- Seeking drone funding: Consumer drone maker DJI (DJI) sought fundraising of $500M to $1B, according to The Information. The company had a valuation of $15B going into the investor talks. The round could be a combo of equity and debt.
- DJI’s last fundraising round from three years ago brought in $75M from Accel Partners at a $10B valuation.
- DJI wants to make a deeper move into the enterprise drone market. The company is also facing increasing competition in the consumer drone market. IDC expects the consumer and enterprise drone markets to add up to about $9B this year and expects annual growth of about 30% for the next five years.
- Competitors: GoPro (NASDAQ:GPRO) recently exited out of its drone business. Direct competitor Yuneec got $60M in funding from Intel in 2015.
- Retail banking startup: Tencent (OTCPK:TCEHY, OTCPK:TCTZF) and Allianz led a $160M Series C round in EU banking startup N26. The round brought total funding up to over $212M.
- N26 wants to build a retail bank from the ground. The company has so far attracted 850,000 customers and plans to process $16B in transaction volume this year.
- N26 has the ambitious goal of reaching 5M customers by 2020. This year, N26 plans to roll out to the U.S. and the UK. But certain products (savings, invest, overdraft, and insurance) will remain locked to Germany and Austria for the near future.
- Competitors: Banks. But direct rivals in the UK include Monzo (£109M in total fundraising, Stripe and Orange Digital Ventures among backers) and Revolut ($84.4M in funding, Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital as backers).
- Trucking ELDs: GV (GOOG, GOOGL) (formerly Google Ventures) participated in a $50M Series C round for KeepTruckin, which creates tech that monitors driver’s time at the wheel. IVP led the round with participation from Scale Venture Partners and Index Ventures.
- KeepTruckin makes apps, software, and electronic logging devices that track a driver’s compliance with federal driving time limits. A U.S. mandate in December started requiring the use of electronic logging device in most big rigs to prevent driver fatigue and related accidents. KeepTruckin expects 400,000 trucks to be using its tech by year’s end.
- KeepTruckin claimed a $500M valuation after the round. The company hopes to hit $100M in annual recurring revenue in 2018, up from the $40M in 2017 and the under $500,000 in 2016.
- Competitors: Uber (UBER) has its own trucking services that come with tracking tech. Startup competitors include Convoy ($80.5M in funding, Jeff Bezos backing) and Transfix ($78.5M in funding).
- Student loan fintech: Fifth Third (NASDAQ:FITB) Capital Holdings led a $50M round in fintech startup CommonBond. First Republic Bank (NYSE:FRC) and Columbia Seligman Investments were among the other participants in the round, which brought total funding up over $130M.
- CommonBond helps students pay for higher education with a suite of products including new loans, refinancing, and employee student benefits. CommonBond has funded more than $1.5B in loans and experienced a 250% revenue growth on the year in 2017.
- AI chip: SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBF, OTCPK:SFTBY) Ventures led a $40M round for AI inference startup Mythic. ARM exec Rene Haas will join Mythic’s board as part of the investment. The round took Mythic’s funding up over $55.2M and also included a strategic investment from Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT).
- Mythic says its platform “frees local AI from the cloud and conventional on-device technologies that limit sophistication.” The company makes AI chips that are low power and small but capable of the performance of a GPU.
- Competitors: Large cap chipmakers like Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) and private AI chip startup Graphcore ($110M in total funding, Dell and Samsung among backers).
- Previously: Venture capital deals of the week (March 17)