We may be headed for the biggest fall season in venture funding history. Then again, given the excitement on the stock market this morning, maybe not.
A tweetstorm from Mattermark CEO Danielle Morrill offering advice for startups pitching in the fall funding season took over Twitter yesterday, and continued into Monday, with various heavyweights from the VC community weighing in as it went on. Along the way, she paused to answer this question (below) from startup mentor and founder Daniel B. Nelson in the affirmative:
@daniellemorrill Biggest fundraising fall in history coming up?
— Daniel Nelson (@daniel_b_nelson) August 23, 2015
But then Monday morning the markets took their cue from China and tech stocks and bank stocks alike dropped as much as 10%. The Dow fell more than 1,000 points, said by the Wall Street Journal to be the largest intraday decline ever, though it has since recovered significantly.
So what does it all mean for fintech founders looking to raise some money this fall? Dan Primack of Fortune noted in his daily email:
I am getting the sense from talking to folks in the private markets that a lot of stuff is being put on hold until we get more clarity. Big funding rounds, leveraged buyouts and IPOs. It helps that there is a relative paucity of such stuff anyway in the dog days of August, which means Labor Day should be the major marker. If things have settled down, then all systems reignite. If not, we could see a rash of stranded unicorns (seeya VC tourists!), broken buyout deals (hello Delaware Chancery Court!) and an IPO market in which only the most fundamentally sound or insignificant dare play (Uber, but for night sweats).
There have been a lot of unicorns — a noxious term referring to startups valued at $1 billion+ — lately. Signs point to a drastic drop in that population. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen commented recently that startup founders had faced an easy time raising capital for the last decade but that would change — and further, in a rare moment of agreement with rival Bill Gurley, he said that many startups with high burn rates would “vaporize” when the market turns.
Matt Harris, managing director of Bain Capital, agreed that the “tourists” would leave the market, in an emailed comment to Bank Innovation this morning:
I’d be surprised by a huge fall in the dollar volume of funding. Generally the “tourists” leave, ie, mutual funds, most hedge funds, most corporates, but VC and growth equity firms have committed capital and don’t really have the option of timing the market. There should be some easing of the upward pressure on valuations, and companies that built models assuming endless, large losses may have a rude surprise coming relative to their ability to raise capital at big prices.
Harris later added that “mega-rounds’ of funding were more likely to be affected by the recent turmoil, and those rounds are where tourists tend to play. So funding should continue, but valuations will take a hit — those unicorns again. Saying funding will continue is truly saying something when the fintech funding chart, as tweeted by Harris last week, looks like this:
A $10-billion funding year was predicted for 2016 by many, based on charts like the above. And certainly fintech funding has had a moment in the sun this summer. No less a firm than Andreessen Horowitz hired a new general partner responsible for fintech last week.
That’s a strong vote of confidence, and the morning’s panic is over. As of 12 noon, the Dow Jones was down just 1.6% on the day. No one thinks interest rates are going to go up anytime soon.
But if the market does have a correction, a lower consumption rate and appetite for investment are reasonable conclusions to draw. That will likely mean fewer unicorns. It’s not clear yet whether it will mean fewer fintech startups altogether.