yesterday, Palo Alto-based announced an $88M funding round led by with participation from , and others. The round takes Bill.com’s total venture raised over time to just , according to its Crunchbase profile.

That round also catapulted Bill.com to unicorn status with a valuation of more than $1 billion, according to . Founded in 2006, Bill.com is a cloud-based business payments and software platform focused on the SMB market.

Founder and CEO diverted questions from the about whether the company is profitable yet or when it might plan to go public, telling reporter Cromwell Schubarth that the company’s current focus ��“is about building and solving the biggest pain points for customers and doing the right thing for businesses.” In a press release, Lacerte said the company automates payments and back office business processes to help its customers achieve “significant efficiencies and cost savings.”

Currently, more than three million members pay or are getting paid with Bill.com, according to the company, which manages more than $60 billion in annual payments.

In October 2018,��, a (also Bay Area-based) provider of credit cards for startups, raised $125 million in a that also gave it unicorn status with a $1.1 billion valuation. (Read more about that .)

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