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Southern California-based Procore said it has yet to determine neither the number of shares it plans to offer nor the price range. But it did list a proposed maximum offering price of $100 million. It also noted that it will list its common stock on the under the ticker symbol “PCOR.”

and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC are serving as joint lead book-running managers for the proposed offering.

Last September, we reported that an IPO could value 17-year-old Procore at more than $4 billion, according to , which cited “people with knowledge of the matter.” In December, we covered how the company had tripled its valuation to nearly $3 billion after raising a $75 million Series H from . That was up from a $1 billion valuation just two years prior when Procore raised $50 million in a round from . Since it was founded in 2003, Procore has , according to Crunchbase data.

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Last August, I reported on Procore acquiring its third startup in 12 months as part of its plan to broaden its offerings through mergers and acquisitions.

The numbers

Procore, which operates as a SaaS company, has seen impressive growth in recent years. As of August 2019, it had more than 1,800 employees, up 600 compared to a year ago, across 13 offices globally. Procore saw its annual recurring revenue surge from under $10 million in 2014 last August. 

Last year, I talked with Procore Founder and CEO by phone about the company’s M&A strategy, and he told me then that was “just the beginning.”

In its S-1, Procore shed more light on its financials. It revealed both increased revenue and net loss in 2019.  Specifically, the company’s revenue surged 55 percent in 2019 to $289.2 million compared with $186.4 million in 2018. At the same time, its net loss was up by 46.5 percent to $83.1 million in 2019 compared to $56.7 million in 2018.

Also, Procore revealed it had an accumulated deficit of $300.8 million at the end of last year.

Meanwhile, customer count nearly doubled from 4,310 at the end of 2017 to 8,506 at the end of 2019. It also has more than 1.3 million users.

Elusive profitability

Like other SaaS operators, Procore sells its products on a subscription basis for a fixed fee with pricing generally based on the number and mix of products and the annual construction volume contracted to run on its platform. As its customers subscribe to additional products, or increase the annual construction volume contracted to run on Procore’s platform, the company generates more revenue.

In citing its risk factors, Procore acknowledges a couple of things. Notably, it admits “to a history of losses,” and that it “may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future.” It also acknowledges that its business may be “significantly impacted” by changes in the “related reductions in spend across the construction industry.” No doubt that a downturn resulting in a slowdown in development would be harmful to Procore’s business.

As we’ve reported extensively, construction tech is one of those spaces that has not been considered traditionally sexy. It is, however, an industry that is growing both in terms of the number of companies receiving funding in the space and in terms of more mainstream investor interest. It’s also seeing more exits, as evidenced by this latest news.

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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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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.

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New investors and , along with existing investors , , , and , also participated in the financing. The round brings Pendo’s to $206 million since its inception in 2013, according to its Crunchbase profile.

The company, per its , aims to “understand and guide the entire product journey with a single (cloud-based) platform.” In other words, it wants to help companies build digital products that are easier to use with a SaaS (software as a service) model. Pendo operates under the premise that “many product teams still lack the basic tools they need to understand what their customers want, why customers come back, or what drives them away.”

“We help companies create software that users love. How often do people use software that is frustrating, confusing or can’t find what you’re looking for?” CEO and co-founder asked me when we talked at the time of Pendo’s 2018 raise. “Our whole value proposition eliminates those experiences. We help people get immediate value when they log into software. We believe that software is becoming a permanent part of our lives whether we’re purchasing new cars or experiencing some other digital experience.”

The company has seen impressive growth over time, noting a three-year CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) of 334 percent. It currently has more than 375 employees, up from 225 in September of 2018, across offices in Raleigh, New York City, San Francisco, London, Sheffield, United Kingdom, and Tel Aviv.

Also, Pendo says its bookings grew 108 percent in the second quarter over the same period in the prior fiscal year. The company now has over 1,200 customers, including Verizon, ADP, Cardinal Health, RE/MAX, LabCorp, Bright Horizons, Okta, OpenTable, Salesforce, Zendesk and the Michigan Supreme Court.

“A lot of companies are focused on sales or marketing but very few are focused on product,” Olson told me last year. “This fundraise is a good example of why product is so critically important today, more than ever before.”

Earlier this year, Pendo completed its second acquisition with the purchase of UK-based . But according to the company, it won’t be its last.

Pendo says it will use the new capital “to accelerate global expansion through sales and marketing investments, and [accelerate] product development through engineering investments and acquisitions.”

