The last time we spoke to Explo, the early stage startup was announcing its $2.3 million seed round. That was back in November, 2020, a very different time, and a lot has happened since then for the Y Combinator Winter 20 alum.

In spite of launching a company at the height of the pandemic, Explo finished building the product and found its first customers. That product is a tool for building customized business intelligence dashboards with a look and feel of your own company, which you can embed in your website or email to customers.

As Explo co-founder and CEO Gary Lin told us at the time of the seed funding:

“In terms of the UI and the output, we had to build out the ability for our end users to create dashboards, for them to embed the dashboards and for them to customize the styles on these dashboards, so that it looks and feels as though it was part of their own product,” Lin told TechCrunch in November 2020.

Lin says one of the things they’ve learned along the way is that Explo is a sticky product and that helped secure the latest $12 million Series A when the company went looking for funding at the beginning of this year. “Since we last chatted, we were heads down building the product, selling the product and around January of this year, we realized that we were actually getting some quite good traction and we thought it might be time to raise a Series A,” he said.

Lin says the venture market was starting to cool when they went looking for funding, but they got a good offer and feel very fortunate about that. “We didn’t actually see the same kind of impacts that founders today see. But it definitely wasn’t as hot of an environment as it was in December of the previous year. So I would say that we got very lucky in terms of timing, and we feel very fortunate about that,” he said. They secured the round in March of this year.

Today, the company is also announcing the official launch of their self-service product with a two-week trial period. The startup currently has 45 paying customers on the books with many others in the process of trying the product, he said. “For the free trials, what happens is that the companies will connect their databases or data warehouses to have the information that they want to be able to analyze. And so Explo will connect directly to these databases, whether it’s Postgres or data warehouses like Snowflake, and then give all of our customers a myriad of ways to kind of share data.”

Image Credits: Explo

And in terms of the impact of the current economic situation, so far at least Explo hasn’t seen a slowdown. “The type of product and type of role that Explo fulfills for customers, is what we’re defining as a necessity, but not a core competency. And so as people are actually trying to make sure that their workforce…is focusing on what’s core to their business, they’re actually even more willing to outsource dashboarding and analytics to a tool like Explo. And so we’ve actually seen sales, not really go down but stay strong as we’ve seen before,” he said.

With 15 employees today, Lin says the plan is to double in the next year, but he will let performance be the guide for that, rather than some hard goal. He says the company is working with a recruiter to keep building a diverse team, and he says the key is finding candidates early in the process.

“We’re really proud of the team that we’ve built. And the team has remained extremely diverse, which we’re excited about. One of the biggest things that we’ve learned over time is that what actually helps the most when it comes to hiring for diverse candidates is the top of the funnel,” he said. That means using a variety of external sources from the beginning of the process to surface a slate of diverse candidates for each open rec.

Today’s $12 million Series A was led by Craft Ventures with participation from Felicis Ventures, Amplo VC and various industry angels.

No one expects every startup worth $1 billion to be ready to go public, but the collection of billion-dollar startups that are ready to list is larger than you might think. So much so that when the IPO window finally does reopen, we could be faced with a veritable torrent of public technology companies.

A programming note: I am off this week. The excellent Anna Heim, who often helps write The Exchange and recently took over its weekend newsletter, will be filling in. She’s the best! I’m back on the 22nd!

As the saying goes, don’t threaten me with a good time. But TechCrunch’s general hunger for new S-1 filings and the data that they include is not what we need to talk about today. Nope, we need to discuss pace.

When the levee breaks

Living as we are in an IPO drought, new data points about the financial health of unicorns are annoyingly scarce. Unicorns — private tech companies worth $1 billion or more — have become an asset class of their own. Crunchbase counts 1,386 global unicorns, pegging their value at $4.8 trillion. CB Insights counts 1,180 worth $3.8 billion. Regardless of which number you think is more accurate, it’s clear that unexited unicorns represent one of the largest pools of paper wealth in the world.

A programming note: I am off next week. The excellent Anna Heim, who often helps write The Exchange and recently took over its weekend newsletter, will be filling in next week. She’s the best! I’m back on the 22nd!

That said, there’s a good chance that a portion of that illiquid value isn’t real, in that if every unicorn had to raise capital today, a good number would not be able to defend their most recent private valuation. However, if we ranked the unicorn cohort by quality, the best companies — often also the most valuable — are actually not as overvalued as you might think.

Coinbase earnings reports carry weight because the U.S. cryptocurrency exchange commands material market share in a budding portion of the digital economy. Additionally, it’s an active startup investor and a key data point in determining the current health of the crypto market. Naturally, TechCrunch was all over its recently released financial data, pulling out a few key takeaways from the mix.

However, in the wake of Coinbase’s Q2 2022 earnings cycle, its regulatory disclosures contained in recent filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have garnered attention, so this morning we’re digging in a bit more.

Regulatory risk is always something to consider when we discuss financial technology companies. Any business dealing with money in motion has to abide by a large and complicated set of rules that have been written over time in an effort to help a nation’s financial markets operate smoothly, with minimal fraud and a lack of erratic volatility.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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However, because the technology market can advance faster than government regulations, companies operating at the forefront of changes to financial technology can wind up in a regulatory gray area. This creates a gap between what the government has sorted out and what the market is actually up to. That’s where we can spot regulatory risk, and that zone of uncertainty contains billions and billions of dollars of economic activity.

After enduring a multiquarter selloff that started in late 2021, the value of software companies on the public market is recovering. The modest rebound posted thus far appears to have formed after a bottom in valuation terms was reached in mid-June, toward the end of the second quarter.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

This column asked in April if the SaaS selloff was over. It quickly became clear we pondered prematurely. But the good news for software startup founders is that the period when the deck was being increasingly stacked against them may now be behind us.

Let’s take a peek at the numbers, and then what might have changed in the market to halt the decline in software — SaaS, more or less — valuations.

Started from the bottom

Earnings season is slowing, with the largest U.S. tech companies already having reported second-quarter results. But oftentimes the most interesting results come not from your Amazons or Apples, but from smaller concerns — and even those that are not traditional tech companies. SoftBank, for example.

Today, the Japanese conglomerate and startup investing powerhouse reported earnings that were more than a little bleak. SoftBank’s quarterly losses, worth around 3.2 trillion yen ($24.5 billion), were its largest in history, leading to the company posting the following image atop its investor presentation:

Image Credits: SoftBank investor presentation

They do say an image is worth a thousand words. So what went wrong? How did SoftBank lose so much money? The Vision Fund, its two-part effort to put more than $100 billion to work in private companies. Let’s see what caused the damage.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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But before we do, it’s worth noting that the Vision Fund has already undergone a period of transition. In the wake of the WeWork IPO fiasco, it got a bit tougher on companies, with profit becoming the watchword of its world. But that didn’t mean that SoftBank stopped putting capital to work — nor was it immune from changing market conditions. Let’s take a look.

Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest and most interesting technology, startup and markets news. This morning was a fun mix of stuff that we don’t always get to, so strap in for the following:

• Stocks and cryptos are mostly higher today, meaning that most listeners of the show are now richer than they were Friday. Congratulations!
• Coinbase earnings on the horizon, but we got word today from Palantir and SoftBank. Palantir’s stock is off due to a guidance miss, while SoftBank reported massive losses from its Vision Fund efforts.
• Also, it turns out that SoftBank is of the perspective that startup founders are not yet willing to accept valuation cuts to bring the value of their startups in line with market conditions. That’s not good.
• And there was a hugevis PE deal today, Avalara being taken over by Vista Equity Partners in a $8.4 billion deal.
• What else? Self-driving cars from Baidu are now taking passengers in China, Lyft is building a media business, and India is cutting back on buying Chinese smartphones.

We are back Wednesday! Chat soon!

Most startups don’t have a clean run from their pre-seed round through an IPO when it comes to fundraising. Quickly growing tech companies sometimes pause at certain stages, raising a little extra cash against their prior round’s terms, for example.

This becomes especially true when the economy changes for the worse and startups are incentivized to raise an extension round, or bridge round. Why are those rounds potentially more popular in lesser macroeconomic periods? Because if startups can purchase a bit more time to grow before raising their next priced round, they may be able to better defend their most recent valuation, or perhaps even surpass it when they formally raise.

