That number remains the lowest count since August 2020, when nine unicorns joined the board. The 12 new unicorns added $19 billion in value to the board in August, which is still down from July when 14 new companies added $26 billion in value.

China brought two transportation unicorns to the board with a new electric vehicle company and a robo taxi service. Other overseas unicorns include an e-commerce wholesaler from Korea, a delivery platform in India, and a fintech application from Indonesia. The seven new unicorns from the U.S. focus on healthtech, blockchain, energy and entertainment.��

Of the new unicorns, enjoys the highest number of investors, with 44 including and . And counts 31 investors including and .��

Transport

• Shanghai-based electric vehicle company raised a Series A funding of $444 million valued at $4.4 billion. The company was jointly created by the and .
• Chinese state-owned automaker SAIC’s autonomous taxi service arm raised $193 million at a value of around $1 billion. Based in Shanghai, SAIC Mobility is partnering with autonomous vehicle provider to develop the service.��

E-commerce and logistics

• South Korea-based , a wholesaler for buyers and sellers of agricultural produce, raised a $37 million Series D at a value of $2.7 billion led by . It last raised a $60 million funding a year ago led by .
• New Delhi-based e-commerce logistics platform for shipping raised $33 million at a value of $1.3 billion. The funding was led by existing investors and.

Health care

• Nurse recruitment platform , based in San Francisco, raised an $80 million Series B led by and New York-based . The company was valued at $1.7 billion. The company also it’s signing up more than 10,000 nurses every week and has reduced the average time to hire from 82 days to 14.
• Cambridge-based biotech raised $221 million at a $1.5 billion valuation led by . The company is developing RNA therapeutics to treat cancer, infectious diseases and genetic disorders.��

Web3

• Northern California-based , a blockchain billing and payments platform for business- to-business transactions, acquired Mexico-based , reaching a unicorn valuation through the transaction. Together, the companies have processed $5 billion in payments and connected 500,000 businesses.
• San Francisco-based raised $8.5 million, which valued the company at $1 billion. Zebec is built on the Solana blockchain, and its first product allows users to receive their payroll in USDC or stablecoins. , and invested in the funding.��

Entertainment

• New York-based ticketing platform raised a $238 million Series E valued at $1.2 billion, led by , which also led its Series B. The company raised funding as it pulled back on a SPAC deal.��

Energy

• Washington state-based nuclear energy company raised $750 million in funding led by , its founder and chairman, and South Korea-based . TerraPower is a developer of nuclear energy solutions as well as nuclear medicine.��

Fintech

• Indonesia-based , a digital wallet application, has raised $555 million, some of it in a secondary financing. Now valued at more than $1 billion, the company is part owned by . The funding was led by and . The company says it has 115 million users in Indonesia for its fintech application.��

Real Estate

• Residential real estate company , founded by , raised $350 million in an initial funding led by , valuing the company at $1 billion. The company is based in New York and is seeking to build a new service model for renters and homeownership.��

Methodology

Funding rounds included in this report are seed, angel, venture, corporate-venture and private-equity rounds in venture-backed companies. This reflects data in Crunchbase as of Sept. 7, 2022.��

The Crunchbase ������Ƶ is a curated list that includes private unicorn companies with post-money valuations of $1 billion or more and is based on Crunchbase data. New companies are as they reach the $1 billion valuation mark as part of a funding round.��

Funding to unicorn companies includes all private financings to companies that are tagged as unicorns, as well as those that have since graduated to .��

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Update: Paystand acquired Yaydoo

Illustration:

Nash’s platform allows businesses to manage and track local same-day deliveries (think things like small parcels, catering and meal kits). Nash pulls together delivery providers so businesses can pick the one that works best for them, and gives the businesses visibility to track an order from the beginning to delivery.

led the Series A, with participation from investors includingand , according to TechCrunch. Nash was founded in 2021 and is based in San Francisco.��

The Nash network

“The Nash platform is built for flexibility. As a business, you can use Nash to run on-demand, scheduled, or even multi-drop off routes,”�� and of Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a �� “If you already have a fleet in some or all of your markets, you can add these drivers to Nash. The platform will optimize between internal and third-party drivers, saving valuable ops team time.”

