TheChek News Flow

March 11 (Reuters) - British clearing bank The Bank of London is considering a rescue bid for the UK arm of collapsed U.S. bank Silicon Valley Bank (SIVB.O), Sky News reported on Saturday.

The British bank has appointed investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners to advise it on its interest in Silicon Valley Bank UK Limited (SVB UK), the report said, citing a source familiar with the matter.

The Bank of London and SVB did not immediately respond to a Reuters' request for comment.

The news of the British bank's bid interest comes a day after the Bank of England said it was seeking a court order to place SVB UK into an insolvency procedure, after U.S. regulators took over its parent company SVB Financial Group earlier on Friday.

The rout in SVB's stock, which began on Thursday, has spilled over into other U.S. and European banks. U.S. banks have lost over $100 billion in stock market value and European banks have shed another $50 billion in value over the past two days, according to a Reuters calculation.

The brand known for its signature windbreaker is cementing its presence in the premium sports segment as it gears up for a retail push into Asia.

PARIS — K-Way announced on Saturday that it has been named as the official supplier of the French team competing in the 37th edition of the America’s Cup, cementing its presence in the premium sports segment as it gears up for a retail push into Asia.

The brand, which has become synonymous with its signature packable windbreaker, will provide technical regatta and leisurewear apparel for the Orient Express Team at the sailing race in Barcelona in 2024. It’s the latest sports partnership for K-Way, which is owned by Italian group BasicNet, whose other brands include Kappa, Superga and Jesus Jeans.

In a statement, K-Way noted that BasicNet’s Sebago label will supply the French team with a collection of technical and casual footwear, while stablemate Briko will provide protective gear including helmets, masks, glasses and life jackets.

Riding on the partnership, K-Way plans to expand its line of performance apparel with sailing gear, said Lorenzo Boglione, vice president of sales and member of the board of directors of BasicNet. It also has an ongoing collaboration with Santini, the Italian cycling clothes maker that supplies the yellow jerseys for the Tour de France, and sponsors surfer Leonardo Fioravanti.

“The idea is to really play on both fields, premium sports and fashion, because we believe they’re really strongly interconnected,” Boglione said in an interview in Paris, where K-Way hosted a fashion week party to celebrate its collaboration with the Café de la Paix, initially unveiled during Milan Fashion Week in January.

“Our customer is not a pure fashion victim, or a fashion nerd, nor a super performance-driven guy. It’s a guy who wants to feel fashionable and sporty at the same time,” he said.

Founder Léon-Claude Duhamel came up with the idea for K-Way in 1965 while sitting on the terrace of the Café de la Paix, watching a mother and her children struggle with cumbersome rain gear. He said it was originally sold with a separate pouch, retailing via mail-order firm 3 Suisses for 12 French francs, which is equivalent to around 17 euros today, according to France’s national statistics institute INSEE.

By the time he sold the company to Pirelli in 1990, he had produced 40 million pieces. BasicNet bought the brand in 2004 and its founder Marco Boglione, Lorenzo Boglione’s father, eventually reached out to Duhamel, inviting him to visit its headquarters in Milan.

“In my day, K-Way had a very good image, but we were a mass product. He has not only maintained this positive image, but he has turned it into a great brand, in the sense that he has really taken it upscale,” Duhamel said in a telephone interview.

K-Way has four distinct product lines: the core Klassic label; Le Vrai basics, including the signature windbreaker; the L’Action premium sportswear collection, which encompasses ski gear, and the R&D label, which is the runway collection.

“I would say 95 percent of the business is between Klassic and Le Vrai, and the rest is product that today is more of a marketing instrument, but we believe both can become proper businesses very soon,” Boglione said.

While BasicNet does not break out sales for individual brands, the group — which operates as a marketplace licensing collections to international producers and distributors — reported aggregate sales by commercial licensees of 1.27 billion euros in 2022, up 34.1 percent year-on-year.

Consolidated revenues, which include royalties and direct sales, rose 30 percent to 386.1 million euros, while net profit was up 47.7 percent to 30 million euros, according to the company’s annual results published on Thursday.

With a network of 100 stores worldwide, K-Way is raising investment in marketing and communications at it prepares to grow “significantly” in Asia over the next two to three years. It is opening a second store in Hong Kong at the K11 Art Mall, and has “very aggressive plans for China,” Boglione said, without providing further details.

