Last night, private equity firm Thoma Bravo said it agreed to acquire Anaplan for $10.7 billion. The financial planning software company’s stock has declined sharply in the last six months, which likely gave the PE firm a chance to pounce.

The stock market hasn’t been kind to SaaS companies in recent months, which makes us wonder if we’re seeing the beginning of a trend of private equity taking aim at vulnerable SaaS firms.

To answer that, let’s quickly unpack the Anaplan transaction and better understand if Thoma Bravo is paying a premium for this company. From there, we’ll be able to get an idea of how much private equity types are willing to shell out for modern tech companies.

Afterwards, we’ll apply what we’ve gleaned to a host of public SaaS companies that could find themselves answering inbound calls from other private equity concerns. Don’t forget that private equity is richer than it has ever been in terms of available dry powder, and that money could be looking for a target.

Inside the Anaplan-Thoma Bravo deal

Anaplan said fourth-quarter revenues rose about 33% to $162.7 million — of which $148 million came from subscription sources — from a year earlier. On a full-year basis, revenue rose just under 32%, meaning that its Q4 growth rate was similar to its full-year outcome.

If we convert the company’s Q4 revenue into run-rate revenues, we can apply that figure (about $651 million) against its $10.7 billion purchase price to get a revenue multiple of around 16.4x for the transaction.

Recall that we’ve seen declines in software company valuations to the point where SaaS companies growing at more than 30% today have had their revenue multiples cut to the 12x mark when we compare forward revenue projections against their present-day value. Compared to that number, the Anaplan deal price seems to be full-fat.

Indeed, with Thoma Bravo paying a roughly 46% premium ($66 per share) for the software company’s shares when compared to pre-deal prices, the PE firm is coughing up close to a Q4 2021 price for Anaplan. To be precise, Anaplan shares peaked at just over $66 a share over the past six months, right in line with the Thoma Bravo offer.

This provides a neat little framework for us to work with: Software companies that are trading at depressed prices today could perhaps sell to private entities for their Q4 2021 valuation high-water mark.

If that’s the case, we’re quite curious about who else could be in line to surrender their status as an independent company. And we have more than a few names in mind.

Back in 2020, Ashwin Ramasamy, a founder at PipeCandy, asked on TechCrunch if the “e-commerce shift” the world was seeing as COVID-19 shook up the global economy would last. The answer was yes. But that doesn’t mean that the same pace of online commerce growth that the world saw during the pandemic will be maintained.

Indeed, as 2021 came to a close, data began to indicate that the e-commerce boom was slowing. The question at that juncture was whether we were seeing a reversion to growth norms from the pre-COVID era or if growth would slow even more; in the latter case, it would imply that future e-commerce activity was pulled forward, instead of the larger digital commerce pie growing thanks to long-term changes to the economy.

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New data from Pinduoduo, a huge Chinese e-commerce company, and trailing results from Alibaba and others from the fourth quarter of last year hint that the pull-forward model of recent e-commerce growth is the most likely.

For startups, it’s somewhat mixed news. Certainly, any startup selling into the e-commerce market has more TAM than ever to, well, address.

But slowing growth means that it will be harder to grow at prior levels, as outperforming the market segment enough to wow venture capitalists will become more difficult. (But certainly not impossible, as today’s nine-figure CommerceIQ round makes clear.)

Let’s parse some of the most recent data to get a handle on where we are today.

Pinduoduo’s slowing growth

In the fourth quarter of 2021, the Chinese e-commerce giant grew just 3% from its year-ago results, posted during the pandemic-accelerated Q4 2020 period. More simply: Pinduoduo barely managed to not shrink compared to its late-2020 results.

In numerical terms, Pinduoduo reported $4.3 billion in revenue. That figure in its local currency was RMB27.2 billion, under market expectations of RMB30.1 billion. Investors had expected a lot more growth than what Pinduoduo was able to deliver, but profits of more than $1 billion helped assuage the market.

Pinduoduo is not that much an outlier.

A UK-based incubator focused on non-profit startups that are addressing climate-related challenges through open-source data initiatives has announced the six startups which will be put through its 2022 program.

Selected projects and platforms for the data-for-climate focused accelerator program include a startup trying to prevent rainforest deforestation in Africa; one that’s hoping to help websites and cloud services speed up their switch to renewable energy; another supporting more accountable carbon accounting and novel pricing models in the energy sector; a couple of progressive think tanks aiming to arm policymakers to push back against fossil fuel industry disinformation; and a climate-focused online training initiative that aims to enable activism through education.

