True Fact: Funding rounds are not actually "revenue"
After raising $70 million from backers like Peter Thiel and Bruno Mars at a valuation in excess of $1 Billion, e-cigarette manufacturer NJOY has filed for bankruptcy. It has an accumulated deficit of $234.4 million, according to the filing. NJOY also solicited buyers, hiring Barclays in January, but it had no takers.
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In a cost cutting initiative, Walgreens will shut down drugstore.com and beauty.com by the end of September, proving once again that when placing your faith in “category killing” domains, the only thing you may kill is your own business. Walgreens acquired their fleet of ecommerce sites in 2011 for $429 million. They will incur a charge of $115 million pre-tax as part of the shutdown. Drugstore.com launched in 1999 (of course!) and IPO-ed at $65/share…
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This one is a heartbreaker, nobody likes to see malevolent actors succeeding in killing an entire company but that’s what’s happened with the ether crypto-currency trading platform DOA. Thieves have reportedly stolen $50 million in an “ongoing cyber-heist” from the platform, forcing it to shut down.
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Oregon data center Peak Hosting has retreated from a “massive growth trajectory” and has laid off three quarters of its workforce (peaked at 200 f/t employees, now down to 50) and filed for bankruptcy after losing it’s biggest customer: mobile gaming company Machine Zone. The lost client was worth a reported $4 million/month in lost revenues.
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The major distribution channel for Theranos, Walgreens has ended the speculation that they may drop the disgraced biomed start-up by… dropping them. Not much left for this former unicorn. Forbes recently marked-to-market founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes net worth from $4.5 billion …to zero.
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Pop-up dining start-up (I know I’m a square but, wtf is “pop up dining?”) Dinner Lab has burned through $10.2 million and filed for bankruptcy. Along the way they acquired competitor “Dishcrawl”, who I guess goes down with them now. Assets will be liquidated and creditors paid out. Members will probably be stiffed for their membership fees.
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The tag line for this site is “True Fact: Funding rounds are not revenue”, except in India, where a new tax code law has deemed that funding rounds that take place “at above fair value” are indeed income. The new rule applies to startups that have undergone a down round. If the preceding round was not from a VC firm registered with the Indian securities regulator (in other words it was from an angel…
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In a $40 million dollar funding round at a lower share price (a.k.a “a down round”) Glassdoor CEO went on record to say “We view this as a slight up round” (I guess you can add diluting shares to inflate market cap to the alchemical bag of tricks in this wonderful New Economy). Still, with shares down 6.3% in this round, they are still clobbering their publicly traded Unicorn peers such as LinkedIn and Yelp….
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They were working on a spinal chord treatment but their clinical trials have failed. Bay area biotech “StemCells” (I was surprised they didn’t “invest” in the .com version of their name) which was publicly traded will wind down operations. They are hoping to see what can be salvaged for investors and skirt a 100% loss. At their peak: $74 million market cap. Now, not so much. ($6 million) They also raised 32 million in two…
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Publicly traded memory maker Violin Memory (VMEM) has posted another quarterly loss in excess of $20M (this is the third or fourth in a row), begging TheRegister to wonder aloud “can they avoid a trainwreck?” Keep in mind, the market cap of the entire company is $36M, which means they are successively putting up quarterly losses worth roughly 2/3 the company’s market cap. This, after 7 funding rounds totalling $187M, their Series D valued them at…
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