“Hong Kong has been really tough for the past couple of years because COVID[-19] hit very, very hard there. But at the same time, they’re now open and China’s open and we are very positive on that. I really believe it’s going to go back to being the stepping stone into China even more,” the executive said.

“We believe the brand fits well with the current scenario in Asia so we will invest also in marketing and communication there more, because of course, we need to get people to know the brand, but we’re very excited for the future,” he added.

K-Way will scale back the number of its collaborations, following high-profile linkups with luxury brands including Saint Laurent and Fendi in recent years, he said.

“We like to do tactical collaborations for specific markets when there is an opportunity,” Boglione said. “We were lucky enough to be chosen by very prestigious brands and we have to keep it up. We can’t just do any collaboration, first because they are very time-consuming and complicated to manage and handle, but also because we need them to make sense.”

In addition to its ongoing partnership with Comme des Garçons Play, there are collaborations with two contemporary brands in the pipeline: French womenswear label Soeur and U.K. men’s clothing line Universal Works.

“The Café de la Paix project is an excuse to tell everybody when and how K-Way was invented,” Boglione said. “The brand is almost 60 years old and we always promote the product, and not the history of the brand, so I think it was very important to underline how strong and deep the history of the brand is.”

Silicon Valley Bank grew too fast using borrowed money—and the risks were lurking in plain sight

Silicon Valley Bank’s failure boils down to a simple misstep: It grew too fast using borrowed short-term money from depositors who could ask to be repaid at any time, and invested it in long-term assets that it was unable, or unwilling, to sell.

When interest rates rose quickly, it was saddled with losses that ultimately forced it to try to raise fresh capital, spooking depositors who yanked their funds in two days. The question following the bank’s takeover Friday: How could regulators have allowed it to grow so quickly and take on so much interest-rate risk?

And it wasn’t the only problem bank last week. Just days before SVB SIVB -60.41% collapsed, Silvergate Capital Corp. SI -11.27% , one of the crypto industry’s biggest banks, said it would shut down.

“The aftermath of these two cases is evidence of a significant supervisory problem,” said Karen Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics, a regulatory advisory firm for the banking industry. “That’s why we have fleets of bank examiners, and that’s what they’re supposed to be doing.”

The Federal Reserve was the primary federal regulator for both banks.

Notably, the risks at the two firms were lurking in plain sight. A rapid rise in assets and deposits was recorded on their balance sheets, and mounting losses on bond holdings were evident in notes to their financial statements.

SVB grew at a breakneck pace, nearly doubling deposits in just a year. Total assets at its parent, SVB Financial Group, grew to $211 billion at the end of 2021, versus $116 billion a year earlier. By the end of 2022, SVB was the 16th largest lender in the U.S. Its implosion was the second-biggest bank failure in American history and marks the biggest test to date of the post-financial crisis regulatory architecture designed to force banks to curtail risk and monitor it more closely.

“Rapid growth should always be at least a yellow flag for supervisors,” said Daniel Tarullo, a former Federal Reserve governor who was the central bank’s point person on regulation following the financial crisis. That’s because risk controls and buffers against potential losses often don’t grow in line with new risks being taken by fast-growing banks.

In addition, nearly 90% of SVB’s deposits were uninsured, making them more prone to flight in times of trouble since the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. doesn’t stand behind them.

“A $200 billion bank should not fail because of liquidity,” said Eric Rosengren, who served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from 2007 to 2021 and was its top bank regulator before that. “They should have known their portfolio was heavily weighted toward venture capital, and venture-capital firms don’t want to be taking risk with their deposits. So there was a good chance if venture-capital portfolio companies started pulling out funds, they’d do it en masse.”

SVB and Silvergate both had less onerous liquidity rules than the biggest banks. In the wake of the failures, regulators may take a fresh look at liquidity rules, with an eye toward adjusting the requirements for holding high-quality liquid assets for banks whose funding sources go far beyond retail deposits, said Jaret Seiberg, an analyst at TD Cowen Washington Research Group, in a note.

To be sure, banks regularly borrow short-term to lend for longer periods of time. But SVB concentrated its balance sheet in long-dated assets, essentially reaching for yield to bolster results, at the worst possible time, just ahead of the Federal Reserve’s rate-hiking campaign. That left it sitting on big unrealized losses, making it more susceptible to customers pulling funds.

Timothy Coffey, associate director of depository research at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, said regulators were aware that unrealized losses in banks’ securities portfolios could lead to trouble, but didn’t take specific steps to address the issue.

