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I don't know how many of you are here. I'm sorry to the seven of us who are avoiding our families.
Let's talk about two things before we get called back to Talk To Other People. In 2021, let's have fun. By the way, thanks for reading. I appreciate you.
The best story of the week was a funding round. The story behind Airbyte's round was fascinating.
Airbyte is a startup that helps customers move data. That is a big market because there is a lot of data out there. Companies want to move it. It is hard work to do that. There is no need for extract, load and transform at this time, but that is the general market that Airbyte competes in.
The company has a free open source product and a paid service. The paid version of Airbyte has the usual enterprise-friendly tooling that you would expect. And being a host. So, a pretty standard play thus far?
Back to the money. Airbyte raised a seed round in early 2021. The company raised a Series A in May. The company had made more than $30 million this year, which was a lot of money.
The sum was compared to what happened next. Airbyte closed a $150 million Series B this week. The company has revenues of less than $1 million annually.
The company was flexing their revenue multiple. People found it funny.
It was only half of the joke. I heard that the revenue number is a bit more under the $1 million mark than I had thought. Airbyte has an ARR multiple of more than 1,500x.
It is infinite. That is where venture capital was always going. What do I mean by that? Well:
Bigger funds have been investing earlier and earlier in the startup lifecycle to ensure they get allocation in later rounds of hot companies.
More startups have been able to raise huge rounds because of this.
The above two points got exacerbated when there was even more money floating around.
It used to be a rule of thumb that to raise a Series A, $1 million in ARR was the minimum.
There is no limit on how much a company can be valued when compared to its revenue base with Airbyte.
How did Airbyte do it? I have a hunch. An open source company has a lot of non-revenue metrics that it can show investors when it raises money. Information for its open source project. I think Airbyte has a hot level of community usage even if its paid products are not very new.
Is the Airbyte round dumb? Who knows? We can't say for sure, but we can say that there was enough data for investors to feel comfortable putting nine-figures of capital into the company at a ten-figure valuation.
This is positive for open source. I think it is.
And finally, Juna.
I talked to Peter about what Juna is doing. The startup is working with insurance providers to provide low-cost sexual wellness testing for sexually active people. It wants to shift the convention around testing to something that you do proactively, instead of reacting to it.
I wonder if we are all used to getting tested these days. I will get my nose poked by a sample in a few minutes, if that is still how it goes. Modern life has pleasures.
Juna is neat because it is cool and I would have used it when I was younger and not married, but also because of its marketing strategy. A lot of brands use social media to get attention. Juna is making TikTok work for it.
The company's waitlist is growing between 15% and 20% per month, which seems healthy. Juna has time to add more names because it is targeting a February launch. Maybe its use of TikTok will pay off?
The company is putting together some capital but not done with it yet. When he closes the round and opens the waitlist, I will chat with him. Sexing tested people is not sexy. Something like that.
Alex.
