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The new round, which included participation from new investors and , brings Roblox’s total funding to more than $335 million, according to CrunchBase data.

Roblox recently reached 115 million monthly active users and more than 1.5 billion hours of monthly engagement.

“If early-stage venture is about asking ‘What if it works?’, later-stage venture is about asking and assessing, ‘Is it working?’,” a16z general partners and wrote in a on the firm’s website. “With largely organic user sign-ups, highly recurring purchase behavior, a high margin structure for the platform, and a super strong value proposition for users (who derive hours of entertainment at a lower cost than they can find elsewhere), Roblox is cash flow positive. Roblox is working.”

Along with the new funding, Roblox has a secondary offering of up to $350 million to provide liquidity for early employees and stakeholders, according to a statement from the company. The company is now valued at $4 billion, according to .

Roblox last raised money in July 2018, when it pulled $150 million for its Series F, according to Crunchbase. Its other investors include , and .

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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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Case in point: Music creation platform has received a $75 million investment from audio company two years after it was notoriously just “.”��

SoundCloud is a platform for individual audio creators to upload content, attracting the attention of average listeners like you and me, lesser-known artists and celebrities such as The Weeknd, Kehlani, and Lil Yachty (even before they got famous).��

The company is a home for independent, unsigned artists, and like many social media platforms it creates the opportunity for one-time nobodies the possibility of going viral and making it big.

SoundCloud was founded in 2007 and claims it has over 200 million tracks from 25 million creators heard in 190 countries. The startup has over $500 million in funding to date, ��

Sirius XM’s investment in the company will be used to work on “product development and enhance the services that fuel its global community of creators and listeners,” .��

SoundCloud’s CEO Kerri Trainor also claims that, “three consecutive years of strong financial performance directly reflect the success of our creator-led growth strategy.”��

SoundCloud’s growth is notable. According to the company, it has a $200 million revenue run-rate based on the financials of fourth-quarter 2019. For those that don’t know, run-rate is a metric that helps forecast the year-end revenue by multiplying the performance of one quarter. That said, it is often employed by younger companies, and SoundCloud is over 13 years old at this point.

To unpack how this company went from almost closing to its recent news, a look as today’s investor is telling. According to the company, an ad and sales partnership with Sirius XM subsidiary �� made the platforms the “largest digital audio advertising marketplace.”

“The agreement enables advertisers and brands to purchase SoundCloud’s U.S. ad inventory directly through Pandora, leveraging the company’s direct sales capabilities, targeting data, and audio programmatic platform,” per the release. The combined audience is more than 100 million unique active listeners, a spokesperson for the company told Crunchbase News this morning. For context–streaming platform has 271 million monthly active unique users according to its latest earnings report.

Beyond partnerships, there’s definitely other factors at play that propelled the company past its layoffs and shutdowns–including support and public rallying from Chance The Rapper, .

But it was likely from and in 2017 that helped SoundCloud stay afloat. It also led Alexander Ljung, the founder and chairman of the company, to step down as CEO. This kicked off a companywide restructuring.��

Per Ljung, the 2017 investment promised a musical future.

“This financing means SoundCloud remains strong & independent. As I said, SoundCloud is here to stay,” at the time.

Today’s minority investment will allow two board seats for Sirius XM.��

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