Recent details a dramatic decline in American sentiment regarding technology companies. After enjoying positive opinion for years, technology companies have seen their public perception slip.

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Notably, the declines aren’t too partisan. It isn’t rare to see American sentiment change quickly based on the turning of our internal politics (see , for example), but in this case members of both the major political parties have seen their views of tech turn more negative in recent years.

The data is stark. According to Pew, the percentage of Americans who viewed technology companies as “having a positive impact on the United States” has “tumbled 21 percentage points , from 71% to 50%.” Among Americans who are Democrats or lean in that direction, positive sentiment regarding tech companies’ impact has fallen from 74 percent to 54 percent since 2015. Republicans and folks who lean in that direction saw their views slip from 72 percent positive to an underwater 44 percent over the same timeframe.

How many  Americans say that technology companies have a negative impact on “the way things are going in the country?” That figure rose from 17 percent in 2015 to 33 percent in 2019. That’s nearly a doubling in less than half a decade.

So What?

Tech companies big and small depend on consumer trust to get work done. Seeing trust fall among a very profitable portion of the global population (American tech companies are brilliant at extracting value from American DAUs; see , for example) is a cause for concern for technology companies that want to acquire new users and expand their revenue.

It’s not going to be easier to acquire customers if the pool of potential customers is curdling against your industry. And according to the Pew data, trust and faith in tech companies is doing just that.

You can see why in both honest and cynical terms. In the honest category, some tech companies have been poor actors; some technology companies are ; some growing technology companies have had to ; ; many tech companies , so that they can pay them less (); many gig jobs are set up to but avoid the legal ramifications of such control (i.e. employment); one company managed to find a way to ; the ; you can add to the list, I’m sure.

Staying in the honest criticism category, some of the innovation that we flocked to wound up not being so great. Facebook’s ability to connect you to friends wound up as a way for the firm to to send you texts about coming back more often to the service. That sort of thing.

Cynically, you can complain that tech companies can be silly (true, but immaterial), or strange (same retort), or focused on the wrong problems (not every tech project that winds up being serious has to start that way).

At the same time, tech does a hell of a lot of good, allowing us to do more, more quickly in an increasingly competitive world. Technology itself made it possible for me to write to you this morning. Indeed, I’d hazard that it was the superpower-like power that tech has given us over time through its various revolutions (radio, then television, wired Internet, wireless Internet, etc.) that contributed to why we liked it so much. That and the companies that powered it often stood at an angle to the world. Google was a perfectly lovely odd duck. (More recently it’s famous for , and for trying to build a .)

But there was a lot to like about Google before it became the incumbent. Now when I think of Google my first thought is how slow Chrome has become and how mobile Google search is so full of UI-bloat that I’m considering giving Bing a try. So I suppose I at least partially fit in the category of companies losing some optimism concerning tech companies.

Adoption Of The New

It’s hard to note change when you’re in the middle of it, but I wonder if the erosion of public optimism regarding technology companies will slow adoption of new services. That could favor incumbents and dent startups.

Which brings me to something that , an old colleague and present friend of mine wrote for The Next Web, my old home. In a piece entitled “,” he riffed on the fun times when things like Google Wave launched and the Internet ground to a halt as everyone jumped aboard to give it a try.

Two sections, in particular, resonated:

It’s healthy to have a critical attitude to the technology that plays a much bigger part in our daily lives than it did 10 years ago, but I can’t help but feel we’ve lost a healthy level of enthusiasm for embracing new things, too. All too often, new technology is greeted with questions about how it might make the world worse, rather than better. […]

Tech has become a much more important part of our lives over the past decade, but I do worry that by focusing too much on the dominance of tech giants, foreign interference in elections, deepfakes, and everything else that scares us about the future, the media is leading us all to lose our sense of wonder at the little ways tech can make our lives better.

In a sense, the second paragraph details why the first paragraph is happening. Because big tech companies have been rather bad lately (here’s some from this week, for example, that made me mad), consumer sentiment is changing. More clearly, big tech might be poisoning the well for smaller companies.

You can see a piece of that in reaction to privacy legislation, worries that big companies will wind up entrenched at the cost of smaller companies.

I should confess my own biases before we go. I’m a technology optimist, but I think I’ve become net-neutral on many technology companies. Once public, a company has an insatiable drive to continue revenue and profit growth. Those demands will eventually clash with ideals, and, at times, what’s best for consumers. These pressures are not unique to the technology world. Indeed, they are merely a facet of capitalism, a method of structuring economies that I favor over others.

