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The year of the VC mega-round? Florida’s Magic Leap and KnowBe4 doing their part

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
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By Nancy Dahlberg
Venture capital-backed companies nationwide raised a record number of mega-rounds, with 64 $100 million-plus deals this past quarter across the nation. Here in Florida, we had two of them.
Nationally, funding increased 10% in the second quarter. In all, $29B was raised across 1,409 transactions, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and CB Insights released Tuesday. The 64 mega-rounds raised this quarter account for nearly half (47%) of all funding raised. 
Statewide, $743 million flowed into Florida companies across 22 deals in the second quarter, according to MoneyTree. But most of that is due to two companies’ raises: Plantation-based Magic Leap, the spatial computing company, drew a $280 million corporate round by Japan’s NTT DoCoMo and Clearwater cybersecurity-training company KnowBe4 raised a $300 million Series D round led by private equity fund KKR.
In addition to KnowBe4 and Magic Leap, top raises in the state included South Florida’s TissueTech ($82.25 million) and Carecloud ($33 million), as well as Naples-based Catalyst Orthoscience at $12.5 million. Rounding out the top 10 were: Aspen Health, Sunwave (of Delray Beach), TrashBulter, Intrinio and FlexEngage, all raising between $4.5 million and $6 million. Software, internet and healthcare companies dominated.
Reality check: Even with those mega-rounds, Florida pulled in just 1.35% of the national venture capital pie. More than three-quarters of the venture capital flowed to just three states: California, New York and Massachusetts.
Other national highlights of the Q2 MoneyTree report:

  •  2019 records the largest first half this century as US funding shows no signs of slowing.
  • This quarter saw one $1B+ deal as Cruise Automation raised $1.2B. 
  •  Juul replaces Uber as the most highly-valued VC-backed company with a $50B valuation and having raised $13.6B in funding.
  • Q2 saw 19 new U.S. unicorns and the unicorn population remains at an all-time high despite recent exits. 
  • U.S. IPO exits reach an 8-quarter record with 33 IPOs. This quarter also saw 163 M&A exits and the time-to-liquidation reaches highest level since Q3’17 with 7.5 years to exit.

“This quarter, the IPOs of Uber, Slack, Pinterest and Zoom helped US IPOs reach an eight-quarter high. In total, 33 companies went public, more than double the number of IPOs in the first quarter of this year,” said Anand Sanwal, CEO and co-founder of CB Insights. “The enthusiasm wasn’t limited to the public markets as the stampede of private unicorns in the US continued with an all-time high of 167 unicorns. The funding landscape for mid- and later-stage companies remains healthy as mega-rounds ($100+ million) have become commonplace and show no signs of slowing.”
The MoneyTree Report can be downloaded  here.
Follow @ndahlberg on Twitter and email her at [email protected]
READ MORE ON REFRESH
South Florida companies keep raising big rounds: Neocis announces $30 million raise this week
Pitchbook also put out its quarterly report. Read about it here.

Nancy Dahlberg
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