The Subak incubator launched last summer — with a goal of making a tangible difference to not-for-profit climate action by linking eco-minded entrepreneurs and projects with an ecosystem of tech innovators who know how to scale projects and create global impact.

The incubator was founded by Baroness Bryony Worthington, who was the lead author of the UK’s 2008 Climate Change Act — and is funded by the Quadrature Climate Foundation, a climate-focused corporate social responsibility initiative launched by algorithmic trading tech firm, Quadrature Capital, in 2019.

Founders and mentors/advisors (aka “fellows”) associated with the program include former policymakers, engineers and VCs, including former engineers at Google DeepMind, Songkick tech builders, an ex VP of Policy for Facebook, a former UK government minister and a former MD of Microsoft for Startups UK and CEO of Code First: Girls, among others.

Subak’s thesis is that open data is a key tool for tackling the climate crisis.

Its one-year+ accelerator program is specifically focused on startups that are trying to come up with innovative ways to use and share data to tackle climate change, rather than being more broadly open to climate startups of all stripes (i.e. such as those seeking to develop greener products or cleaner industrial processes etc).

The idea being that with time running out for humanity to avoid catastrophic temperature rise, data-drive change has the agility to be able to make a difference quickly. (Hence: “We are looking for organisations with data underpinning their theory of change, and which build open data assets as a core output of their work,” as Subak puts it on its website.)

The six startups making the cut for Subak’s 2022 program will each receive up to £110k (~$145k) of unrestricted grant funding, along with mentorship and support to scale their impact.

Here’s a quick round-up of the six startups that have made the cut for this year’s program:

• Project Canopy: A not-for-profit that’s aiming to become “the data broker for the Congo Basin Rainforest” — a forested area that spans 2.5 million sq km over six countries and is the world’s largest tropical carbon sink — by applying machine learning to parse satellite imagery in order to be able identify illegal logging activity in real time. The startup’s goal is to be able to provide rich, real-time analytics to local policymakers, conservation groups, NGOs etc so they’re armed with actionable intelligence to combat deforestation and biodiversity loss
• AimHi Earth: An “education-to-action” organization that’s building accessible climate training with the goal of empowering “everyone to understand the whole picture of climate change, how to communicate about it and how to make a positive difference — both individually and collectively”
• The Green Web Foundation: A non-profit organization that’s developing tools and an open database to measure the carbon emissions of websites and cloud services to try to help speed up the transition to a fossil fuel-free Internet by 2030
• EnergyTag: Another energy-focused startup with a mission of accelerating the shift to renewable energy. It wants to help to drive investment in technology needed to decarbonise energy grids through 24/7 energy tracking. So it’s creating an internationally recognised standard for hourly certificates that allow energy users to verify the source of their electricity each hour of the day — which it says will enable accurate carbon accounting and support new market models, like nodel pricing
• Autonomy: An independent think tank developing tools and research to tackle climate change, the future of work and economic planning — with the goal of generating data and policy solutions to underpin the shift to sustainable jobs and just, green transitions
• Instrat: Another progressive think tank — this one based in Poland and focused on the local energy sector using open energy data to drive policy debate and a just transition to net zero. Poland remains massively reliant on coal-fired power stations for energy generation but this startup says it’s developing a one-stop-shop for the local energy sector data “to prove that a coal-based economy is unprofitable in the short-term and absolutely unsustainable in the long-term”

Commenting on being accepted into the program in a statement, Jules Caron, co-founder of Project Canopy, said: “A few months ago, Project Canopy was just a couple of guys with a pdf. Joining Subak is really our watershed moment. Subak’s funding and support will allow us to put data at the heart of decision-making for the Congo Basin rainforest — the key to global climate change mitigation. We’ve seen the work Subak’s first cohort has already achieved. The emphasis on collaboration and sharing tools is crucial to our progress in the climate fight, and it’s why we are so excited to join Subak.”

An initial five startups were announced by Subak as founding organizations at its launch last year: Namely New Automotive, Transition Zero, Ember, and Open Climate Fix –– and Subak says the five remain involved with the program, sharing data and learnings with the network to support incoming cohorts.

The Subak program is divided into three phases: An initial three months badged as “Accelerate” (when up to £20k is distributed in two chunks); then nine months of “Growth” (up to £60k is unlocked through this phase, depending on milestones); after which there’s an “optional bespoke” element referred to as “Cooperate” — aka an ongoing alumni and collaboration programme — where there’s an additional £40k in potential support up for grabs for each selected startup.

