Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The company’s long-time partner, , is developing the test, which will be available as soon as Friday afternoon.

“Drive-through testing is an option, but it doesn’t exist everywhere,” Dr. Chris Hall, Nurx’s senior medical adviser said in an interview with Crunchbase News. “We feel that all of the testing options are necessary to address this crisis, but we just feel like home-based testing is going to be a really important part of that.”

Nurx, which is based in San Francisco, has more than $93 million in funding and is backed by investors including and . It last raised $32 million for its Series C round in August 2019.

Nurx first published a blog post to answer a few questions about coronavirus, before the company realized it could play a bigger role in the solution. The startup has been working for about two weeks on making an at-home test available, Hall said, and has been meeting with Molecular Testing Labs multiple times every day, including weekends. The entire Nurx team has been working on rolling out the at-home COVID-19 test.

“We began to realize pretty quickly after creating that blog post that we were perfectly situated to pivot to this service,” he said.

While Nurx is perhaps best known for delivering birth control and the HIV-prevention medication PrEP, it has been in the at-home testing space for a while, providing testing kits for sexually transmitted infections, HIV, Hepatitis C and HPV.

Getting tested for coronavirus in the United States , and Nurx is one of several startups working on making more COVID-19 tests available since the gave certified labs the green light to develop and distribute them. Austin-based at-home testing startup also announced plans to have an at-home COVID-19 test available next week. Los Angeles’ and San Francisco’s also announced home test kits.

A person wanting to get tested for the virus can use the Nurx app or website, indicate interest in the test and fill out a survey with questions about symptoms. A Nurx provider will then review the information and decide if the patient should be tested. If so, the company will send a test kit with expedited shipping and instructions on how to complete the test and how to send the kit back to Molecular Testing Labs’ facility in Vancouver, Washington.

To complete the test, patients will perform a throat swab. Molecular Testing Labs performs a polymerase chase reaction (PCR) test to determine if the patient has COVID-19.

A patient should receive results within 24 to 48 hours, Hall said, and Nurx will advise them what next steps they should take, such as isolation. Patients will receive automatic advice, but if they have unanswered questions they can communicate with a provider.

Nurx will have the test, which will cost under $200, available on a “limited basis” when it’s first introduced. The company’s planning to provide 10,000 home testing kits in the upcoming weeks and, according to a company spokeswoman, 100,000 tests in the near future.

“We are here to work with everyone just to increase the sheer number of tests that are out there,” Hall said. “No single provider and no single company or initiative is going  to be able to solve this problem alone.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated post-publication to reflect that patients will now perform a throat swab rather than a nasal swab to complete the test.

Illustration:

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

Interos ingests more than 85,000 information feeds a month and uses machine learning across five risk factor categories to understand which risk factors are important to customers and could disrupt their supply chain. The company looks at financial risk, operational risk, geographic risk and cyber risk.

In CEO ’s words, Interos is “building the world’s largest business relationship graph.”

The new funding round was led by with participation from , which also invested in the company’s $8.35 million Series A last year.

“Both of them (Venrock’s Nick Beim and KPCB’s Ted Schlein) understood the fact that this is a big data problem,” Bisceglie said in an interview with Crunchbase News. “This is something we’ve tried to do with humans and spreadsheets for many years and we simply cannot continue to do it that way.”

Last year was a period of significant growth for the company. Interos tripled its headcount in 2019 and saw its annual recurring revenue grow by 700 percent, according to a statement from the company.

Half of the new funding will go toward engineering and data science, and the other half will be for sales and marketing, Bisceglie said. The company, which is based in Arlington, Virginia, will be expanding its office this year with plans to hire at least 80 people.

Illustration Credit:

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

New backer also participated in the financing, which brings San Francisco-based Zumper’s total funding since its 2012 inception to more than $150 million. and led the company’s $46 million in September 2018 (at which time the company had a pre-money valuation of $200 million, according to Crunchbase). The company has a long list of high-profile investors including , and .

