The Boston-based startup announced a $100 million investment led by , along with a CEO change.

Executive Vice President of SoftBank will now serve as the company’s CEO — pending board and regulatory approvals — with , current CEO and co-founder, transitioning to  the role of adviser.

The news comes after in October that the company hired to find a buyer for the company. 

It has been the company has had two rounds of layoffs, cutting 100 jobs in June and then another 200 in October.

Big money

It was just more than a year ago that the company confidentially filed for an initial public offering that would have valued it at more than $5 billion, at the time.

It was less than two years ago that Cybereason was raising big money at an even bigger valuation. In July 2021, the startup announced it had raised $275 million in a financing led by , the fund started by former U.S. Treasury Secretary .

No valuation was given by the company, but reports at the time in both the newspaper in Israel and said the round valued the company at about $3.1 billion. 

Cybereason’s platform offers a full array for protection, including endpoint detection and response and extended detection and response. XDR platforms are highly scalable and offer companies better visibility in network and application communication. XDR solutions can read and group related alerts and build timelines concerning attacks by evaluating data found on activity logs.

Threat detection and response capabilities across endpoints and the network has become even more important with so many people working from home and expanding the attack surface available to bad actors.

Cybereason is one of the best-funded startups in cybersecurity, with more than $800 million raised, per Crunchbase data.

Now the question is: What will investors get for all that money?

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and —the two firms that used to regularly top our most active and spendiest venture investor rankings—cut back sharply in the third quarter. Both firms face well-publicized woes, with Tiger reeling from declines in its public tech portfolio and SoftBank cutting staff in the face of steep losses.

That leaves and in first and second place, respectively, for most active global lead venture investor in Q3. While both those firms also cut back dealmaking activity in the quarter, they did so at a less dramatic pace.

To see how firms and recent quarters compare, below we lay out the ranking for the most active venture and growth lead investors in 2022, comparingfor Q1, Q2 and Q3 of 2022:

Notably, there wasn’t a single firm on the list above that increased its lead deal pace in Q3. That’s not too surprising, given the general investment environment. Global venture funding for the third quarter, which totaled $81 billion, was down 53% year over year and 33% quarter over quarter, according to a Crunchbase News analysis.

Most active participating investors

While some firms are known for leading rounds, other venture investors more frequently take a smaller stake. Below, we tally up the most active venture investors across all rounds, including those they led and those in which they participated.

For an idea of who spent the most money, we tallied up the total dollars invested in each investor’s rounds. (This offers a general idea of how much is spent, but not a specific one, given that rounds with multiple investors rarely specify how much each backer contributed.)

Here, Andreessen Horowitz is once again in the lead, followed by BlackRock and Sequoia Capital. Once again, everyone on the list participated in deals that collectively raised less in Q3 than in Q2.

Seed slows too

Seed investment has shown more modest declines than other stages. But still, funding is down and the most active firms are doing fewer deals.

To get a clearer idea, we look at the most active seed-stage investors for the past three quarters below:

As you can see, the most active seed investor remained , which has topped the ranks for every quarter this year. In second place was , a U.S. angel network with a diversity focus. 

No one was scaling up. Rather, every seed investor in our most active list did fewer deals in Q3 than in Q2. 

Is this the bottom?

There’s a case to be made that the current dealmaking slowdown will likely be temporary. As investors held back on consummating rounds, it’s likely less about disinterest in the current crop of startups and more about valuations.

With the slump in public tech and biotech stocks, investors are having to lower valuations for their private portfolios. As a result, startups with the means to do so largely prefer delaying their next financing rather than doing a down round. Moreover, during a period of resetting valuations, it’s harder for investors and startup teams to reach consensus on terms.

Still, there is some broader slowing going on too. For initial seed deals, for instance, down rounds aren’t a concern, and yet we’re still seeing a pullback. 

Nonetheless, the most active check writers are still writing a lot of checks. While they may be scaling back, none of the top startup investors appear to be abandoning the asset class.

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Edge computing is a “movement” to bring the power of the computer closer to where data is created or consumed to “rival the experience of the human brain,” explained Packet co-founder Zac Smith.

Equinix has data centers all over the world. With Packet being part of Equinix, it will be able to take its platform and put it all throughout Equinix’s platform. It will also help more companies take advantage of the hybrid cloud, Smith said.

