gm. gm. Having a corporate job is shitty heaven, while being a startup founder is fun hell and no one can tell us otherwise. 

FUNDRAISING

That’s Haun big fund

Former a16z GP Katie Haun has raised a total of $1.5 billion for her new web3 focused venture fund, Haun Ventures. It’s the largest fund ever raised by a solo VC according to Axios. 

The details

The money is being split up into two separate vehicles, a $500 million early stage fund and a $1 billion “acceleration” fund that will invest “through all layers of the web3 stack," Haun told Axios.

• Side note: The official Haun Ventures Twitter account only has 990 followers at the time of writing which means it raised $1,515,151 in capital for every one follower it has. Do with that info what you will. 

If you want another stat, Haun Ventures has exactly one GP—Katie Haun. It plans to expand quickly in the future, but it reiterates how much respect and influence Haun commands in the crypto space to raise a fund of that size on her own. 

Drama between Huan and a16z?

Haun has been one of the higher profile defectors from a16z in the past few months, so it will be interesting to watch the dynamics between the two juggernauts play out. For now, it appears they are playing nice in the sandbox: a16z is a large investor in Haun’s funds and the two have already co-invested in a few deals. Although...if the relationship sours and Haun ends up kicking a16z’s ass in the next few years, the inevitable HBO show chronicling the fall out will no doubt be a banger. 

Zoom out: Crypto prices and NFT trading volume are down across the board which represent some troubling macro factors for Haun to deal with. But Haun has weathered worse crypto downturns before: “When I think back to deploying the first two crypto funds, that was during a period of immense volatility—it was definitely a crypto winter with prices down 70% and projects were still born during that cycle.” In other words, Katie has been there and done that and she ain’t too worried. 

ROUND UP

VCs fork over f**ckloads of money for fintechs

On Monday and Tuesday, two separate fintechs announced new rounds that more than doubled their valuations, both in under a year. 

Jeeves has gone parabolic.

Anyway you look at the fast-growing fintech, you’ll find gaudy numbers: Revenue has climbed 900% since its Series B in December, its client base has more than doubled to 3,000 companies, and its valuation has jumped to $2.1 billion from $500 million in half a year. Jeeves provides payment rails for any business spend in any global currency and currently has customers across 24 different countries. Bringing international finance infrastructure under one hood has been a huge win for Jeeves and serves as a further example of how lucrative a global perspective on the expense management category has become. (More here) 

Ramp has…also gone parabolic.

Not even gonna lie, we could probably write the exact same blurb for Ramp as we did for Jeeves. Like Jeeves, Ramp is a corporate expense platform that saw “close to a 10x” bump in YoY revenue in 2021 and raised a monster round that more than doubled its previous valuation ($3.9 billion  → $8.1 billion). One point of departure from Jeeves— Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, which led Ramp’s latest equity round, has now led a round for Ramp four times in a row. You don’t see that everyday. (More here)

Bottom line: It's a hell of a time to be in the corporate card and expense management biz.  

QUICK HITS

Seed round

Stat: Some news to make you look on the sunny side: the world has officially surpassed 1 terawatt of solar installations, enough capacity to generate power for all of Europe. But before you go clapping each other on the back, solar still accounts for just 3.1% of the world's energy production. Caveats gonna caveat. 

Startup: Hex sounds like a fintech company that belongs in the roundup above, but it's actually a data science collaboration platform. Imagine Figma, but for data. It already has two industry heavyweights, Snowflake and Databricks, on its cap table to go along with the $52 million Series B it just raised. (More here)  

Rabbit hole: Did you know J.R.R. Tolkien painted? Neither did we. (Tolkien Estate) 

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Netflix announced two new games—one educational RPG and one PS3 remaster—for its nascent mobile gaming platform. 

• Apple Podcasts is rolling out new creator features that will finally allow podcasters to see how many people follow them. 

• LAPSUS$, the hacker group who has targeted Sony and Nvidia in the past, claimed it gained administrator access to user authentication service Okta on Monday.

• Qualcomm is establishing a  $100 million Snapdragon Metaverse fund. Wut.

TRIVIA

Logo Quiz

Answers at the bottom. This was an easy one...

SOMEBODY BUILD THIS

TIDBITS

🧠 A law professor weighs in on NFTs.  

😷 Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes.

😓 Some advice from HN on how to deal with the stress of fundraising.

TRIVIA ANSWER

• A: Twitter

• B: Red Sox

• C: Hilton

• D: Disney

• E: Outlook

• F: Lufthansa

• G: Dunlop

• H: Lakers

• I: General Electric

• J: McDonald's