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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: .

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DoorDash said in its announcement that the number of shares on offer and a target price range for the transaction “have not yet been determined.”

The brief statement also adds that the IPO “is expected to take place after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.” In recent days, the U.S. stock market has experienced significant downward pressure amid concerns about the spreading SARS-CoV-2 virus and speculation about the scale of its impact on the global economy.

As of 2017, the SEC has granted smaller, high-growth companies a path to initially file their S-1 registration statements confidently, allowing for regulatory review without immediate exposure to scrutiny from the media and would-be public market investors. Confidentially filed S-1 documents are made public prior to IPO.

According to Crunchbase data, San Francisco-based DoorDash has raised in equity funding since its inception in 2013. Its last private market valuation was approximately $12.6 billion, post-money, earned in .

The include the likes of , , , , , the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund , and the .

DoorDash has never released a complete picture of its financials, which will be part of the IPO process. The company is not profitable and was expected to lose $450 million on revenue of between $900 million and $1 billion in 2019, according to from .

The company faces a number of labor disputes, as its “gig economy” workers are treated as independent contractors and are not eligible to receive benefits like health insurance. Earlier in February DoorDash was as it works through individual cases brought by 5,010 drivers for the platform who believed the company was in violation of California labor law.

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But not every industry had a great year. A Crunchbase News analysis shows a number of major categories – including hardware, blockchain, delivery and electric vehicles — that are poised to show big year-over-year declines.

Below, we look at what the numbers reveal about these out-of-vogue sectors.

Hardware

Hardware investment showed a decline in 2019, as U.S. investors increasingly backed away from big rounds for startups developing consumer electronics, networking hardware, and other devices.

Per 1, U.S. hardware raised $1.97 billion in seed through late stage venture funding rounds in 2019. Direct year-over-year comparisons aren’t entirely fair at this point in the year, given that many rounds get reported late. Still, it’s hard to see much chance we’ll catch up to the 2018 total of $3.46 billion.

One of the big reasons hardware funding is down is that there were fewer supergiant funding rounds in the category this year. Just two companies raised known rounds of $100 million or more: , a maker of hardware and software platforms for data centers, and , a developer of adaptive, kinetic glass.

It should also be noted that the hardware category does not include a lot of robotics and autonomous driving deals. If we factored in funding rounds for startups such as , a developer of autonomous robotic vehicles that raised $940 million in February, the 2019 totals would be much higher.

Crypto And Blockchain

While the price of bitcoin has recovered from lows hit a year ago, dealmaking activity for crypto and blockchain has not followed suit.

Crunchbase data shows investor enthusiasm for crypto and blockchain deals remains far below peaks hit several quarters ago. Dealmaking activity appears to have hit its highest point around late 2017 and early 2018, when cryptocurrency prices kept soaring, and blockchain was the buzzword of the day.

For the first two-thirds of the year, private investors put an estimated $2 billion to work across at least 472 known rounds globally, per Crunchbase analysis (not including initial coin offerings (ICOs)). Initial data for the remainder of the year shows the space still garnering some deals, but well below prior highs. (In 2018, the peak year, investors put at least $4.65 billion into the space, not including ICOs.)

It also should be noted that the numbers include companies for which crypto or blockchain is a component but not a core focus of the business. For example, one of the  largest crypto-related rounds of 2019 was a $323 million Series E for , which offers cryptocurrencies but is best-known as a commission free stock trading app.

So when one looks at funding for more pure-play crypto and blockchain startups, the funding levels look more bearish.

Delivery

Food delivery is a tough category for making a profit, but in recent years it’s been a pretty lucrative one for raising venture funding. But if 2019 is any indication, the fast-growing sector is in the midst of a slowdown.

So far this year, food delivery companies brought in in venture and seed funding across at least 125 funding rounds, per Crunchbase data. That’s down from $11.1 billion that went to , across at least 223 rounds.