The funding comes as many businesses are competing with to offer same-day delivery to customers who have grown accustomed to getting their orders fast.��

The company raised a $125,000 pre-seed round led by Y Combinator in August 2021, according to Crunchbase. Nash also raised a previously unannounced $7.8 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz late last year, according to TechCrunch.��

Since then, Nash “has also become a critical part of the logistics infrastructure for many larger enterprise and consumer companies—even marketplaces,” Chen and Moore wrote in their blog post.

Nash’s network is available in all 50 U.S. states and Canada. The new round will be used to scale the company and support more small and medium-sized businesses and enterprise customers, according to Andreessen Horowitz.��

Illustration:

This morning announced its , including 44.1 percent revenue growth to 27.5 billion RMB ($3.91 billion), and post-tax profit of 1.3 billion RMB ($189.1 million). Meituan improved from stiff year-ago losses on both an operating and net basis, making its growth and incomes all the more notable.

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The company, which provides deals, reservations, and on-demand delivery, went public last year worth around $55 billion. Today it is worth about $68 billion; shares of the company fell just over 5.5 percent in trading today, following the announcement of its results.

All that’s well and good, but what matters is that inside of Meituan Dianping’s earnings were positive notes regarding its food delivery business. Food delivery is a key growth driver for companies like and , and the entire game for firms like and . So, what Meituan has to say about the economics of food delivery matters; can the Chinese giant make it work?

It seems that the answer is mostly yes. Here are the key excerpts from its earnings report, regarding food delivery (emphasis Crunchbase News):

[R]evenue from our food delivery business increased by 39.4% year-over-year to RMB15.6 billion for the third quarter of 2019 from RMB11.2 billion in the same period of 2018. Gross profit from our food delivery business increased by 64.5% to RMB3.0 billion for the third quarter of 2019 from RMB1.9 billion in the same period of 2018, while gross margin expanded to 19.5% from 16.6%. Although gross margin decreased by 2.8 percentage points on a quarter-over-quarter basis due to unfavorable weather conditions, we were able to achieve positive adjusted operating profit for our food delivery business for the third quarter of 2019.

Food delivery made up about 57.5 percent of Meituan’s gross transaction volume (total platform spend) in the third quarter. Yes, the firm’s profit note regarding the portion of its business that we care the most about was adjusted profit (removing “share-based compensation expenses, amortization of intangible assets resulting from acquisitions,” along with various impairment charges), but that’s still better than nothing.

Recall that Uber and Lyft are only promising �ڳܱ���-���ܲ����Ա������adjusted profit to begin in 2021; Meituan Dianping is already there with its whole business and food delivery operation. Uber Eats, generated negative adjusted EBITDA (another adjusted profit metric) of $316 million off $392 million in adjusted net revenue ($645 million in un-adjusted top line). Those numbers are worse.

So What?

Meituan making money on delivery shows that it is possible to do so. And it was able to make money on food delivery in a market as competitive as China, and one that is slowing down. Turning a profit on delivery, it turns out, is not an impossible feat.

We don’t want to hold our breath for it, but perhaps if Meituan Dianping can generate adjusted profit on food delivery, others can too. (Food delivery is a crowded space in the U.S., which could complicate short-term profitability.)

It’s probably too bold to say that Meituan’s news will prompt Postmates to get off the sidelines public (Postmates’ CEO said market conditions are the reason for its delayed IPO, but it would be unusual for a company to go public in the midst of the holidays). Nevertheless, Meituan’s delivery profit is a good sign for all of the players in the space.

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Rewind the tape a few years and on-demand startups were nowhere. As the market learned how expensive it was to build a delivery startup at scale, capital became scarce.

Back in 2016 being an on-demand startup . , and missed its target of becoming a unicorn . In the same year, on-demand food startup shut down amidst the “on-demand apocalypse.”

But that was all���ٳ���,��mind. Now is��now, and today on-demand is hot. Not on-demand ride-hailing, just on-demand delivery. If you do that, times are pretty good. Unless you are Uber doing on-demand deliveries, then you are still not hot. Got it?

Good. News out recently brings us to this topic as DoorDash looks to add another chunk of capital to its cap table. At a new, higher valuation to boot.