“This is something that’s been rolling through the industry for several months,” he said. “They did nothing to help this bank,” he added, referring to SVB.

Indeed, the two firms aren’t the only ones facing the risk posed by unrealized losses. The banking industry as a whole had some $620 billion in unrealized losses on securities at the end of last year, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which began highlighting those late last year.

Another regulatory issue: accounting and capital rules that allow banks to ignore mark-to-market losses on some securities if they intend to hold them to maturity. At SVB, the bucket holding these securities—consisting largely of mortgage bonds issued by government-sponsored entities—is where the biggest capital hole is.

The idea behind such a bucket is that it insulates an institution from short-term price volatility. The problem this poses is two-fold.

First, a bank may not be able to hold such securities to maturity if it faces a cash crunch, as happened at SVB. Yet selling the securities would force the bank to recognize potentially massive losses.

Second, the treatment of the securities means banks like SVB are discouraged from selling when losses emerge, potentially causing problems to fester and grow. That appears to have been the case at SVB and many other banks as rising interest rates in 2022 caused large losses in bond markets.

Banks have an additional incentive to pile into Treasurys. They have to hold less capital against such holdings, supposedly because they are risk-free. However, this means banks are holding less capital to absorb losses, and Treasurys can lose value due to changes in interest rates.

Others said monetary policy over the past decade played a role. The Fed “suppressed the yield curve and made it very clear to the banking industry that you would do this for a considerable period,” said Thomas Hoenig, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and former vice chairman of the FDIC. “So bankers are making decisions based on that message and based on that policy, and they fill their portfolio up with government securities of varying maturities, and they say they’re going to hold them to maturity.”

Silvergate and SVB may have been particularly susceptible to the change in economic conditions because they concentrated their businesses in boom-bust sectors. With companies in those sectors now moving assets elsewhere in the financial system, the nature of those risks may shift, said Saule Omarova, a professor of law at Cornell University who was nominated to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in 2021.

That suggests the need for regulators to take a broader view of the risks in the financial system. “All the financial regulators need to start taking charge and thinking through the structural consequences of what’s happening right now,” she said.

CNN

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A newly discovered asteroid roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool has a “small chance” of colliding with Earth in 23 years, with a potential impact on Valentine’s Day in 2046, according to NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

The asteroid has a 1 in 625 chance of striking Earth, based on data projections from the European Space Agency, though NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Sentry system calculated the odds closer to 1 in 560. The latter tracks potential collisions with celestial objects.

But the space rock — named 2023 DW — is the only object on NASA’s risk list that ranks 1 out of 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, a metric for categorizing the projected risk of an object colliding with Earth. All other objects rank at 0 on the Torino scale.

Though the 2023 DW tops the list, its ranking of 1 means only that “the chance of collision is extremely unlikely with no cause for public attention or public concern,” according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, while a 0 ranking means the “likelihood of a collision is zero, or is so low as to be effectively zero.”

“This object is not particularly concerning,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

NASA officials have warned that the odds of impact could be dramatically altered as more observations of 2023 DW are collected and additional analysis is performed.

“Often when new objects are first discovered,” NASA Asteroid Watch noted Tuesday on Twitter, “it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future.”

Risk of asteroid impact

It’s common for newly discovered asteroids to appear more threatening when first observed.

“Because orbits stemming from very limited observation sets are more uncertain it is more likely that such orbits will ‘permit’ future impacts,” the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, located at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, notes on its website.

“However, such early predictions can often be ruled out as we incorporate more observations and reduce the uncertainties in the object’s orbit,” it reads. “Most often, the threat associated with a specific object will decrease as additional observations become available.”

It may be a few days before new data can be collected because of the asteroid’s proximity to the moon, Farnocchia noted in an email to CNN. The last full moon was two days ago, and it still appears bright and large in the sky, likely obscuring 2023 DW from immediate observation, he said.

“But then the object will remain observable for weeks (even months with larger telescopes) so we can get plenty of observations as needed,” he added.

The asteroid measures about 160 feet (about 50 meters) in diameter, according to NASA data. As 2023 DW orbits the sun, it has 10 predicted close approaches to Earth, with the nearest landing on February 14, 2046, and nine others between 2047 and 2054. The closest the asteroid is expected to travel to Earth is about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), NASA’s Eyes on Asteroids website notes.

The space rock was first spotted in our skies on February 2.

It’s traveling about 15.5 miles per second (25 kilometers per second) at a distance of more than 11 million miles (18 million kilometers) from Earth, completing one loop around the sun every 271 days.

Farnocchia noted the success of NASA’s DART mission, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, in September 2022 as evidence that humanity can be prepared to confront space rocks on potentially disastrous courses. DART intentionally collided a spacecraft into an asteroid to change its trajectory.

“That’s the very reason why we flew that mission,” he said, “and that mission was a spectacular success.”

Start-ups face ‘moment of crisis’ as industry leaders warn many could be ‘technically insolvent’

More than 200 UK-based tech company executives have urged Downing Street to intervene after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which they warned poses an “existential threat the UK tech sector”.

The Bank of England moved to put the UK arm of SVB into insolvency late on Friday following the shutdown earlier in the day of the bank’s US entity, but said it had “a limited presence in the UK and no critical functions supporting the financial system”.

On Saturday around 210 start-up founders and leaders signed an open letter to Jeremy Hunt, the UK chancellor, warning that “the majority of us as tech founders are running numbers to see if we are potentially technically insolvent”.

The signatories said they employ more than 10,000 people and have raised venture funding totalling £3.5bn.

“The majority of the most exciting and dynamic tech businesses bank with SVB and have no or limited diversity in where their deposits are held,” the letter said.

“This is a real moment of crisis for British start-ups,” said Dom Hallas, executive director of Coadec, a lobby group representing UK-based tech companies. “Without a clear way forward by Monday the risk will grow — it’s critical that government has a plan in place by then.”

Signatories to the letter include executives from Tessian, Beamery, Curve and bit.bio, companies that have each raised funding in excess of $100mn, as well as several smaller firms.

The letter added: “The Bank of England’s assessment that SVB going into insolvency would have limited impact on the UK economy displays a dangerous lack of understanding of the sector and the role it plays in the wider economy, both today and in the future.”

Daniel Shakhani, founder of Salary Finance and an investor in a series of companies that have received SVB funding, said: “This is a crisis that requires UK government involvement as it’s not clear what the outcome is going to be for the UK entity, which could be left orphaned if SVB US gets sold.”

As late as Friday, SVB UK had said it was an “independent subsidiary” of US-based SVB Financial Group with its own balance sheet and “ring fenced” funds. But it was forced to apply for £1.8bn of liquidity that day as panic spread among tech companies and their investors.

Companies which are unable to access the funds trapped in SVB’s UK arm may themselves go under, the executives said, warning of a “meaningful” increase in unemployment as the impact cascades through the UK economy.

Officials are canvassing tech companies to better understand the scale of the problem and potential solutions, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The Treasury said: “We are working with the Bank of England to ensure that Silicon Valley Bank UK’s failure is managed smoothly, and that any disruption is minimised.”

Hunt had discussed the situation with Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey and economic secretary to the Treasury Andrew Griffith was in contact with affected firms and will host a meeting with them later today, the Treasury said.

The Bank of England declined to comment on the possibility of additional support for clients with large deposits at SVB.

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves tweeted that the situation was “really worrying for many firms”. “The chancellor should urgently assess the scale of risks to UK firms posed by SVB’s collapse, and must work with firms to manage those risks,” she said.

Insolvency procedures are the BoE’s preferred resolution strategy for smaller banks which “do not supply transactional accounts or other critical functions to a scale likely to justify” the use of resolution measures, which ensure a bank can keep doing its core business while a plan for its wind-down is worked out.

Unlike a regular corporate insolvency, a bank insolvency process prioritises paying depositors the £85,000 protected by the FSCS “as soon as is reasonably practicable” with a target of seven days. The money can be raised through an industry levy “if necessary” and later recouped from the insolvency as assets are sold.

The bank liquidator’s second objective is to achieve the best result for the bank’s creditors as a whole.

Chinese, European and American shoppers are fueling strong gains for several luxury houses.

“It’s probably not worth their while to be the richest person in the graveyard.”

That revelation is why top-tier consumers are fueling luxury sales in the sector, according to Luca Solca, who summed up the global luxury market Thursday night at a French American Chamber of Commerce event in New York. Just how long that mindset will last remains a matter of debate, the Bernstein senior analyst said. High-end demand in Europe and the U.S. is still very healthy after two strong years of sales. Inevitably though, this post-pandemic euphoria will normalize, Solca added.