��DZ��dz�������’s had the largest single venture capital funding round of food delivery companies in 2019, bringing in $1 billion in its Series E round. also pulled in some serious cash, raising a total of $1 billion across two separate rounds.

The food delivery space has encountered its share of problems in 2019. DoorDash came under fire for its tipping practices and we’re still waiting on Postmates to go public. Lackluster post-IPO performance by Uber, which had been banking on growing its delivery business, also hasn’t helped.

That said, companies are still raising big sums, so this isn’t a sector that hasn’t petered out yet.

Electric Vehicles

If you are a venture capitalist and want a place to park lots of capital, the electric vehicle industry has much to offer. Companies in the space are notoriously capital-intensive, and while their risk profile is high, the returns on betting on the category leader can be high too, as evidenced by Tesla’s $70 billion-plus market capitalization.

However, history also shows that the bulk of electric vehicle investments don’t turn out so profitably. Perhaps that, combined with a slowdown in China-based supergiant rounds, is contributing to a global slowdown in venture-backed bets on the sector.

So far in 2019, venture investment in electric vehicle-focused companies , with just over $5 billion going to Chinese deals. In 2018, by contrast, investors put over $18 billion to work globally, of which more than $14 billion went to China-based companies.

The Big Picture

It’s noteworthy that three of the four shrinking categories highlighted above involve companies that operate in the physical world, either making things or delivering things other people made. The fourth, crypto and blockchain, saw declines in large part because of the bubbly levels of the prior year.

Looking at where the money continues to flow, it’s clear venture investors love affair with software revenue models has not abated. They’re more on the fence, it appears, when it comes to businesses that still incur high fulfillment costs for each customer they add.

Photo courtesy of via Unsplash.

Despite a series of setbacks amongst other Vision Fund-backed bets, one particular wager is chugging along as if the market was unchanged from earlier in the year. , a richly-backed food delivery startup may raise $100 million more from at a valuation as “nearly $13 billion.”

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That number makes sense as the company’s last round, from , the , , and others, valued the company at $12 billion before the investment and $12.6 billion after. If the $100 million values the firm at around $13 billion, we can safely presume that DoorDash is worth about the same per-share as it was before; DoorDash is likely selling more equity at around the same price as its May Series G.

DoorDash has proven to be a fundraising juggernaut in recent years. From , DoorDash raised , along with that same year. Our current annum brought more investment, with DoorDash picking up along with the previously-mentioned $600 million Series G.

If the new, $100 million investment gets named, it will be a Series H. It may be considered an extension of the company’s Series G.

Context

The round affirms that another investing group is willing to pay DoorDash’s prior valuation, good news for SoftBank, who has put lots of capital into the company since its Series D. But DoorDash’s continued funding success comes at an interesting time.

In the wake of WeWork’s implosion, there has been a sentiment shift (more here) of sorts away from quick growth powered by large deficits to perhaps slower growth but coupled to a quicker path to profitability.

Valuations have also been questioned, as companies that have been anointed as unicorns with high valuations while private have struggled to perform to that same level as public companies. It could be a smart move by DoorDash to stay valued at the same amount it was at before. Should the company go public, it would be easier to maintain the valuation it had while it was private if that valuation isn’t astronomically high.

Investors seem to like DoorDash (otherwise they wouldn’t be giving it so much money), but DoorDash is in a crowded space. There are multiple high-profile, well-funded food delivery startups out there. Refraining from boosting DoorDash’s valuation is probably wise.

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Yesterday as part of its third-quarter earnings report, GrubHub’s described how the online food delivery giant views its market. And its competition.

The letter provides interesting context for the on-demand players, especially those working with food delivery. It’s a space that has attracted oceans of capital (DoorDash, , etc.) and investment from other sorts of on-demand companies, like . The scale of the bets placed in the space by venture investors, , and companies that venture capitalists previously funded is huge. It’s in the tens of billions by now.