The Round

DoorDash is raising “at least $500 million” at a valuation of “about $13 billion” . The that DoorDash is looking for “between $650 million and $750 million” at a post-money valuation that “would approach $13 billion.” And finally, the news that DoorDash was looking to raise new capital at a valuation north of $10 billion.

That’s a lot of news about a single round. But when there’s that much smoke, there’s nearly always fire of some sort. So it’s more than likely that DoorDash is working to close a monster new round, at a monster new valuation.

Which is odd, really. It’s not odd that DoorDash��can raise more money. Deliveroo just did, Postmates is , and the market for food delivery is large. But it’s odd that DoorDash��is raising more money.

After all, the company has been doing little else lately:

That’s rapid valuation growth by literally any standard. Indeed, the are betting that it is creating prodigious value at the moment, or they are betting that with their capital injections the firm is set to consume quite a lot of the delivery market.

DoorDash, , is . That must cost a lot of money. But otherwise, the firm may be raising to power new markets, fund current operations, and perhaps shore up its balance sheet in case of a macro downturn. I also wonder if this is just another round that DoorDash is raising because it can.

Slack did that for a while, and it worked out pretty ok.

Regardless, what’s clear is that the 2016 on-demand market is behind us. In 2019 what was anathema before is hot once again. Just wait for three years from now. Maybe things will have reversed yet again.

Illustration: .

So far, online ordering and on-demand delivery have allowed us to largely accomplish this goal. Just point, click, and wait. But there’s one catch: Delivery people. We can never all lie around ordering pizzas if someone still has to deliver them.

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Enter robots. In tech futurist circles, it’s pretty commonplace to hear about how some medley of autonomous vehicles and AI-enabled bots will take over doorstep deliveries in the coming years. They’ll bring us takeout, drop off our packages, and displace lots of humans who currently make a living doing these things.

If this vision does become reality, there’s a strong chance it’ll be largely due to a handful of early-stage startups currently working to roboticize last-mile delivery. Below, we take a look at who they are, what they’re doing, who’s backing them, and where they’re setting up shop.

The Players

Crunchbase data unearthed at least eight companies in the robot delivery space with headquarters or operations in North America that have secured seed or early-stage funding in the past couple of years.

They range from heavily funded startups to lean seed-stage operations. Silicon Valley-based , an autonomous delivery startup founded by former engineers at , is the most heavily funded, having raised . Others have raised a few million.

In the chart below, we look at key players, ranked by funding to date, along with their locations and key investors.

Who’s Your Backer?

While startups may be paving the way for robot delivery, they’re not doing so alone. One of the ways larger enterprises are keeping a toehold in the space is through backing and partnering with early-stage startups. They’re joining a long list of prominent seed and venture investors also eagerly eyeing the sector.

The list of larger corporate investors includes Germany’s Daimler, the lead investor in . China’s , meanwhile, is backing San Francisco-based , while Toyota AI Ventures has invested in .

As for partnering, takeout food delivery services seem to be the most active users of robot couriers.

Starship, whose bot has been described as a slow-moving, medium-sized cooler on six wheels, is making particularly strong inroads in takeout. The San Francisco- and Estonia-based company, launched by Skype founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, is teaming up with and in parts of California and Washington, DC. It’s also working with the Domino’s pizza chain in Germany and the Netherlands.

, another maker of cute, six-wheeled bots, has also been with Postmates in parts of Los Angeles. And , which is branding its boxy bots as “your friendly neighborhood robot,” teamed up for a trial with Yelp in San Francisco. ��

San Francisco Bay Area Dominates

While their visions of world domination are necessarily global, the robot delivery talent pool remains rather local.

Six of the eight seed and early-stage startups tracked by Crunchbase are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the remaining two have some operations in the region.

Why is this? Partly, there’s a concentration of talent in the area, with key engineering staff coming from larger local companies like Uber, Tesla, and Waymo.��Plus, of course, there’s a ready supply of investor capital, which bot startups presumably will need as they scale.

Silicon Valley and San Francisco, known for scarce and astronomically expensive housing, are also geographies in which employers struggle to find people to deliver stuff at prevailing wages to the hordes of tech workers toiling at projects like designing robots to replace them.