Packet, while headquartered in New York, has a presence in cities such as Dallas and Palo Alto. Packet’s 140 employees will be joining Equinix.

News of the planned deal was announced earlier this year, and was expected to close in the first quarter of 2020. The acquisition closed on March 3, according to Packet.

Packet raised $9.4 million in a Series A round led by in August 2016 and landed $25 million in a Series B round led by in September 2018. , and have also backed the company.

Packet wasn’t looking to be acquired, Smith said, but it already had a relationship with Equinix. The acquisition made sense, he said, as both Equinix and Packet are infrastructure providers.

Packet marks Equinix’s 25th acquisition to date, with the company last buying in December 2017.

Editor’s Note: The acquisition price was revised post-publication from $355 million to $335 million and the number of acquisitions changed from 13 to 25, due to updated information provided by the company.

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Here at Crunchbase News, we’ve reported on a number of Brazilian real estate companies, such as unicorn (which last September raised a $250 million Series D round led by ), and (a co-living startup that raised a $4.7 million pre-seed round) for example. But Brazil is not the only Latin American country with venture-backed companies attacking the space.

I interviewed , founder & CEO, of Mexico City-based about the company’s recent (and previously unannounced) $8.8 million Series A raise.

������������’s and San Francisco-based co-led the round, which also included participation from  out of New York and Mexico-based . (Villarreal himself was previously an associate at Mountain Nazca.)

The round is notable for a few reasons. For one, it marks Class 5 Global’s first investment in Mexico, a region that has seen a significant uptick in venture investing as of late. Latin America, in general, has also seen increased global investor interest, as we reported in this piece last April.

Via email, Class 5 co-founder and managing partner told me his firm was “amazed by the quality of the entrepreneurs emerging in the ecosystem,” and that it hoped “to partner with many more.”

In particular, he believes that TrueHome, which started out as iBuyer but has evolved into being a tech-enabled broker focused on the Mexico City market, is meeting a critical need.

“Mexico has one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. With very little organized data, however, the process of buying or selling a home in Mexico is full of friction,” he wrote. “Buyers are forced to deal with fake and duplicated listings and unreliable brokers. TrueHome is solving these problems by using technology to make buying and selling homes a seamless and transparent process.”

Class 5 Global is focused on investing in emerging markets, particularly Latin American, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Zach Finkelstein and Joel Ayala co-founded the firm, having previously led deals in such emerging market companies as Careem, CargoX, and Fresha.

How it works

TrueHome started operating in April 2017 as an iBuyer (which on homes on behalf of potential buyers) but pivoted in January 2018 to brokerage services.

“We made a couple of transactions as an iBuyer, but then as we were making offers for properties, and buying and selling them, we saw a huge opportunity to bring technology into the brokerage part of the industry to make the process more transparent and simple, and help our customers save money on the transactions,” Villarreal told me in a phone interview.

By the summer of 2018, TrueHome had launched its beta to the market, and closed on a seed round of $1.3 million led by Mountain Nazca. It’s since been building out its technology and capabilities, and grown its headcount to a little over 150 employees compared to about 25 a year ago.

TrueHome has over 1,300 listings, which makes it one of the top 5 brokers in Mexico City, according to Villarreal. It’s focused strictly on the residential market and for-sale properties.

It’s also (for now) focused just on the Mexico City market, which it says is huge enough to provide plenty of business.

“There’s no MLS in this market,” Villarreal told me. “With the lack of transparency, brokers don’t have an incentive to provide all the information on properties. That ends up hurting the consumer at the end of the day.”

TrueHome takes a percentage of each transaction made on its platform. It charges 3 percent to execute transactions generally. But if another broker sells one of its properties, it splits a 4 percent transaction fee with that broker. Its own brokers are salaried, similar to ’s model.

With its new capital, the company is focused on working to be “the No. 1 broker in Mexico City” and achieving 20 percent market share in the areas in which it operates.

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The largest growth year over year in funding includes meat alternatives, indoor farming, robotic food delivery and cloud kitchens. Investment in startups operating what the report terms upstream–closer to the farmer and before  retail–increased 1.3 percent year over year, accelerating in the second half with the highest numbers for H2 on record. Alternative proteins ( raised $300 million, , $90 million and , $75 million) and vertical farming ( raised $100 million, , $100 million and , $82 million) drove much of this. The whole sector showed 250 percent growth in the last five years.