But if technology companies are going to arrogate all sorts of power and authority over our data, we can demand more from them. And the Pew data shows that Americans are.

I just hope that we don’t lose all of our optimism about the power of technological change because some tech companies can’t seem to find where they put their ethics.

Illustration:

Those businesses may have little in common, but one shared thread is that U.S. startups in these sectors have all secured large funding rounds led by Russia-based investors.

They’re not alone. Over the past seven years, Russia-based strategic and venture investors have participated in more than 300 funding rounds for U.S.-based startups, according to Crunchbase data. Investments span all stages, major sectors, and round sizes, and include both equity and debt financings. (See deal list .)

The cross-border deal-making isn’t limited to Russian investors backing U.S. startups. Venture firms based in the U.S. have invested in more than 150 funding rounds for Russian startups over the past decade, with a particular focus on e-commerce and consumer internet deals. We’ll look at those trends in the second installment of this two-part series.

In this first installment, we’ll focus on Russia-backed rounds for U.S. startups. Below, we look at the year-over-year trends, highlight some of the biggest deals and most active investors, and look at what the dataset does not include.

Russia-US Investment Over The Years

A Crunchbase News analysis of deals involving Russian investors backing U.S. startups found that deal counts began picking up in 2011. Activity peaked in 2012, and it held relatively steady over the next three years.

In the chart below, we look at the number of rounds per year for U.S. startups that included a Russia-based investor and the totals raised in those rounds. The investment totals reflect capital from all backers, not just Russia-based ones. Overall, Russian investment activity looks to be lessening in 2016 and 2017, with fewer rounds recorded.

In the chart below, we look at U.S. startup rounds involving a Russia-based lead investor.  The number of deals with a Russian lead investor peaked in 2012, dipped over the next three years, and has been trending up in the past two years.

These Are The Active Investors

A number of Russia-based investors have backed multiple U.S. startups, and a few are particularly active.

Among cross-stage investors, Moscow-based l looks to be the most active. The firm has participated in 30 seed through growth stage financing rounds for U.S. companies, with a focus on cleantech, biotech and IT. At the seed stage, Impulse VC has been quite active, participating in about since 2013. And Skolkovo Foundation, which is supported by the Russian government, has extended grants or seed investments to in the past six years.

Banks have also done a number of deals. , a subsidiary of Russian government-controlled VTB Bank, has participated in funding rounds for at least four U.S.-based startups. Its most recent funding round was in 2016, for storage technology developer .

, Russia’s biggest bank, has been active as well. The bank was involved in two of the largest cross-border deals in the past year: a $100 million debt round for taxi app and a $57 million Series C for online mortgage provider .

Meanwhile, on the strategic side, one of the busiest U.S. startup backers is Russian pharmaceutical firm Pharmstandard, which has led or joined funding rounds for at least six () U.S. life science companies. The Moscow-based company was a lead investor in funding rounds for , a transplant device developer, , a now-public cancer immunotherapy developer, and , which is working on technology used in cancer surgery.

To give an idea of breadth of invests, below we look at the largest U.S. funding rounds in recent years that involved a Russia-based lead investor:

Who’s Not Included (And Why It Matters)

It should be noted that the Crunchbase datasets may not reflect the full extent of Russian involvement in the U.S. startup ecosystem. For one, the data is limited to funds and investors based in Russia. That means it leaves out Russian billionaire Yuri Milner’s DST Global, which is headquartered in Hong Kong.

Milner is the most high profile Russian national actively investing in U.S. tech companies. Although his personal investments are included in the Crunchbase dataset, DST’s are not. That’s significant as since 2009, DST has participated in at least 23 funding rounds for U.S. companies, mostly not as a lead investor. Deals include many of the most prominent Internet companies including Facebook in 2009, Airbnb in 2011, Twitter in 2011, and Slack in 2015. (See full list )

Russian nationals, firms, and government-run entities can also participate in startup funding as limited partners, who are generally passive stakeholders in venture funds. DST, for instance, counts banking conglomerate VTB Bank, which is majority-owned by the Russian government, among its limited partner investors. The dataset does not include investments by non-Russian firms with Russia-based limited partners.

Looking Ahead

Where is Russia-U.S. startup investment likely to go from here? It’s noteworthy that the number of U.S. startup financings involving Russian investors is down in 2017 from prior peaks, along with investment totals.

Perhaps there’s greater caution in the startup community around the sourcing of capital. There were some hints of this in a New York Times examining how the election hacking story is impacting Silicon Valley and its large Russian immigrant population. The paper reported that some Russian venture capitalists have said startups are more wary about taking their funding.