When I interviewed Olson last year, he told me that an IPO was something the company was considering. So I asked Pendo if that was still in the works. Its answer: “Yes, it is. Pendo’s goal is to build a large, successful and independent company. Their business fundamentals, recent growth, product suite and leadership team have set the company on a path not only toward IPO but to be a dominant SaaS business for years to come.”

This marks the second large round raised by a North Carolina company in a matter of weeks. On Oct. 2, we covered North Carolina-based , which has developed a cloud-based operating system for financial institutions, raising $80 million in a round of funding led by

In October 2018, I took a look at North Carolina’s growing startup scene. At that time, we found that venture funding in NC startups was up 154 percent to $2.57 billion for the year compared to $1.01 billion in all of 2017,  according to Crunchbase data. Maybe it’s time to take another look.

Disclosure: , an investor in Pendo, is also an investor in Crunchbase, the parent company of Crunchbase News. Crunchbase’s investors are listed as part of its Crunchbase profile. For more about Crunchbase News’s editorial policies on disclosure, see the News team’s About page.

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It’s this intriguing posture that has prompted Crunchbase News to explore the past, present, and potential future of the venture.

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Tiger Global was created by Chase Coleman in 2001, a former tech analyst at Tiger Management Corp., which was a separate hedge fund managed by Julian Robertson.

The hedge fund closed in 2000 and according to , Robertson gave Coleman $25 million to start his own technology fund, which would later become what we now know as Tiger Global Management, an investment firm with both a hedge fund and a private investment vehicle.

The firm has since become a prolific venture investor in the technology world. In October 2018, the group raised its eleventh private investment fund at nearly $3.8 billion, representing its largest fund to date, and one of the largest announced last year.

That capital has been funneled into over 250 companies since its inception. Some of its earlier bets include late secondary market transactions into LinkedIn and Facebook before those companies’ public debuts. According to , Tiger Global made $1 billion off of its Facebook bet alone.

Tiger Global hasn’t exclusively invested in growth stage companies that are . Per its founder’s LinkedIn page, Tiger’s private equity strategy, which is led by , has a “ten-year investment horizon and targets growth-oriented private companies.”

That statement was supported by COO who told Crunchbase News that Tiger Global has supported growth strategies that emphasize long term success over “over-optimization” in the short term. The firm first invested in Invision in 2013 and 2014, leading the company’s Series A and B rounds.

A full 30 percent of Tiger Global’s investments since its inception have been directed toward early stage (Series A and B) startups, with 20.5 percent alone being directed toward Series C startups.

Beginning in 2011, the firm’s investment cadence began to pick up significantly.

That year, the firm made multiple investments in now well reported U.S. companies. For example, Tiger Global joined Kleiner Perkins, participating in Square’s Series C in 2011. That year, it also led direct-to-consumer glasses startup s as well as ’s $50 million . It doubled down on both investments in 2013.

Other notable investments include recruiting website , CRM platform , direct-to-consumer shaving company and stationary bike company , which is reportedly prepping for an IPO.

Putting The Global In Tiger Global

Tiger Global has also made a name for itself on the global investment stage, particularly in emerging markets in China and India, as the following chart depicts.

As you can see, 60 percent of Tiger Global’s bets were made in companies located outside of the U.S. Indian companies have attracted more than 30 percent of Tiger Global’s total reported investment deals since Tiger’s first fund. Startups based in China attracted 11 percent of the firm’s investments.

The firm began investing internationally in China as early as 2003. Since then, it has funneled cash into other companies, including Alibaba rival JD.com. Tiger Global first participated in the company’s $1.5 billion Series C in March 2011, doubling down on that investment in JD’s $250 million Series D in November 2012.

Interestingly, Tiger Global led online learning platform company 17zuoye’s $20 million Series C in 2014. The edtech company made headlines in 2018 for raising $450 million in total from Toutiao and Singapore-based Temasek. It has also led massive, supergiant investments in , a China-based vegetable selling app, and, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence giant, among .

India

Perhaps even more interesting than its Asian presence is Tiger Global’s huge bet on India’s emerging market, where it was among the first U.S. investors to take interest in the region. The group’s first lead investment in the country was e-commerce company Flipkart’s Series B in June 2010. Since then, Tiger Global has made more than 80 investment deals in India, according to .

Pankaj Jain, a former Partner at 500 Startups in India, told Crunchbase News that growth in internet usage in India drove more interest in the startup community there.

“2010 I think was a real tipping point when it came to startups in India,” Jain said. “You started seeing e-commerce companies like Flipkart getting real traction, you started seeing other companies like SnapDeal raise money relatively quickly, looking at selling online.”