Closer to retail and grouped as downstream in the report are eGrocers, restaurants, delivery and home cooking, which saw an overall decline of 7.6 percent year over year. The largest sector decline is food delivery by 56 percent year over year.

Agritech and foodtech experienced growth in investments in regions outside of Asia and North America. According to Louisa Burwood-Taylor head of media and research at AgFunder “Europe continued its trend for growth across VC industries posting a 94 percent increase in agri-foodtech funding, while Latin America had a breakout year, closing $1.4 billion in agri-foodtech funding across 40% more deals than in 2018; that’s more than the entire LatAm VC industry in 2017. Africa also more than doubled its funding in the space.”

Notable investors in the sector cited by the report include venture investor , corporate investors and , and late-stage private equity investors , , and .

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The comes as the company closes a $1.75 billion credit line from and soon after WeWork appointed a new CEO, real estate executive Sandeep Mathrani.

As part of the 5-year plan, the company said it expects to post its first-ever quarter with $1 billion in revenue this year. In 2021, it’s aiming to be adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) positive, and in 2022 WeWork’s goal is to be free cash flow positive.

Put simply, free cash flow means a company is “generating more cash than is used to run the business and reinvest to grow the business,” according to .

When WeWork filed its S-1 document with the , it was clear the company was burning cash. You can read more about the state of WeWork’s finances when it filed to go public here. But the summary of its cash situation is that its operations were consuming a lot of cash ($198.7 million in H1 2019), and the company’s investing cash was even more negative ($2.36 billion in H1 2019).

Looking ahead, WeWork is also aiming for 1 million memberships in 2023, and having $1 billion of free cash flow in 2024. The company had more than 662,000 total memberships by the end of last year.

WeWork attempted to go public last fall but had to scrap its IPO after concerns came up about the company’s finances and corporate governance. Since then, its valuation plummeted, former CEO Adam Neumann stepped down (and was reportedly being paid well to do so, though the company’s chairman told Monday that the billion-dollar figure wasn’t true), and took control of the company.

It laid out a turnaround strategy, which included divesting acquired companies that weren’t part of WeWork’s “core business.”

WeWork had 739 locations as of the end of last year, in 140 cities and 37 countries, according to the company.

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-backed has reportedly shut down operations, according to an by Protocol’s Biz Carson.

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Brandless, a direct-to-consumer startup focused on food, beauty and personal care products, had announced it had raised a total of $292.5 million since its inception in 2016, according to .

led its last funding round, , which valued the company at $500 million, according to Crunchbase. At that time, our former editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm pointed out the fact that it was “a huge check at a large cost in equity terms.” But it turns out that SoftBank had only provided about $100 million upfront with a commitment to “fund around another $120 million if certain milestones were met. That final tranche never came,” according to Axios.

led its $35 million Series B in July 2017, a round that also included participation from NBA player , , and , among others.

Back in 2017, Crunchbase News sat down with  , co-founder and CEO of  to talk about how the company wanted to eliminate the inefficiency of the brand tax while changing the way people shop and live.

Background

It was bound to happen eventually. With all its misteps over the past couple of years, SoftBank was bound to have a portfolio company shut down.

The news that Brandless has shuttered is not entirely shocking, considering that last June, it got a new CEO amidst “turmoil” within the company, according to .

Looks like Brandless’ vision of $3 home goods just couldn’t keep up with the steep competition from rivals like . In fact, soon after it got that big cash infusion from SoftBank, the startup’s strategy seemed to change. According to TechCrunch’s Connie Laizos, in January 2019, the “company added baby and pet products to its stable of offerings, some of them at a ”

In a statement to , Brandless blamed a “fiercely competitive” retail market that was “unsustainable” for its business.

The news is the latest in a string of bad publicity for SoftBank. In January, we reported on how SoftBank-backed Colombian delivery unicorn had been hit with a trade secrets lawsuit. Also in January, we covered how two SoftBank-funded startups were in the news for either confirmed or rumored layoffs: Rappi had , according to Axios. And published an article that discount lodging provider reportedly was “firing thousands of staff across China and India.”

