Tech earnings kick off as Canva works to make M&A great again
📈 Trending Up: Swiggy-backed Rapido … Meta’s open-source AI chops … Apple Intelligence … AI scrapers’ ability to get in trouble … custom chatbots … PayPal shares post-earnings … FAYE … solar power … China’s factories … olympic doping …
📉 Trending Down: US home insurance profits … cement production in China … Anthropic’s Google relationship … the FT’s ownership …
🤔 What Else?
SaaS sales metrics are getting slowly, holistically worse: New data from RepVue indicates that SaaS sales speed, deal size, and rep comp are all headed in the wrong direction at once. Not good.
It’s a big earnings day: Today we’re hearing from Microsoft, AMD, Arista Networks, PayPal (see above), Electronic Arts, Pinterest, Match, Yandex, Blackbaud, Freshworks, Lemonade, and A10 networks.
📊 Startup of the Day: Type One Energy. TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant has a great piece out on Type One, which just raised $53.5 million. The company is working on commercializing fusion power, focusing on using stellarators for plasma confinement.
If we can get to net-positive fusion energy at scale, the planet will be greatly helped.
This means a global implementation of fusion energy. Says Type One CEO Christofer Mowry when discussing coal usage in China, “If we don’t find a way to decarbonize the region, we might as well fold up the tent and go home.”
High-risk dollars into an industry that is working on both tech and commercial risk at once? You love to see it!
Canva snags Leonardo.Ai
Given the present IPO dearth, startup M&A is taking on an outsized portion of mantle when it comes to generating cash returns for venture capitalists. Thus, every startup M&A transaction is of note and worth examining.
Especially when Canva is involved. The Australian design company was valued at $40 billion back in 2021 when it raised a $200 million Series F. That made it one of the most valuable private-market technology companies in the world. More recently, the company’s valuation settled at $26 billion. Sure, falling valuations are never great, but a $26 billion valuation in 2024 actually says a lot more than a $40 billion price tag a few years back. [Update: Canva reached out to let CO know that we got the numbers wrong here. $40B was in AU$, so the $26B in USD is, in fact, the same figure.]
So we care about Canva. We should care about Leonardo.Ai, too, because it’s built a real business in the AI game and found an exit to a giant that, if we’re reading the tea leaves correctly, was executed at an attractive price.