The freewheeling spending is being driven mostly by “how people feel, what they want to do and what they want to spend money on,” Solca said. Even if some consumers’ see their stock market portfolios decreasing, they “don’t care and want to have a good time” after experiencing two terrible years due to the pandemic, Solca said. As many are eager to be out and about again, the demand for new dresses, shoes and handbags is outweighing jewelry purchases, which spiked due to gifting during the pandemic and continue to show strong results, he added.

Before the pandemic, Chinese shoppers accounted for 30 to 33 percent of luxury consumers; American consumers comprised 22 percent, and European ones accounted for 18 percent. More recently, the surge by American and European shoppers in the past two years has taken some of the overall market share from Chinese consumers, however, with the lifting of lockdowns in China in the past few months, the expectation for 2023 “is a very strong rebound for Chinese luxury spending,” Solca said, adding that estimates that that market could grow at 7 percent seem “very low,” based on feedback from companies in China that have indicated the potential to double or triple sales in their own stores there. The rebound sparked by Chinese consumers is expected to extend into next year, which would be conducive to sustaining “above-average demand for the industry,” as in double-digit percentage gains on average this year and next, he said.

To highlight “how thin the penetration of Chinese demand is, Solca noted how Louis Vuitton indicated in 2018 that it had 5 million Chinese consumers globally, representing .03 percent of the population in China.

Noting how that may bode well for the stock market, Solca said he has never been so busy speaking with investors in the last 20 years.

Referring to Global Blue data, Solca said that between 2019 and 2022 the top spenders globally have grown between 2.6 and 2.7 times and the bottom spenders have grown by about 30 percent. With the return of shoppers from China, who can now travel more freely, luxury stores, including some that already have waiting lists and require appointments, could potentially get very crowded, he said. “This could cause the service levels of our industry to get worse. They are already poor, frankly with the queuing [that is sometimes] required in front of the stores, and waiting forever to get what you want.”

“The industry is building on a paradox, by selling the perception and illusion of exclusivity while growing exponentially,” Solca said. Modern luxury brands have reconciled that by never discounting “to maintain that perception of exclusivity while selling as much as they possibly can,” he said.

Not anticipating a slowdown in American or European luxury spending anytime soon, Solca noted how the luxury industry in Europe is considered as strong as the technology sector there. “LVMH has the largest market cap in Europe today,” he said.

The greatest risks to the luxury market are geopolitical developments — namely if the relationship between the U.S. and China continues to deteriorate, and international trade suffered, with sanctions applied to China. “This would be a very good day to buy luxury goods stocks, because they would fall a lot,” he said.

Another challenge for retailers is how social media and online information and interest are deterring some from in-store visits. That means stores need to be more exciting and engaging — hence the influx of pop-ups and limited-edition designs — and the added fixed costs of such endeavors. That is also leading to greater consolidation and the “big companies get bigger and smaller brands struggling to stay in the game, because they don’t have the ability to spend more and human resources to dedicate towards all of these new fronts that have been emerging,” Solca said.

The uptick in top-tier luxury spending has lead to dedicated VIP rooms, and soon by-appointment VIP stores, Solca said. Increasingly, luxury brands are reducing wholesale accounts to avoid competing with them, building their own direct-to-consumer and maintaining full-price shopping. Gucci, Prada and Burberry, for example, have halved their wholesale presence, Solca said.

Afterward, he spoke with WWD about how luxury brands need to be integrating and upstreaming manufacturing so that they produce goods directly to secure capacity and to claim that ESG criteria. “The time of greenwashing is over. Companies need to be true to what they say. That is the best insurance policy. That is the best guarantee — that you are respecting the environment and the workers as well.

He also spoke about how luxury brands are seeing robust sales from their top-shelf spenders, while also using their advertising and social media to cast a wider and more diverse net. “They use different categories for different customers. All of the luxury brands are getting into beauty because that is the luxury of the poor so you give that to the masses,” he said, noting how couture, the most expensive products, uphold a brand’s highest standard. “[Luxury] brands are going into beauty and couture to be different things to different people,“ Solca said.

There’s a battle for attention that is going on, too. “Why do these collaborations like the one with all the polka dots [that Louis Vuitton] with Yayoi Kusama? To attract attention,” Solca said.

“Who you are and how important you are in the world is probably more important than the technical skills that you bring to the job of designing whatever line you are responsible for because you have very strong teams behind you any way,” he said.

The big news of the week in venture obviously is not who raised what but rather where will they put that money? Nevertheless, there were some big rounds this week. It feels like it was just about a month ago we were here talking about Anthropic — and that’s likely because it was only a month ago. AI continues to seduce investors and the public in general. Maybe AI can create a bank for startups to store all that cash.

