November 26 – 5 Key Stories From The Digital World
- Startups innovating around fertility and reproductive health are raising a lot of venture rounds lately, and generating some big exits
- If we fast-forward a few years, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which some sort of consumer-branded service serves as a go-to point for an ever-increasing array of ailments
- Much of that rise in spending is going to pet health…we’ll spend just over $18 billion in vet bills and $16 billion for medicine and supplies this year
- Musk noted these pre-orders were achieved “with no advertising & no paid endorsement”
- fans have backed the Cybertruck to the tune of about $20 million in the first weekend of pre-sales
- body was made from the same “ultra hard, cold-rolled stainless steel alloy” SpaceX is using for the forthcoming Starship rocket
- first nine months of the year, add-ons to existing portfolio companies accounted for 68% of all private equity investments in the US—the highest annual rate on record
- deal multiples spiking across the broader buyout market, this inorganic growth is one of the few ways left for investors to find the potential for value creation
- probably just a coincidence that three of the six names on this list—Audax, HarbourVest and Abry—are all headquartered in Boston
- demand and uptake of existing on-demand/subscription/streaming platforms within games, such as Steam (30 million+ active daily players)
- games industry as a whole can learn much from what Netflix, Amazon Prime and rivals are doing well
- means switching from a model of selling A Product and instead building brands, engaging with audiences – and keeping them
- “farming as a service”…hydroponic plant-growth cabinets that shrink the acreage needed to grow fresh greens to fit in a grocery-store aisle
- Infarm’s cloud-connected sensors keep track of more than 200,000 plants that cycle through the system every month
- hoping to shorten the distance between where food is produced and where it’s consumed