That followed pizza-making robot startup , also backed by SoftBank, laying off  53 percent of its employees.

SoftBank, a Japanese investment conglomerate, has been accused of overinflating valuations with its fat checks, and it’s not ending well for many companies. But the practice of investing too much, perhaps too soon, may be catching up with SoftBank. Earlier this year, that SoftBank is cutting its ties with startup investments, even after signing term sheets.

In fact, SoftBank’s heavy-handed check-writing is leading investors and startups alike to rethink sky-high valuations in favor of a path to profitability.

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As part of the deal, Softbank will invest an additional $100 million in the company in January 2021, according to tech news website . Currently, the company has about $418 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.

FirstCry sells baby products and toys online, and calls itself “Asia’s largest online shopping store for kids and baby products.” The company sells items like kids clothing, bath products, nursery items and toys.

The company raised the first part of its Series E, about $149 million, in January 2019 (the new $150 million is also part of the Series E). The company raised its $4 million Series A round in April 2011, and its investors include and

According to Entrackr, the company has a value of at least $1.2 billion in the SoftBank transaction. The bank now holds about 40 percent of the equity in the company.

FirstCry is among a growing number of unicorns based India, including payment platform and hotel company Oyo.

Based in Pune, India, FirstCry carries more than 5,800 brands and has more than 7.5 million registered users, according to its website. It also has more than 400 stores across India, in cities including Bangalore, Delhi and Hyderabad.

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Usually when we talk about startup hubs we’re referring to metro areas. But the categorization can apply to countries as well. For as long as we’ve been tracking, a handful of nations rake in the vast majority of startup venture funding while others get virtually none.

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Here, we’re going to look at the middle ground–a group of roughly 10 countries that bring in between $1 billion and $3 billion a year in early- and late-stage venture funding.* For want of a catchier term, we’ll call them moderate-sized markets.

It’s a geographically diverse bunch. Three hail from Asia: Indonesia, South Korea and Hong Kong. Two are in Latin America: Brazil and Colombia. Four are from Europe: Spain, Sweden, Netherlands and Switzerland. And then there’s the lone continent, Australia

Putting it in perspective

You may be wondering how these mid-sized venture regions compare to the really big hubs. As it turns out, even when taken altogether, they’re rather tiny in comparison.

To put it in perspective, U.S. startups raised over $100 billion in reported financing rounds in 2019. The group of 11 countries we’re featuring here collectively brought in less than one-eighth that amount.

But while they may be small compared to the big hubs, moderate-sized markets are far more dynamic. To get a better idea of how the countries in this grouping rank, we’ve charted out funding for each in the past two years:

Totals for the moderate-sized markets fluctuate a lot more than the larger ones. If we saw a 236 percent annual increase in U.S. venture funding, or a 74 percent decline, investors would be freaking out. In the moderate-sized markets, it’s quite common to see increases or declines of 50 percent or more.

Here are some other findings:

Giant deals skew totals: Seeing big fluctuations in national funding totals year over year doesn’t necessarily signal a more bullish or bearish overall investment climate. That’s largely  because really big rounds for one or more companies can really skew the results.

Take Indonesia, for example. In 2018, local ride-hailing wunderkind pulled in over $2.4 billion, which accounted for most of the venture for the entire country. A dip in funding totals for 2019 says less about the national startup investment climate than about Gojek’s fundraising schedule.

In Colombia, meanwhile, e-commerce unicorn was the main reason funding for the whole country surged in 2019. It closed a $1 billion round backed by .

Reported round counts fall below 150 a year: For this dataset, we looked at how many disclosed venture rounds of Series A or later closed in each country over the course of 2019.

While no one is on track to rival the United States’ thousands of rounds per year, the numbers are pretty encouraging in that they point to a solid foundation of funded companies already making it past seed stage.

Most funding increases are due to bigger rounds, not more deals: More than half the countries on our list reported year-over-year funding increases of over 50 percent. Yet when looking at round counts, most countries, based on data to date, were flat to down.

Rounds frequently get reported late, and that may lead to upward revisions. However, the basic trendline is pretty clear: Investments rose more than deal counts. That means backers are putting more money into the startups they like, but not necessarily doing a lot more deals at Series A and beyond.