, CEO and co-founder of Zumper, declined to disclose the company’s current valuation, saying only it is “a significant step up from our 2018 valuation.”

Zumper’s self-described mission is to make renting an apartment “as easy as booking a hotel.” The startup claims to be the largest privately held rental marketplace (in terms of users) in the United States. Last year, 67 million people used Zumper to find, list, or rent properties in the U.S. and Canada. Georgiades expects that number to climb to 80 million this year, saying he company helps advertise more than 1 million listings a month.

‘Airbnb for one-year leasing’

The residential real estate market space is a crowded one for sure, and Zumper competes with the likes of publicly traded .

For Georgiades, Zumper differentiates itself in that it helps people in all steps of the process, making it a true “end-to-end” marketplace.

For example, Zumper offers renters the ability to find, apply for and then book an apartment. They can also digitally pay their rent to their landlord. It also helps small landlords and multifamily properties with things like finding tenants, marketing and collecting rent.

The company makes money in two ways: Landlords pay to be at the top of its feed for more exposure, in a classic lead-generation model; and also pay Zumper to close leases. For example, if a landlord uses its tools to conduct a transaction, it pays Zumper a fee per transaction.

Georgiades declined to disclose revenue figures but said the company saw its “pretty sizeable” revenue rise by 100 percent year over year last year.

“We’re not going from a small number to a small number,” he told Crunchbase News.

Meanwhile, the company doubled its headcount to 200 compared to about 100 a year ago. Zumper’s employees are spread across offices in San Francisco, Scottsdale, New York, Chicago and Providence, Rhode Island.

Looking ahead, the company will use the new capital to grow its sales and engineering teams and invest in scaling its transactional tools. Currently, 90 percent of its audience finds Zumper organically, according to the company.

“Ultimately, we want to be the Airbnb for one-year leasing,” Georgiades said.

For , co-founder and managing partner of e.ventures, Zumper’s progress so far has been “striking.”

Yesterday, we wrote about a similar offering in the United Kingdom. London-based it had raised about $13 million. Goodlord’s SaaS (software as a service) platform aims to make the rental process smoother and more efficient for landlords, leasing agents and renters alike. It handles a wide range of services from contracts to references to payments.

Blog Roll Illustration:

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

Valuations and other key financial metrics were not publicly disclosed by the company. However, in its announcement, Netlify did say that it’s tripled its customer base (to 800,000 users) and revenue year over year. The company says that 8 percent of internet users visit a Netlify-powered site each month.

In a public statement, Netlify’s co-founder and CEO said “We started Netlify with the mission to empower developers and change the way the web is built. The growing number of developers signing onto Netlify daily and the latest investment in our business has validated that vision. With this funding we’re full-speed ahead delivering new features, investing in our enterprise-grade infrastructure and growing our team, to help more developers and businesses take advantage of the JAMstack.”

What is the JAMstack? It’s a web development architecture co-developed by Biilmann. The acronym stands for JavaScript, APIs and prebuilt Markup. Dynamic functionality is handled by client-side JavaScript; server-side operations get abstracted into composable APIs which can be called over HTTPS via JavaScript; and sites are served as static HTML which can either be written natively or be generated from source files written in Markdown format using a static site generator.2

The principal benefits the JAMstack offers to web developers is that sites can be served exclusively over a content delivery network (CDN), which improves scalability. Because a project’s entire codebase lives in a version control system like Git, and each deployment represents a snapshot of the entire site, developers are able to trace version histories and ensure consistency across an entire live site.

Netlify builds software tools that help with different aspects of JAMstack development. is a local application server developers can use for building and testing their websites prior to production deployment. is a Git workflow for web development. is Netlify’s “application delivery network” that offers features some traditional CDNs don’t.