Data from Carta, a software service that supports companies’ cap tables and the like, indicate that bridge rounds — “a type of interim financing that companies may choose while they wait for a larger fundraise,” in its own language — are rising in popularity, as TechCrunch expected given our reporting on the matter. However, where the funding varietal is gaining the most popularity was slightly surprising. The companies with the least capital raised are not those seeing the largest gain in bridge round activity, it turns out.

Databricks, an enterprise software company focused on data and analytics, announced this morning that it has surpassed a $1 billion annual revenue run rate. The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the financial result.

The milestone comes after the company raised a mammoth $1.6 billion round last August at a $38 billion valuation. At the time, Databricks announced that it had cleared the $600 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) mark.

By the end of 2021, Databricks said that it crossed $800 million in ARR. As a result of the company’s well-known recent private-market valuation and its regular disclosures of revenue numbers, we’ve been able to track its growth and resulting revenue multiples as the company grows and the market changes.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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The timing of the new number is somewhat vague. TechCrunch confirmed with Databricks spokesperson Keyana Corliss that it surpassed the 10-figure revenue run rate milestone in recent months, but was not able to nail down a more precise timeline.

News that private equity group Thoma Bravo is buying Ping Identity for $2.8 billion in cash broke earlier today, marking the beginning of the end of Ping’s life as a public company (at least for now).

Thoma Bravo will pay $28.50 per share in an all-cash transaction, a price that TechCrunch noted is a roughly 63% premium over the company’s pre-announcement share price. News of the sale emerged after Ping reported earnings that missed both profit and revenue estimates in the second quarter.

Given that M&A activity has been muted compared to 2021’s torrid pace, the deal is attracting attention. To better understand the transaction, we’re going to dive into Ping’s numbers to see what its sale price can tell us about the value of software companies today, and then riff on the identity market itself, part of the technology space with several public players and a recent history of falling values.

What $2.8B buys you today

Given that Ping announced its earnings at the same time as its sale to Thoma Bravo, we can directly compare its recent results with its newly disclosed sale price.

Perhaps the most interesting story to emerge from the venture capital slowdown and stock market correction that began in late 2021 is the rejiggering of unicorn valuations.

Instacart and Stripe picked up new, lower 409a valuations. Klarna got repriced via an equity round, and other richly funded startups that raised last year are staring down the prospects of either flat or down rounds as 2022 continues.

And then there’s Discord, which raised $500 million last year at a massive $14.7 billion valuation, per PitchBook data. The chat-focused software company, which previously turned down an exit to Microsoft for around $10 billion, then saw its valuation fall, according to Fidelity calculations. (The U.S. investing house, which mostly focuses on publicly traded equities, owns some Discord stock in its Contrafund, giving us regular looks at how Fidelity values it.)

As Insider first reported, Fidelity recently cut its valuation for its Discord shares. Is that reduction fair? Today we’re digging into Discord’s price change per Fidelity numbers and what we know about its growth trajectory, and then we’ll close with a comparison of the public markets to the company’s changing worth.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

If Fidelity’s cut is fair, Discord will still retain decacorn status, membership in the somewhat rarified club of private companies worth $10 billion or more. But we may find that Discord is cheap at Fidelity’s new mark, or that it is expensive yet, which would bode ill for not just the well-known communications service favored by gamers, but for a host of other unicorns as well.

With July now behind us, we have a full month of trading data from the NFT market to digest. The numbers are mixed. While there are some positive signals from the non-fungible token market that matter, others are decidedly negative. Trading continues, but at what appears to be a far slower pace.

For companies in the NFT space, the news is likely unwelcome. The larger blockchain world is in a period of correction, but to see key NFT market metrics fall as quickly as we have makes us wonder what could reignite demand. It seemed doubtful that the period of hype that gave us endless Bored Ape derivatives would last forever. But what’s next?

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Let’s peek at the July data and then dive into what could return NFTs to prominence. After all, NFT trading has risen a few times during the first decade-plus of the blockchain era — such as it is — so surely it can rise again?

To start, we’ll check in on the market-leading OpenSea, and then we’ll add in other NFT marketplaces to get a good vibe for the non-fungible token market. After that, we’ll theorize some ideas that could make NFTs less uncool again. To work!

A lackluster July

The overall direction of NFT trading volume has been negative for some time, as the following chart from The Block and CryptoSlam makes clear: