Category: Tech news

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The law firm Fenwick & West has published some new data to highlight how Covid-19 has impacted the world of venture capital in Silicon Valley. The biggest surprise? It’s how little impact the global pandemic seems to have had on dealmaking this spring.

Consider first that valuations in April were actually higher than in March, and that despite massive layoffs in the tech sector, so-called up-rounds only declined modestly, from 72% in March to 70% in April.

In fact, though you’d think the massive disruptions prompted by virus would accelerate things wildly, it looks more like the steady continuation of a trend that began last year, when 83% of financings saw companies receive higher valuations.

We can’t pinpoint when this started based on Fenwick’s report, but our guess is that it kicked off with WeWork’s pulled IPO last fall, which seemingly reminded investors that what goes up — and up — sometimes comes down fast, too.

What about good old-fashioned down rounds? You’d probably guess that a lot of startups — including those in the travel industry or that count the travel industry as a customer — were impacted severely when the coronavirus took hold in the U.S. But again, Fenwick’s data, at least, tells a different story. The number of deals that were marked down by investors accounted for just 12% of all deal volume in April; that’s even lower than in March, when 16% of companies experienced down rounds.

It does make sense, considering that the data is specific to April alone, especially when accounting for the many startups that have been thrown a longer lifeline by their investors in the firm of extensions to earlier rounds. Investors don’t like seeing their deals marked down by new investors, of course. The thinking, too, is just to get the companies through this rough patch, then figure out what’s what. (Relatedly, there was a sizable increase in flat rounds: 18% in April, compared to 13% in March and 9% last year.)

More astonishing was the sheer pace of investing into startups in Silicon Valley. Though there was talk about investors needing to stop and assess the health of their portfolio companies from mid-March to early April, it seems now that VCs never really stepped off the gas. According to Fenwick, the number of deals actually increased from 54 in March to 64 in April; that nearly matches the 65 deals per month that were completed last year, when the world wasn’t grappling with an epidemic.

For what it’s worth, many of these were later-stage deals. Fenwick’s data shows the percentage of Series D and E+ deals increased to 38% of all financings in April, up from 21% in March and the highest that figure has been since August 2018, when Series D/E+ deals combined for 42% of all financings.

In short, VCs were plowing more money into what they see as sure things — and into management teams they weren’t meeting for the first time over Zoom.

Either way, as one of the reports authors — longtime attorney Barry Kramer — noted in a follow-up email, averages “can obscure” the disparities in how companies are being impacted right now, with some benefiting from the stay-work-learn-at-home shift, while others, including biotech research, manufacturing and hardware being hurt by it.

“We aren’t seeing massive upheaval or panic in the industry,” however, wrote Kramer. VCs are instead “adjusting to the current situation.”