Yesterday it was announced (here, here, and here) that Toronto-based Top Hat has raised $22.5 million (USD) in Series-C funding. The round was led by New York-based Union Square Ventures.
I am always excited to see Toronto-based startups doing well and I am particularly excited by this remark in USV’s blog announcement:
“Also worth noting is that Toronto continues to impress us with its quality and diversity of companies. We now have five investments there, placing Toronto third as a location in the USV portfolio after New York and San Francisco.”
Here is another quote from Fred Wilson’s blog:
“Toronto is a great place for startups. In addition to five investments of ours that are HQ’d there, I know of at least one other USV portfolio company that has much of their engineering team in Toronto. The talent, mindset, and quality of the people in the Toronto/Waterloo tech/startup community is really top notch and we love investing there.”
Go Toronto.
(Of course, Toronto really means Toronto-Waterloo. That’s the geography of the ecosystem.)
Snap Inc. (Snapchat) nailed the launch of Spectacles. I want a pair.
If you haven’t been following, it all started with a pop-up vending machine in Venice Beach. But like Snapchat itself, it was an ephemeral installation that eventually disappeared, moving on to Big Sur, California. At the time of writing this post, the countdown is on to discover where the vending machine will pop up next. It’s a viral marketing play that aligns very well with their brand.
But there’s even bigger news.
Earlier this week it was revealed that Snap Inc. has filed for an initial public offering. It plans to go public by as soon as March 2017 and expects to be valued somewhere around $25 billion. Remember when everyone flipped out because Evan Spiegel had rejected Facebook’s acquisition offer of $3 billion?
Here’s their revenue story from Vanity Fair:
Last year, Snapchat brought in $59 million in revenue—a low number that reflected the embryonic stage of its business. This year, however, Snapchat predicts it will generate revenues between $250 million and $350 million. And in 2017, the company estimates it will reach revenues between $500 million and $1 billion, based on “bullish sales targets.”
I’ve been a Snapchat fan for awhile now, so I am thrilled to see the company going public. As Fred Wilson wrote on his blog this morning: “Snap is a great company led by a creative and ambitious founder and they have a loyal and growing use base. I think Snap can be an excellent public company.”
If you’ve got people’s attention, you can figure out how to monetize it.
A new “transparent offer platform” called Haus has just launched in California to serve the residential real estate market. The way it works is that all offers are submitted online. And once an offer has been confirmed, it – along with all of its terms – gets revealed to every other potential buyer. See image below.
I’ve seen a number of different iterations of this same idea, which tells me that this is a well-identified problem in the real estate market. Here’s a snippet from a recent TechCrunch article announcing Haus:
“We think the openness will create a more efficient market and that the number of offers and price will ultimately be dependent on demand,” said Haus GM Sarah Ham. “Bidding wars are a common, almost accepted, part of the real estate process today. But with our approach, buyers know where they stand. Buyers will know what they need to offer to make their offer competitive, but they also won’t negotiate against themselves.”
I completely agree that this is a problem that needs to be solved. It will create a more efficient marketplace. However, in this market, I suspect that the current information asymmetries largely benefit sellers, to the detriment of buyers. So I wonder if the supply-side of the marketplace will be willing to participate at scale. What’s really in it for them?
Side note: Haus is the latest project from Expa, which is a “startup studio” that works on its own ideas, as well as partners with other founders. I am very interested in this approach to creation because I think you have to try and make a lot of things if you want to do truly innovative things.