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