More details about Subak’s program are available via its FAQ.

While the data-for-climate accelerator started in the UK, Subak is building out a global network of incubators to underpin its program — and has already launched its first international hub in Australia.

Policymakers in the European Union, meanwhile, are also focused on opening up data access as part of the bloc’s ‘green deal’ strategy to shrink carbon emissions to zero by 2050 — announcing a swathe of digital regulations in recent years which are intended to unlock the change-making power of data and drive efficiency upgrades by, for example, encouraging and enabling reuse of industrial data and real-time sensor data, and supporting cross-industry and public-private sector collaborations.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week.

• Markets! The stock market is a bit up and down around the world, but nothing to cause too much concern. Crypto is neutral as well, but with some gains made in the last week.
• Big news! Anaplan is selling to PE for more than $10 billion. Notably the deal is not cheap, which means that we’re seeing private equity get its checkbook out as software company prices come down and become, well, targets.
• Unicorns! FTX is heading to Australia, more indication that some crypto trading platforms are going to every market that they can. What will happen to smaller crypto platforms? And when does that consolidation land?
• Startups! Powered by People raises $5 million, CommerceIQ raises $115 million, and Sequoia debuts Arc, which is a non-accelerator accelerator.

Our live show is this week! Which means you can come hang out while we record our Friday episode on Thursday. Snag a free ticket here, or tune in on Twitter spaces!

It’s a bit unusual for meaningful tech news to break on a Sunday night, but that’s what happened last night when private equity firm Thoma Bravo announced it was acquiring Anaplan, the SaaS financial planning tool, for a cool $10.7 billion. The company closed on Friday with a market cap of $7.4 billion.

Anaplan’s stock price has been on a rough run over the last six months with the price down over 22%. Over the last year it’s down a more modest 7%, but the private equity firm saw a chance and took it, offering Anaplan what is close to its peak price over the last six months to close the deal.

In its most recent earnings report earlier this month the company reported revenue up over 30% to $163 million, but losses widening to $53.8 million compared to $41.5 million in the same quarter last year. Anaplan predicted modestly increasing revenue for next quarter, and the stock has actually been trending up since the report.

That 30% growth rate is right in the sweet spot of private equity firms, giving them something to work with. Thoma Bravo’s managing partner ​​Holden Spaht likes having the financial planning service in the fold and he thinks his firm can help it grow more.

“We have followed Anaplan for years and have seen the incredible value they bring customers through their best-in-class planning platform. We look forward to leveraging Thoma Bravo’s extensive operational and investment expertise in enterprise software to support Anaplan in its future growth,” Spaht said in a statement.

That’s a lot of executive speak to say they like the company, tracked it over the years and pounced when they saw the opportunity.

Anaplan was a hot company for a time in the 2016-2018 timeframe, offering a more modern way for companies to conduct financial planning and reporting without resorting to Excel spreadsheets to make it happen.

It launched in 2006, raising almost $300 million along the way. Its final raise was $60 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, which feels kind of tame today, but in 2017 it was an eye-popping valuation. The company went public to much fanfare in 2018 closing on the first day up 42%.

The deal is expected to close some time in the first half of this year, but is subject to regulatory oversight and approval by stockholders. The Anaplan board has already approved the transaction.

Anaplan stock is up over 7.5% in pre-trading.

Meet Lune, a new startup that wants to expose CO2 emissions calculations so that customers are better informed when they purchase something online. When companies start using Lune’s API, they can also let their customers pay a fee to finance a carbon neutralization project.

Before founding Lune with Roberto Bruggemann, Stadigh previoulsy worked for VC fund Crane. And Lune has raised a $4 million seed round led by Stadigh’s previous employer Crane. 15 business angels also participated in the round, such as N26 co-founder Maximilian Tayenthal, Voi co-founder Fredrik Hjelm and OysterHR and Nexmo co-founder Tony Jamous.

“The way things work today is that companies create a sustainability report that is hidden away on the website and very few people read it,” co-founder Erik Stadigh told me.

The startup first helps you measure the carbon impact. As always, those are just estimations. “We offer automated carbon emission calculations and follow best practice guidelines,” Stadigh said.

And once you integrate the API in your product, customers can choose to pay a bit more to contribute to compensation projects. “We partner with carbon offset developers across the world,” Stadigh said.