“To enable more use cases at scale in 2020, we’re investing in new features catering to our enterprise customers, including more control and better collaboration for larger teams. We look forward to enabling the JAMstack at scale with the services they need as they look to migrate major parts of their web infrastructure to Netlify,” said co-founders Chris Bach and Matt Biilmann in about the round.

The company offers for tinkerers and small teams, but with this new funding the company is intent to scale out its . These include more processing power on the build side, higher speed on the deployment side, and other client services like security auditing and premium support.

“Netlify and the JAMstack are fundamentally changing how websites and web applications are built. The large and growing community of developers building on the JAMstack is testament to the movement that Matt and Chris and the team are spearheading, and to the unified platform they’ve built,” said Laura Yao of EQT Ventures.

�������ܲ��ٰ����پ��Dz�:��

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

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.

�������ܲ��ٰ����پ��Dz�:��

Car rental marketplace has raised an additional $30 million in a second round of its $250 million , bringing in shareholders that include NFL player Larry Fitzgerald and rapper 2 Chainz.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The new round of funding brings Turo’s total funding to , and adds and as investors in the company. Through Manhattan Venture Partners, Fitzgerald, 2 Chainz, NBA players Victor Oladipo, Langston Galloway, and Thad Young, and NFL players Dee Ford, Tyrod Taylor, Malcolm Jenkins, and Clint McDonald are now shareholders in the company.

Turo, which was founded in 2010 and is based in San Francisco, lets car owners rent out their vehicles on its website and app. Those looking to rent a car can find one in more than 5,500 cities in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Germany, according to Turo’s website.

The company has more than 14 million members and more than 450,000 listed vehicles, according to a Turo spokeswoman. Its revenue is growing more than 60 percent year-over-year.

Turo raised $250 million for its Series E in July 2019, with leading the investment. IAC became the largest shareholder of the company with rights to expand its ownership over time, according to a statement at the time of the funding. Turo’s other investors include and .

In September 2017, the company raised $104 million in its  (led by ), and $47 million in its Kleiner-led in November 2015.

Manhattan Venture Partners is somewhat known for bringing a celebrity touch to private company funding rounds. The VC firm has an “All-Star Fund,” that helps celebrities and athletes invest in private companies.

Turo competes with other peer-to-peer car rental startups like , and legacy car rental companies like and .

Illustration Credit:

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

This is less than the 2018 all time high of 158 companies, and above 2017 (102 companies), 2016 (87 companies) and 2015 (106 companies). To qualify for this distinction, venture-backed privately held companies were valued in a funding round at $1 billion or more.

In the US, 78 new unicorns emerged in 2019, 11 more than in 2018. China unicorn creation slowed down substantially in 2019 with 22 new unicorns from a high of 58 in 2018. The next highest count of new unicorns is Germany and Brazil with five, a record for both countries. Israel, India, and the UK all report four new unicorns this year.

Unicorn Funding By Year

To understand 2019 through a different lens, let’s switch gears from the 2019 new unicorn cohort to funding to all unicorn companies. In 2019 unicorn companies raised $85.1 billion — down from 2018 at $139 billion, and 2017 at $93.8 billion.

Despite concerns about a changed venture funding market after WeWork pulled their IPO on Sept. 30 2019, funding to unicorns was up quarter over quarter by 11 percent, but the quarter was down year over year by 54 percent. It is worth noting that 2018 included two of the largest rounds ever to unicorn companies with $14 billion invested in Ant Financial, and $12.8 billion in Juul. However, these two rounds alone do not account for all the increased funding to unicorns in 2018. We fully expect 2019 invested dollars to increase at a greater rate than prior years as new unicorns are minted in 2020.

2019 Unicorn Cohort

2019 new unicorn companies collectively added , and $50.5 billion in equity funding in total over time. The leading sectors for 2019 unicorns were in Financial Services, Commerce and Shopping, Data and Analytics, Transportation, SaaS, and Health Care.