And so, when GrubHub warns that growth in its market could be set to slow dramatically, it’s worth paying attention to. Let’s explore.

Warnings

GrubHub is being challenged by private companies who can lose lots of money in the short-term as they have raised ample capital from investors more interested in growth than profits. GrubHub, in contrast, is profitable and has to report its earnings each quarter.

The public company has noticed the entrant of high-growth on-demand companies, as we’d expect. That said, how it describes the entrance of, we presume, DoorDash is interesting (Bolding: Crunchbase News):

Over the last few years, two significant changes on the restaurant supply side temporarily accelerated overall industry growth. First, a new entrant leveraging a national, scaled third-party transportation network brought delivery capabilities to tens of thousands of independently owned and enterprise restaurants that couldn’t or didn’t choose to provide their own delivery services. Second, listing restaurants on platforms without any partnership allowed other players to expand restaurant inventory rapidly. Both of these changes opened up new and unique pockets of restaurant supply and resulted in significant growth in both orders and new diners as previously untapped geographies and additional restaurants in all geographies were now immediately accessible online.

Regarding its own new user growth, GrubHub said that “retention of these newer diners was good” but that their “ordering frequency” wasn’t developing over time to be as strong as seen in “earlier cohorts.” The company then got into the weeds, explaining how it saw the market changing in the wake of the new competition and a changed competitive landscape (Bolding: Crunchbase News):

We spent a fair amount of time digging into the causes of these dynamics. What we concluded is that the supply innovations in online takeout have been played out and annual growth is slowing and returning to a more normal longer-term state which we believe will settle in the low double digits, except that there are multiple players all competing for the same new diners and order growth.

GrubHub next described why some diners weren’t performing as expected. The company wrote that ” online diners are becoming more promiscuous,” using a number of platforms for delivery instead of just one, for example. “Easy wins in the market are disappearing a little more quickly than we thought,” GrubHub continued.

The warnings didn’t stop there, however. GrubHub also took shots at companies looking to find efficiency in delivery scale, writing that (Bolding: Crunchbase News):

A common fallacy in this business is that an avalanche of volume, food or otherwise, will drive logistics costs down materially. Bottom line is that you need to pay someone enough money to drive to the restaurant, pick up food and drive it to a diner. That takes time and drivers need to be appropriately paid for their time or they will find another opportunity. At some point, delivery drones and robots may reduce the cost of fulfillment, but it will be a long time before the capital costs and ongoing operating expenses are less than the cost of paying someone for 30-45 minutes of their time. Delivery/logistics is valuable to us because it increases potential restaurant inventory and order volume, not because it improves per order economics.

Firey stuff, frankly.

Now, GrubHub has a biased view of the market, its place in it, and the dynamics of the space in which it competes. That much is clear. But the company is also trying to explain its worldview to its shareholders, so we’re not just reading some useless hype; this is how the company describes itself to its owners.

Let’s bring this back to startups.

Growth

DoorDash and other prime GrubHub competitors are valued on revenue growth instead of profit. This means that they don’t have to make money in the short-term, but also means that if their growth rate slows, their value can quickly fall. If overall market growth slows, it could crimp DoorDash’s ability to continue the sort of growth that its backers covet.

The news doesn’t really get better from there. GrubHub’s notes concerning easy wins becoming scarce on the ground implies rising customer acquisition costs (CAC); harder wins cost more. This abuts the fact that diners’ budgets aren’t infinite. GrubHub noted in its letter that “the average diner in the United States will not consistently pay over $25 in total cost for a quick service restaurant cheeseburger meal.” So, rising CAC could cut into margins if order size can’t scale further. (SaaS fans can think of the situation as something akin to falling LTV compared to CAC.)

Summing, we could see what makes some on-demand companies attractive become less attractive over time. GrubHub is right in that most customers won’t use the service if they repeatedly have to pay high costs for a regular-quality meal. Also, none of this takes into account a possibly failing macro-climate. Add that in and things become worrisome.

Investors agree. Shares of GrubHub were off 37 percent this morning.

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In a bid to shake up the narrative surrounding itself and its various comps, announced yesterday that it expects to generate adjusted profit in two years’ time. The news, coming on the heels of sagging share prices from Lyft and its domestic ride-hailing rival , pumped life into their public valuations.

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Made during a Wall Street Journal conference, however, the company’s promise was modest. After noting that Lyft had “never laid out [its] path to profitability,” the company’s CEO said that he was “excited to now go on the record” by announcing that Lyft will be “profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis a year before analysts expect us to.”

Green went on to clarify that comment, saying that Lyft would reach positive adjusted EBITDA, a profit-related metric that disregards a number of costs, in “Q4 2021.”

Shares of Lyft rose 6.5 percent on the day. Uber climbed 3.6 percent on the same news. In effect, Lyft affirmed part of what it promised during its roadshow. Rewinding to April, here’s how Crunchbase News described each company’s self-described future profitability:

Both Lyft and Uber reported expected future profit ratios. Adjusted profit, that is. Uber reported an expected adjusted EBITDA margin of 25 percent, and Lyft a similar metric [of] 20 percent[.]

Yesterday, Lyft didn’t promise a level of expected adjusted EBITDA. Instead, it simply said that it would post some of the stuff in the final quarter of 2021. From its promise of some adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2021, we can expect the firm to begin to grow the result on a percent-of-revenue basis until it reaches the 20 percent threshold it promised months ago, provided that everything goes to plan.

So What

The Lyft announcement is both good and bad news for ride-hailing and other on-demand companies.

The good news is obvious. Lyft expects, and has now publicly promised its investors, that it can get to something akin to break-even in two years’ time. The bad news is equally obvious: It’s going to take Lyft another eight quarters to stop losing money even after stripping out huge costs like share-based compensation.

Lyft, founded in 2012, while a private company. It during its IPO. That means it’s going to take $7.2 billion in capital (presuming that Lyft doesn’t hire more along the way) and nine years to still post GAAP net losses.

The company should be huge by then, provided that it can continue even a moderate growth pace. Lyft posted $867.3 million in revenue during Q2 2019, for example, up 72 percent from its year-ago period. Keep up even half that growth for two years and Lyft is huge. (Lyft’s Q2 results were well-received by the market, with the domestic ride-hailing unicorn beating on both growth and loss reduction.)

The company posted an adjusted EBITDA loss of $204.1 million in its most recent quarter.

But perhaps Lyft’s promise can help its yet-private comps. The and the of the world, companies worth billions and in need of eventual exits. Lyft put a flag in the ground, saying that on-demand companies can, at some point, break even post adjusted profit.

Next, let’s see if Uber follows suit and if the Lyft news can break the Postmates IPO filing free. We’d love to read it.

Illustration: .

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The new capital comes after it was rumored that Postmates was targeting September as the month to release its IPO filing to the public, kicking off the final steps to becoming a public company. Crunchbase News was very interested in seeing its sums.

As a private company, Postmates has proven to be a prodigious fundraiser. Raising before its new round, Postmates has attracted capital from , , , , , among other investors. , a private equity firm, led its latest round.

Postmates’ valuation rose from $1.9 billion in early 2019, . Investors are therefore betting that Postmates has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in new value this year; that casts a positive spin on the firm’s trajectory.

That it is now able to, presumably, delay its IPO with a fresh infusion of private capital is more neutral. It’s hard to tell from the outside if the company is taking advantage of inexpensive capital from a ready source, for example. Or, if the delivery shop couldn’t quite get its IPO ducks in a row, leading it to take on more private capital in the interim.

Postmates has now raised around $900 million, all-in. The firm will crest the billion-dollars-raised mark when it eventually goes public.

The IPO

Postmates’ privately filed IPO is more interesting than most companies’ individual S-1 filings. Aside from ‘ portion of Uber’s earnings, it’s hard to tell how the on-demand unicorn cohort is performing financially.

And there are billions of dollars at stake with Postmates and grappling with each other for market share (more here on DoorDash.). With Postmates openly working on going public, full financial results for one of the best-known on-demand companies felt within reach. Now they appear further away.

Postmates’ new round means it has the capital it needs to keep growing outside of the public eye. But when it or another company of similar ilk does go public, expect nearly every VC in the industry to watch carefully. A lot of their collected bets are riding on those IPOs doing well.

Illustration: .

The company on the private markets, and supposedly worth $120 billion as a public entity, has struggled since its IPO. Indeed, after pricing at a disappointing $45 per share, Uber opened at $42 before falling further.

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Uber recovered temporarily from initial lows, but successive earnings reports that showed slowing growth and large losses seem to have put a pall of sorts over the company. The popular ridesharing concern closed today worth $30.70, 34.8 percent off its all-time highs, and off 5.7 percent on the day. lost an even larger 7.3 percent today to $45.42, off 48.7 percent from its all-time high.

We care more about Uber as it is the more valuable of the two, and is a global company, making it a better comp for other ride-hailing companies around the world.

Let’s take a peek at Uber’s performance since going public ( ):

Uber is no longer a private company, so why do we care here at Crunchbase News? It’s a fair question. As always, we’re interested in a public company because of how its performance could impact yet-private startups.

To understand why Uber’s share price matters for all sorts of startups we have to look at history, and at prices. Let’s begin.

History

Uber’s meteoric growth was so inspiring, market-bending, and seemingly lucrative that a host of startups took it upon themselves to mimic its model. Uber, it famously went, doesn’t even own the cars that power its market place. What a brilliant market for Uber to win, it being able to drive huge revenue for itself while externalizing some costs that taxi companies had previously undertaken.

Copying Uber for a new product, or service took off. The “Uber for X” model became so popular that the method of explaining new services in the context of Uber’s model became a Twitter joke.

Few at the time understood how unprofitable Uber was, and even fewer folks understood how unprofitable Uber would wind up; how Uber could manage such steep losses while seeing single-digit growth in its ride-hailing business, as in the first half of 2019.

As Uber loses ground on the public market, it presents a challenge to the companies who followed in Uber’s wake. Namely how they are going to avoid the same growth trap and cost structure that is causing Uber to lose value on the public markets. (As an Uber rider since it was only black cars in a few cities, I’d love the service to survive, thrive, and empower lots of drivers to generate material profit, in case you were worried I have fallen prey to a case of Uber Hate.)

But while myriad Uber for X have gone out of business (, , and so forth), there are still a number of companies in the market that are Uber cognates, or Uber comps, that are looking to go public. Which brings us to price.

Price

Uber and Lyft, the first public ride-hailing companies, have been repriced by the public markets. Each is now worth less than it was while private, a key indicator of mismatch between investors on either side of the IPO divide; companies continue to grow after they go public, meaning that they tend to grow in value, all other things held equal. (To see a company quickly lose value after an IPO is a universally-accepted bad sign, even if there are some examples of firms pulling out from such declines and later doing well.)

I am curious what this result will have on two groups of companies: The still-private ride-hailing unicorns (, , , among others), and the upper echelons of on-demand delivery companies (, , , etc). Uber’s declines likely impact the first group more than the latter. But the second group of companies could take hits as well. We’ve seen, for example, companies like DoorDash quickly accrete value. DoorDash not only has business-model overlaps with the repriced Uber, but competes directly with Uber’s growth business, Uber Eats.

As Uber and Lyft continue to deflate, their performance must weigh on the shoulders of startups who emulated parts of the model that they popularized.

This entire post is predicated on an emotional response I had today after checking Uber and Lyft’s share prices. It sounded something like this:

yeeeeeeeeessssshhhhhhh………..

A lot of private companies, startups even, would be in far better shape today in terms of their market positioning as cash-hungry companies that need to raise if Uber or Lyft were trading above their IPO price. A low bar in any market.

Illustration: .

We’ve covered the dizzying rise of from food delivery unicorn to Vision Fund-backed, niche-defining decacorn.

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All it took was a bathtub of capital. The company’s market share has risen among key groups thanks to its epic fundraising activity. Its consumer market share in the United States has risen to a leading position, . And its recent acquisition of Caviar from will as well.

But it seems that even the company’s sights are a bit higher than merely using humans to deliver an ever-larger amount of food. Instead, DoorDash is snapping up self-driving talent. To what end, and at what cost, is a good question.

Robots, Not Cars

It doesn’t seem that DoorDash is in any danger of building self-driving car tech. What the firm is working on are self-driving robots that can scoot about cities, delivering food at a far lower cost (in theory) than what it costs to pay humans to do the same.

It’s not new work at DoorDash. You can find company notes August 2017 entry, extolling a new robot delivery vehicle that it was excited to announce. The post also noted that the firm had already started “testing robot deliveries on the DoorDash platform.”

Fast forward to this week, and the company appears to be very much still at it. Here’s :

DoorDash has been on an acquisition tear of late, with Scotty Labs as its latest target. […] [The company] is working on technology to enable people to remotely control self-driving cars, raised a $6 million seed round.”

TechCrunch also notes that DoorDash scooped up “the two co-founders from Lvl5,” a firm that works in mapping for self-driving tech. (Data on , and .)

Add the two deals to DoorDash’s history of work in robotics and it’s pretty simple to see that the company is still investing in building delivery robots. Of course, competitors like are working on the same thing.

Indeed, there appears to be a sort of two-prong battle in the world of autonomous wheels. The first deals with self-driving vehicles that can carry several things; cars, trucks, and other wheeled machines that can bring multiple people, or multiple tons of product to where they need to go. And the smaller end of the race, where box-sized robots want to bring small amounts of product to consumers’ places of work and rest.

It’s hard to fault delivery companies for working on their own tech. My read is that every single on-demand company wants to get rid of paying delivery humans as quickly, and completely as possible. This was evident even back when ride-hailing companies first decided to not pay their driving staff like staff. Since then, self-driving machines have been worked on by nearly everyone you can name in the ride-hailing market. Postmates and DoorDash, in the on-demand niche, are similar.

Postmates has filed privately to go public�����Ի� could reveal a public S-1 this year. If it does, we’ll be curious to see what sort of impact its robot delivery machines make on its R&D spend. Because we know that self-driving tech is expensive.

Ride-Hailing, Self-Driving

Ride-hailing generates no cash, let alone net income. I cannot name a single ride-hailing company of scale that makes money anywhere in the world. The model requires lots of capital until a later date when prices can rise to help companies cover costs. Or until self-driving tech can reduce costs in other ways, allowing delivery platforms to collect more money per delivery for themselves.

Now, read that paragraph again but swap in on-demand deliveries for ride-hailing, and you get a nearly-true set of statements. GrubHub makes money, so the edits don’t hold up, but you can see the point.

On-demand companies feel like they are suffering from a similar problem as ride-hailing companies. To generate lots of demand (revenue, and revenue growth), they need to charge a price point that doesn’t allow them to fully cover their costs. Self-driving tech could help either category, so everyone is investing in the stuff. (More on the issue here.)

But at what cost? We’ve noted that ride-hailing is a bit like fracking in the past, with lots of capital going in but very little coming out in the way of cash or profit. Autonomous work is similar. Indeed, the cost of self-driving tech is staggering. Billions and billions of dollars are being poured into the space, with little so far to show for it in the way of commercial performance.

So can DoorDash get robot deliveries right before Postmates does, or someone else? Or can it get the work done and scaled before its model runs out of fresh cash? We’ll see, but the company certainly is still hard at it.

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Switzerland-based seems to have, and the company’s innovative storage method made see enough potential profit to . (The company has raised other capital , including led by , subsidiary of . That deal will make sense shortly.)

For the Vision Fund, the deal size isn’t shocking; but what caught our eye is the technology selected. This is the fund’s first-ever investment into an energy company, according to a by Energy Vault.

Energy Vault is a change from Masayoshi Son and Company putting capital to work in on-demand companies, chips, or dog-walking, and we’re here for it.

Towering Possibilities

Here’s how the company’s Super Jenga (our name, not theirs) system works:

That is very smart? And simple? And pretty cool? And we suspect that it would look pretty neat in action. (TechCrunch of the system.)

Energy storage is an active sector, one that has as our needs to capture, and later access, power have risen; as the world moves towards renewable energy sources, some of which are more cyclical in nature than traditional power generation methods, being able to save generated power is a key piece of work.

To demonstrate the scale of the need for Energy Vault’s product, or one like it, read discussing how Utah may store air power in salt:

One hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, a giant mound of salt reaches thousands of feet down into the Earth. It’s thick, relatively pure and buried deep, making it one of the best resources of its kind in the American West.

Two companies want to tap the salt dome for compressed air energy storage, an old but rarely used technology that can store large amounts of power.

Compared to that, Energy Vault’s methods look downright simple. Let’s move on now to the Vision Fund and its recent deal flow and performance (both the good and bad), leaving you with the point that Energy Vault is incorrectly named. It should be called “Energy Tower.”

Vision Fund 2

Aside from investing in every late-stage company you can name, is looking to raise more money of its own. The SoftBank Vision Fund II plans to land somewhere around $108 billion, several billion dollars larger than its older sibling.

The pace and size of investments from ���Ǵڳٵ����԰�’s first fund was hard to wrap our heads around — and, apparently, investors struggled as well. Reports in June detailed that the second Vision Fund was having a hard time raising cash to fuel its investing machine. However, a month later, SoftBank said it had landed and on its list of LPs for the second Vision Fund.

It was a welcome boost for SoftBank, as it raises new billions, that its first fund had a good recent quarter. The firm saw liquidity, as well as “unrealized valuation gains” that looked strong. The results weren’t too surprising, considering some of its portfolio companies’ recent successes (think direct listing, fundraising rush, and recent investing news), but they were notable all the same. And while we poke at ���Ǵڳٵ����԰�’s invest-in-everything strategy, keep in mind its numbers showed specific strengths in its enterprise and consumer deals.

When SoftBank does launch its second, gigantic fund, we’ll see a second wave of investments by the behemoth. Despite its string epic check size and deal stamina, the company does have a few investments that could serve as learning lessons for the second fund

Market Wobbles

First up, Uber, a huge Vision Fund investment that had a disappointing start to its life as a public company and still is struggling.

The most recent news from the ride-hailing giant comes from its recent second quarter earnings report. The global transportation company – which SoftBank put billions into, making it – had less revenue than expected and larger losses than anticipated.

Uber must be feeling deflated, to say the least.

SoftBank, in its earnings report, explained that it had an “unrealized loss totaling ¥195,326 million was recorded for the decrease in the fair values of investments in Uber and others.” That means Uber isn’t the only Vision Fund deal that appears weak.

Looking to the future, WeWork, which filed its S-1 publicly yesterday, appears dangerously unprofitable as well (more here). And SoftBank has invested at least $6 billion into the co-working space business over time, and at one point .

But while its Uber bet hasn’t performed well thus far, and the company’s WeWork stake is looking risky, the Vision Fund’s huge (paper) win from its DoorDash bet could allow the investing giant to keep making big bets on unprofitable companies. And, perhaps, cut checks into different sorts of corporate growth risk, deals like this week’s Energy Vault deal.

Energy Jenga!

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