Wrapping up

So, what area is poised to become the next big venture hub? We’ll study that question in more detail next week, as we hone in on the fastest-growing startup funding markets.

For now, it’s safe to surmise that countries bringing in a few billion a year in startup funding today have plenty of more room to grow.

* We focused on early and late stage (Series A and beyond) and did not include seed-stage funding rounds. This is due in part to the pattern of seed-stage rounds being reported in Crunchbase weeks or months after they close, which can make results for recent quarters appear lower than warranted. While reporting delays also occur at Series A and beyond, they are less pronounced. Small seed rounds, particularly in non-English-speaking countries, may have a higher likelihood of not being included in the dataset.

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You’ve probably heard some of these stats, but let’s dwell on a few. About 8 percent of the world’s oil production is used to make plastic. Of that, about . Of that, some 18 billion pounds of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year.

It’s enough to make the author of a piece on sustainable packaging feel downright consumed with self-loathing for just downing a plastic bottle of water and a plastic-wrapped cookie. But we’re here to talk about startups.

Fortunately, while some writers aren’t doing their part, startups have been quite busy developing alternatives to plastic packaging and other environmentally damaging materials. Investors have been writing them some big checks as well.

A Crunchbase survey of funded companies in the sustainable packaging and materials space unearthed more than 20 () that have raised significant funding in the past three years.  Collectively, they’ve raised more than $850 million, with most of the money coming in the past couple of years.

This is no paltry sum, so we thought it’d be instructive to take a look at where the money’s going, and what it might signify for the future of disposables.

Top Funding Recipients

There are at least seven recently-funded startups in the eco-packing space that have individually raised $20 million or more, per Crunchbase data. We chart out the top funding recipients below.

One unusual takeaway is that the most heavily funded company – – started out with a business model that had little to do with sustainable packaging. The Silicon Valley company was primarily focused on robot-enabled pizza prep and delivery when it raised a $375 million round from in late 2018. The company has since announced a sharp pivot into sustainable packaging a few months after acquiring fortuitously named startup .

Another observation from the list of top venture-backed startups is there’s no clear geographic hub for sustainable packaging. Well-funded companies in the space hail from multiple continents and are based in major tech hubs as well as cities not known as startup havens.

Why Now?

Sustainable packaging seems like one those startup spaces that should have really taken off a long time ago. After all, everyone knows plastic is wasteful and bad for the environment, and there are plenty of other materials we could use to package the endless things we buy.

But change hasn’t come easy. Disrupting entrenched supply and manufacturing chains, producing new materials and containers at scale, and asking people to pay a bit more for eco-friendlier packing are all challenging things to orchestrate.

Adding to the complexity is consumers’ high expectations of their packaging, notes , an adjunct partner at , who is focused on food supply chains. ������Ƶ are looking for containers that are resealable, microwaveable and keep food fresh.

“The consumer at this point will not sacrifice product convenience,” she said. “So the packaging needs not just to be sustainable, but also fulfill the convenience and conservation capabilities it has been fulfilling for years.”

But the space is getting a boost as more major retailers, eateries, and food and consumer products producers are increasing investment in and commitment to sustainable packaging. And it goes beyond small steps like the eco-friendly paper straw you get at Starbucks.

Big corporations stepping up their eco game include cereal giant , which in October that it aims to transition to 100 percent reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by the end of 2025. Consumer products conglomerate , meanwhile, to halve its use of virgin plastic by that date. Even , known for its low-cost emphasis, has providing fully recyclable, reusable or compostable packaging for its private brand items. And the …

Exit Potential

Sustainable packaging isn’t a brand-new area, and entrepreneurial companies have been innovating in the space for a couple decades at this point. That means some of them have found their way into the arms of an acquirer, including most recently Pivot.

But for now the bulk of the exit activity remains ahead, particularly as incumbent packaging companies come under pressure from customers and governments to meet targets for lower-waste packaging.

As one sustainable packaging startup, , notes in its marketing materials: Packaging waste represents one-third of all municipal trash, costing local governments billions each year in disposal costs. Finding ways to cut back is a laudable environmental goal — but increasingly it’s looking like a wise financial decision as well.

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