The five most highly valued new unicorns include:

• ($7.3 billion) the autonomous vehicles subsidiary from Uber
• ($7 billion) an e-commerce platform for pharmaceutical products
• ($6.2 billion) unifying customer analytics
• ($5 billion) Travis Kalanick’s smart kitchens for food delivery
• ($5 billion) a sustainable automotive technology company

Six companies that became unicorns in 2019 and also went public in the same year, listed in order of IPO valuation, are:

• ($3.7 billion) a genomics platform
• ($1.7 billion) targeted at treating infectious diseases
• ($1.7 billion) a marketplace for luxury goods
• ($1.6 billion) which automates back office financial operations
• ($1.4 billion) a producer of Blockchain servers
• ($1.3 billion) to manage healthcare data

All of these companies had an increased valuation at their IPO over their last private funding round in 2019, ranging from 25 percent for Health Catalyst to 189 percent for 10X Genomics.

Investors In The 2019 Unicorn Cohort

With $50 billion invested in this new unicorn cohort, it is interesting to look at the investors fueling the growth of these companies. The most active investors in companies that became unicorns in 2019 by portfolio count include the following:

with 13 portfolio companies, and with 11, , , , and at 10. This list of investors includes a mix of early and late stage venture, corporate venture, and private equity/alternative investors all actively seeking stakes in highly valued venture backed companies.

The most active investors by deal count, which showcases investors who are in multiple rounds for companies who joined the unicorn ranks in 2019 include the following: New Enterprise Associates in 30 rounds, Insight Partners (26), and GV (25), and Spark Capital (24).

2019 Unicorns By Founders

While there is no shortage in funding for these high-value companies, there remains a discrepancy between the number of male and female founders that reach the coveted unicorn status. Five (4 percent) of new unicorns in 2019 had female-only founders and 16 (12 percent) were co-founded by a female-male team. Overall, 114 (84 percent) unicorns in 2019 had male-only founders.

Illustration:

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

In May, we reported that the nine-year-old company had raised $123 million at a as part of a Series F led by . (The company said this morning the valuation remains the same). Existing backers , and also put money in that tranche of the round, which included “new participation” from an unnamed large global asset manager.

Today’s financing brings Nextdoor’s total raised since its inception, according to its Crunchbase profile. The company was founded by , , , , , and .

In a world where so many people are glued to their devices, Nextdoor is a startup that has found a way to use technology to try and help people feel a sense of community. The San Francisco-based company aims to connect people who live in the same, or nearby, neighborhoods together by creating a forum for them to communicate digitally. Its presence has grown over time and currently, people in over 247,000 neighborhoods in ten countries are using the platform. (That’s a gain of 11,000 from its May figure that I reported at the time.) It has more than 300 employees globally.

In May, when I asked about financial growth metrics, a spokeswoman only told me that Nextdoor expects “revenue to double again in 2019.” The company makes money from a combination of sponsored posts as well as a real estate vertical that allows agents to brand themselves as local experts in the neighborhood.

Bond General Partner Mary Meeker joins the company’s board as part of the financing event.

“Nextdoor is built on trust – verifying each members’ name, address and neighborhood – which creates the transparency and accountability that is core to building communities,” she said in a written statement. “Nextdoor is connecting people to the information and services that matter most, and I am excited to work with this impressive team to help expand Nextdoor’s local utility as well as its growing global footprint.”

Nextdoor’s revenue growth puts it in good company; growing over 100 percent is comfortable unicorn territory. But with the public markets wobbling, recession worries mounting, and trade tensions persisting, having more capital aboard is likely a welcome insurance policy for the company against market disturbances.

Finally, the deal brings Meeker into an investment where her former employer Kleiner Perkins holds a stake. Though her exit from KPCB marked the end of an era, it’s doubtful that the older firm minds that Meeker and Bond are putting more capital into Nextdoor; after all, she’s putting more dry powder in an investment that could generate material markups and liquidity. (For more on Kleiner’s new life, head here for notes from our time with a number of its new partners.)

Illustration: