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| Here's a look at today's Startups briefing. - 🌏 Workforce management platform Rippling set up Asia-Pacific HQ in Australia.
- 🚀 Secondary market transactions surged by 27% in Q4 2023 as employees got desperate for liquidity.
- 🤝 Apple is set to settle a trade secret lawsuit against SoC startup Rivos.
Thank you. Karan
p/karan-chafekar | |
| 1 | | Workforce management platform Rippling set up a regional headquarters in Sydney, Australia, marking another step in its ambitious international expansion plan. The move comes in short succession after its launch in the U.K. and Ireland earlier this year. Rippling already has an office in India and launched services in Singapore. It is gearing up to launch in New Zealand next. More: - Slack's former VP, Matt Loop, has been roped in as the VP and head of Asia to oversee the APAC expansion.
- The company has 10,000 customers, including Australian companies such as SiteMate, Liven, and Omniscient Technology.
- Prominent global clients include Notion, Anduril, and Anthropic.
- The company decided to expand into Australia due to the presence of several clients' employees in Australia and India, a willingness seen in Australian companies to spend on software, and the absence of a local competitor that provides the expansive list of features that Rippling does.
- Rippling already has 30 employees in the Sydney office and plans to add more members to its sales, marketing, and product teams.
- The startup was valued at $11.25B when it raised a $500M Series E funding round led by Greenoaks in March 2023.
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| 2 | | Secondary market trading platform Caplight witnessed secondary transactions worth $296M on its platform in Q4 2023, up 27% from the previous quarter, per the WSJ. 
What the numbers say: Nearly half of all secondary transactions involved trades of common shares, typically held by employees and founders, per Caplight's co-founder and CEO Javier Avalos. Last year, about 70% of the transactions were less than $1M, suggesting that employees and individual investors are the ones seeking liquidity. Avalos adds, "If you're an employee or former employee who thought the company you hold shares in would exit in 2021, you might now be getting desperate for liquidity." Relevance: Zanbato's chief growth officer Akrati Johari corroborated Avalos' hypothesis, adding that 48% of secondary share sales on its platform came from family offices and high-net-worth individuals, including employees and former employees. Employees typically liquidating their stakes might have made major life decisions or investments based on the expectations of their company going public. Where to see the impact: While current employees can hold on to their stakes, laid-off employees typically have a 90-day window to exercise their stock options. Individual shareholders might have to contend with a high bid-ask spread while liquidating their shares in the secondary markets, with private stock marketplace Hiive reporting a 28% gap between prices quoted by sellers and buyers. A rebound in public markets could narrow the bid-ask spread and further boost secondary market activity in the latter half of this year. | | | |
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| 3 | | Tech giant Apple told the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that it has agreed to settle the lawsuit against startup Rivos. The agreement will reportedly allow Apple to recover any confidential information from Rivos after a "forensic examination of Rivos' systems and other activities." Per the joint court filing, both companies want to resolve the claims against each other by March 15. More: - The dispute started after Apple sued the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup in 2022 for poaching employees and stealing trade secrets related to its system-on-chip (SoC) technology.
- Last month, Apple settled claims levied at former employees who joined Rivos.
- Rivos dismissed the claims and countersued Apple, alleging unfair competition and using illegal measures to intimidate employees who might join the startup.
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| 4 | | Koloma, a cleantech startup extracting carbon-free green hydrogen from natural underground deposits, bagged $245.7M in Series B funding, per Axios. News about the Series B round comes a day after it received a $20M research grant from the U.S. Energy Department's ARPA-E program to advance geologic hydrogen exploration. More: - Khosla Ventures led the round, joined by Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, United Airlines' Sustainable Flight Fund, Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Energy Impact Ventures.
- The SEC filing document for the current round shows 19 investors participating in the current round.
- The round also has an "option, warrant or other right to acquire another security," per the filing.
- The round brings the firm's total funds raised to date to $337M.
- Ohio State University geologists Tom Darrah and Paul Harraka co-founded the business.
- Darrah is the CTO of the firm, whereas Harraka is the chief business officer.
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| 5 | | M13-backed travel startup Layla acquired AI-powered itinerary-building bot maker Roam Around for an undisclosed sum. Layla debuted its AI-powered trip-planning platform last year, which fetches knowledge from Booking.com, Skyscanner, and other sources. Layla co-founder Saad Saeed is optimistic about the synergies the acquisition will bring to its existing itinerary-building solutions. More: - In addition, the acquisition will help Layla's partnerships with TripAdvisor, Kayak, Viator, and GetYourGuide.
- Layla will integrate Roam Around's solutions into its own product portfolio and eventually phase out the brand.
- Layla raised a €3M ($3.2M) seed funding round led by Firstminute Capital and M13 in Nov. 2023.
- Other notable investors include Booking.com co-founder Andy Phillips, Skyscanner co-founder Barry Smith, and Paris Hilton.
- Roam Around, which has raised $1M from FLYR.com and Jason Calacanis, has monthly site visits of half a million people and has generated about 10 million itineraries to date.
Note: Inside.com founder and CEO Jason Calacanis is an investor in Roam Around. | | | |
| 6 | | Full-stack quantum computing startup Diraq Pte. Ltd. extended its $20M Series A round from May 2022 with an additional $15M funding. The firm will use the proceeds to accelerate technology development, start technology commercialization, grow its team size, and expand in the U.S. More: - Co-founder and CEO Professor Andrew Dzurak said, "The primary technical focus in the next 18 months will be on the development of a device through a standard semiconductor foundry."
- Reaching this milestone will demonstrate the viability of Diraq's technology and serve as a proof point as it scales its technology.
- The firm is developing scalable qubit technology by reconfiguring CMOS transistors, which allows for scalable error corrections and eliminates the need for low-temperature operation.
- Quantonation led the current Series A-2 round, with additional participation from the Higgins Family Investments and the University of New South Wales.
- The Australian startup has raised over $120M in funding to date, most of which has come from various Australian and U.S. government funding programs.
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| 7 | | Quick Hits: - Visa and Mastercard have come to a historic $5 billion settlement, marking a pivotal moment for small business owners.*
- U.S. cybersecurity giant F5 acquired API security platform developer Wib. F5 will integrate Wib's solutions to its Distributed Cloud Services services. The move will help F5 add vulnerability detection and observability capability to its solutions, which should help users identify potential exploits and weaknesses during the application development process.
- Portland, Ore.-based reusable dishes and food container startup Bold Reuse is expanding to Seattle with a waste-cutting pilot project with Seattle Public Schools and a 9,000 square-foot dishwashing facility in the city.
- SaaS website building platform Wix launched the Wix Capital Accelerator Program to guide pre-seed and seed startups working on developing business platforms, management solutions for SMBs, and AI, deep learning, and LLM-based solutions.
- Tech-enabled mental health platform Headlight emerged from stealth with a $18M funding round led by Matrix and EPIC Ventures.
- Dive into advanced tips and tricks with the Kubernetes Cookbook. Get your copy, compliments of the cloud experts at DoiT.*
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 | Analyst | | Karan Chafekar is a Management Consultant, Business enthusiast, and Licensed Pilot. | | This newsletter was edited by Vibha Chapparike | |
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