He also added that because of the of the hedge fund investment market , funds like Tiger Global and may have been looking for alternatives to hedge fund and fixed income activities. Further, the hold that Silicon Valley had on the startup ecosystem in the U.S., he believes, could have motivated some of those funds to look more closely at fast growing global markets like China and India.

“[Tiger Global] was like no other large investor in India. They would do all their homework beforehand, they would identify which companies they liked and why. They would meet with those companies and they would make a decision almost instantaneously,” Jain said. “They wouldn’t take three months of due diligence to make a decision–they would have done a lot of their due diligence before they even came.”

By 2015 the growth in mobile internet usage following the launch of services pushed that market potential forward. In the years following that first Flipkart investment, Tiger Global continued to double down on investments in Flipkart, as well as fashion e-commerce company Myntra, and taxi-hailing app Ola.

“At 500 we were doing a lot of small checks at the seed stage. In 2015, Tiger came and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to employ that same strategy at the Series A stage.’” That year, the fund led or participated in 33 deals in India, 60 percent of which were early stage rounds, according to Crunchbase. Tiger’s activity in 2015 “set off a frenzy,” according to Jain, attracting other investors from Japan and China, particularly ones Tiger had worked with before.

Scaling Back

Tiger Global slowed down following that rapid increase in check writing. In 2016 and 2017 the company made just seven investments in the country. That slowing cadence was also prevalent outside of India. Tiger Global made just 20 investments overall and did not raise a new fund.

It seems the group instead has shifted to finding an exit for its main investments. A number of Tiger Global’s portfolio companies were acquired in 2017 and 2018. Those M&A exits included Dubai-based Souq, which was acquired by Amazon for $580 million in May 2017. Other exits passed the $1 billion mark. Brazilian ride-hailing service 99 was purchased by Didi Chuxing for $1 billion in January 2018, Glassdoor was acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion in May 2018, and Flipkart struck a $16 billion deal with Walmart in May 2018. Other portfolio companies like JD.com and Spotify went the public route.

Tiger Global 11

The group now seems to be heating up again, investing 53 times since the beginning of 2018, leading 42 of those deals. About 70 percent of the Tiger Global-led deals were for late-stage startups, and nearly half were for startups based in the U.S., with the fund leading only four investments in India and 12 in China.

While the fund may not be making headlines for its investments in India at the moment, it’s still grabbing people’s’ attention, investing in new and non-traditional verticals. One of those non-traditional bets is cannabis.

Tiger Global invested alongside Snoop Dogg’s in cannabis regulation-focused startup Metrc. It also led cannabis-focused point of sale platform ‘ Series A, again with Casa Verde. And from what Green Bits CRO Charlie Wilson told Crunchbase News in an email, it seems that Tiger Global came prepared to invest in cannabis, much like it was prepared to invest in India.

“Tiger Global was ahead of nearly all their peers, demonstrating not just curiosity but a commitment to make investments in this massive category,” Wilson wrote. “They identified Green Bits as the leader in retail technology and didn’t hesitate.”

With $3.8 billion to deploy, we can likely expect Tiger Global to continue to lead in emerging verticals and markets and grace the headlines of tech media everywhere, whether it wants to or not.

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Editorial Note: A previous version of this article stated that Tiger Global Management is a hedge fund with public and private equity vehicles. A Tiger Global spokesperson clarified Tiger Global’s structure, and it has since been updated. 

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Now it appears that the New York-based investment firm is preparing to do a whole lot more investing. Tiger Global for its latest fund in a year that’s seen a number of mega fundraises. This one – dubbed Tiger Global Private Investment Partners XI – is believed to be the second biggest venture fund in 2018 thus far and by far, Tiger Global’s largest fund yet.

Tiger Global closed on the fund—its 11th venture capital investment vehicle—earlier this month after shopping it for just six weeks, according to a TechCrunch . It was initially aiming to raise $3 billion.

The fund will focus on putting money into enterprise and direct-to-consumer companies in China, India and the US, according to TC.

According to Crunchbase, Tiger Global has been steadily increasing its fund size over time, raising a total of $13 billion since 2011. Specifically, Tiger Global Private Investment Partners X LP closed in December 2015, . Fund IX also raised $2.5 billion in November 2014. Prior to that, the investment firm in April 2014.

Tiger Global has had 50 known , including companies such as , and , according to Crunchbase. It’s also made 266 , leading 140 of those.

Most recently (announced today!), it led a Series A in Belgian bicycle startup .

There’s no question that this already prolific investor is about to get even more active with this huge fund.