That said, the region isn’t entirely friendly territory for slow-moving sidewalk robots. In San Francisco, already home to absurdly steep streets and sidewalks crowded with humans and discarded scooters, city legislators to ban delivery robots from most places and severely restrict them in areas where permitted.

The Rise Of The Pizza Delivery Robot Manager

But while San Francisco may be wary of a delivery robot invasion, other geographies, including nearby Berkeley, Calif., where startup operates, have been more welcoming.

In the process, they’re creating an interesting new set of robot overseer jobs that could shed some light on the future of last-mile delivery employment.

For some startups in early trial mode, robot wrangling jobs involve shadowing bots and making sure they carry out their assigned duties without travails.

Remote robot management is also a thing and will likely see the sharpest growth. Starship, for instance, relies on operators in Estonia to track and manage bots as they make their deliveries in faraway countries.

For now, it’s too early to tell whether monitoring and controlling hordes of delivery bots will provide better pay and working conditions than old-fashioned human delivery jobs.

At least, however, much of it could theoretically be done while lying on the sofa.

Top Image Credit: .

Crunchbase News has spent considerable time looking at the on-demand economy. We’ve taken looks at companies that pick your stuff up, companies that drop your stuff off, and everything in between.

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Our love of the topic made the news that has raised an enormous new stack of money all the more interesting. Why Deliveroo, why this much, and why now? Let’s see if we can quickly find some answers.

Finances

The Guardian has done an admirable job keeping tabs on the Deliveroo saga. In its piece today detailing the new funding information, there was :

The new investment has also been unveiled just days after it emerged that the Deliveroo founder, Will Shu,��.

Well then! That looked juicy enough. Following The Guardian’s reporting backward in time, we came across :

Deliveroo’s revenues soared sevenfold to £128.6m in the year to 31 December 2016 as it expanded operations in the UK and overseas to 25,000 restaurants in more than 140 cities and 12 countries. But pre-tax losses climbed to £129m from £30.13m a year before. Deliveroo’s UK business alone made a loss of just over £46m.

Deliveroo’s cash resources stood at nearly £180m at the end of last year after the company raised £209m in new funding from the issue of shares.

This helps us answer our questions, mostly. First, why Deliveroo? Because the firm is growing at a tremendous pace—an intoxicating metric for private investors. Seven-fold revenue expansion is Snap-style growth, a company that proved catnip for huge swaths of the venture class.

Why did Deliveroo raise so much in the round? Assuming the firm adds on new markets, , short-term losses may accelerate. To fund its current operating deficit, and even grow it, demands huge sums of fresh capital. Perhaps $385 million, give or take. The company also likely needed the funds. Having £180 million in cash��nearly three quarters ago when your annual pace of loss��was��£129 million implies that a capital event would be welcome.

You don’t want to run too close to metal when you are growing at such unprofitable levels.

Finally, let’s not forget that Deliveroo can��raise such a large sum.��The firm joins a taking on large checks while the private market is hot and the public market is overinflated.

In short: losses are still in vogue, provided that they are stapled to rapid growth. On a post-tax basis, Deliveroo lost more than 100 percent of its revenue, working off of our prior quote’s results. But when you stack that next to 700 percent revenue growth, Deliveroo passes just fine.

From The����

SAP buys Gigya for reported $350M

• SAP announced that it is acquiring��, a provider of customer identify management software, in a deal reportedly valued around $350 million. Silicon Valley-based Gigya previously raised just over $100 million in venture funding.

Deliveroo raises $385M

• Restaurant food delivery startup��, has raised $385 million in a new funding round at reported����of over $2 billion. The London-based company plans to use the money to add service areas, increase staff, and expand restaurant partnerships.

US VCs up Canada investment

• American venture capitalists are heading north. U.S. venture capitalists poured 150 percent more venture capital dollars into Canadian companies in 2016 compared to four years ago, according to a��Crunchbase News analysis. Industry insiders point to pro-entrepreneur policies, recent startup successes, and a favorable exchange rate as key factors behind the rise.
• For more stories, follow����on Twitter and check us out on��.

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