1. Anthropic, $300M, artificial intelligence: Few companies have been busier this year than San Francisco-based AI startup and rival to ChatGPT, Anthropic. Just weeks after raising hundreds of millions of dollars from Google, it was reported the company is raising another $300 million round at a pre-investment valuation of $4.1 billion. Spark Capital is reportedly leading the round. Just last month it was reported Google had invested between $300 million and $400 million in the startup. The deal came just two weeks after news broke of Microsoft’s massive $10 billion investment into OpenAI. Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude, is in closed beta mode, but in a paper detailing its goals, it is expected to combat harmful prompts by explaining why they are dangerous or misguided. Before the massive fundraising this year, Anthropic — which has reportedly made limited revenue — had raised $704 million across Series A and Series B funding rounds in 2022, according to Crunchbase data. The Series B was led by disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

2. Palmetto, $150M, cleantech: Every week some cleantech startup makes it high on this list, and this week it’s Palmetto. The Charleston, South Carolina-based startup raised $150 million from TPG Rise Climate as it looks to take advantage of the growing consumer demand for solar energy. The company’s platform helps to manage the entire residential solar process for providers — handling sales, design, engineering, permitting and fulfillment. According to the Energy Information Administration, solar capacity is expected to grow 84% through the next two years — meaning a lot more houses will be looking toward solar to help combat rising electricity bills. Founded in 2009, the company has now raised nearly $630 million, according to Crunchbase data.

3. Soci, $120M, marketing: Big national brands still need localized digital marketing strategies to drive growth and expansion into new markets. San Diego-based Soci does just that, and this week picked up $120 million in a round led by JMI Equity. The startup helps companies such as Ace Hardware and Jersey Mike’s Subs scale localized marketing efforts — helping push their digital presence in local search and social pages, while also protecting their online reputation. Founded in 2012, the company has now raised nearly $240 million, according to Crunchbase data.

4. Consensus, $110M, SaaS: Like most sectors, SaaS startups saw their funding cut significantly last year compared to 2021. However, that doesn’t mean some startups aren’t getting funded. Demo automation firm Consensus locked up a fresh $110 million round led by Sumeru Equity Partners — the largest round raised by any VC-backed startup in Utah to date. The Lehi, Utah-based company has an interactive video demo platform that helps presale and technical sales teams automate repetitive product demos and reallocate their time more wisely. After a monster year in 2021 — in which U.S.-based, VC-backed SaaS startups raised nearly $33 billion — SaaS companies saw funding nearly halved, dropping to $16.5 billion. So far this year, such startups have raised less than $2 billion to date. Founded in 2013, the company has now raised nearly $140 million, per Crunchbase data.

5. Bicara Therapeutics, $108M, biotech: Biotech dominates this list as we move along, and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Bicara Therapeutics is the first to pop up. The startup raised a $108 million Series B co-led by Red Tree Venture Capital and RA Capital Management. The company is developing biologics to fight tumors and is already in clinical trials for a head and neck cancer treatment. Founded in 2020, the company has raised $148 million, per Crunchbase.

6. (tied) Humane, $100M, artificial intelligence: New York-based Humane, which plans to launch a product that incorporates artificial intelligence into a consumer device, and partners with OpenAI, raised a $100 million Series C led by Kindred Ventures. Founded in 2017, the company has raised $230 million, according to Crunchbase.

6. (tied) Rapport Therapeutics, $100M, biotech: Boston-based Rapport Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing precision medicines for neurological disorders, launched this week with a $100 million Series A financing from Third Rock Ventures, Arch Venture Partners and Johnson & Johnson Innovation.

8. Macro, $90M, media: The Los Angeles-based media company raised more than $90 million from investors including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. Founded in 2015, the company — which was behind the making of the film “Fences” by August Wilson — has raised $240 million, according to Crunchbase.

9. QurAlis, $88M, biotech: Cambridge, Massachusetts-based QurAlis, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing medicines for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), closed an $88 million Series B led by EQT Life Sciences, Sanofi Ventures and Droia Ventures. Founded in 2016, QurAlis has raised $143.5 million, per the company.

10. Ring Therapeutics, $87M, biotech: Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Ring Therapeutics, a developer of a gene therapy platform, raised an $86.5 million Series C funding. The round involved a handful of investors, including funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates. Founded in 2017, Ring has now raised $230 million in total, per the company.