Lune also works directly with payment companies, such as TrueLayer. When it’s time to check out, customers can choose a “green payment method” that will contribute to carbon offset projects.

From the merchant’s perspective, Lune customers can choose to pay for those projects or let customers pay the extra fee. Lune is already talking with other payment partners to offer more payment integrations.

Lune charges based on the number of calculations and also takes a small cut on carbon offsetting transactions. With Lune’s API, the startup wants to turn any company into a climate-friendly company.

Many would say that not purchasing a product is the best way to reduce the carbon impact of that potential purchase. But when you can’t avoid a purchase, it could help customers pick one company over another.

Image Credits: Lune

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. 

Happy Saturday, friends; I hope you are well. As you read this, I have scooted back to my regular digs up in the Northeast, leaving sunny New Orleans behind. Yes, next week’s writing will be more emo on account of the weather. Regardless, there are two things to talk about today, so let’s get busy! — Alex

When APIs evolve into platforms

Earlier this week, The Exchange chatted with Shippo founder and CEO Laura Behrens Wu about her company’s announcement that it has inked a partnership with Shopify.

Shippo is in the shipping game, offering a SaaS offering to merchants that gives them access to bundled, and therefore cheaper, rates for moving goods. Last year the company raised $45 million at a valuation of just under $500 million. (Back in 2019, when the company raised $30 million, Behrens Wu said that her company has SaaS-like gross margins, for reference.)

The company has grown quickly, doubling shipping volume in 2020 — which at the time tracked loosely with revenue — and doubled in size back 2019.

In early 2021, when we last checked in with Shippo, it had a neat plan ahead of it to keep that growth flowing (emphasis added):

Now flush with more capital, what’s next for Shippo? Per its CEO, the startup wants to invest more in platforms (where Shippo is baked into a marketplace, for example), international expansion (Shippo only does a “little bit” of international shipping, per Behrens Wu), and double-down on what it considers its core customer base.

This week, Behrens Wu said that offering shipping is now “table stakes” for both platforms and marketplaces, so individual sellers expect that if you offer them a digital storefront, they expect payments support along with an option for shipping. Shippo wants to be that shipping tool that platforms offer.

The CEO said that after getting inbound interest from marketplaces about 18 months ago, her team got to work on building an API for its service that allows others to bake Shippo’s service into their marketplace.

There’s a revenue share component in the deal, according to Behrens Wu, but with Shopify and other potential partners offering huge volume gains, the math could pencil out well for Shippo. That’s because its service gets better with volume. The more packages that Shippo helps ship, the better deals it can land with shipping companies around the world. And now it has a way to dramatically expand its total volume, perhaps improving its ability to rip monetary value out of the e-commerce shipping world.

We’re going to need to check in with the company in a few months to see how things are going, but it all feels rather bullish.

Behrens Wu reached out after noting our reporting on the growth of API-powered startups. Well, now the company has an API that is key to its overall growth trajectory, our thesis holds: SaaS is neat, but APIs could be the future-facing business model to beat.

Insurtech: Still not dead!

Not to overly savage the expired equine, but insurtech has had an up and down few years. From huge fundraises for neoinsurance startups to big dollars for insurtech marketplaces, we saw a string of IPOs that failed to hold onto value post-debut. It’s been messy.

And yet. The Exchange wrote earlier this year that insurtech venture capital activity was actually strong last year despite the barrage of negative news concerning some of the sector’s best-known names. Things were once so hot that we tried to figure out “why VCs are dumping money into insurance marketplaces” back in early 2020.

Well, the VCs are still at it. This week Policygenius announced that it has closed a $125 million round. The company’s software essentially allows consumers to find and buy different insurance products online. Given how large the insurance market is, getting folks to the right product is big business. A bit like how Credit Karma was valuable as heck, if you will.

Policygenius competitor The Zebra raised $150 million last April, for reference, so the Policygenius round is not an entire surprise. But it does underscore the fact that public-market news can help accelerate a startup sector, but that it can’t — it seems — kill it off.

Webflow, a well-funded no-code startup that helps customers build websites, raised a new round of capital this week.

Per Forbes reporting, Webflow landed $120 million in fresh funds at a $4 billion valuation. Forbes also writes that the company will reach the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) mark shortly, has more than 200,000 customers, and currently earns around 8% of its total top line from enterprise customers.

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The above comes a little over a year after Webflow raised $140 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, giving the company a roughly 2x valuation bump with its new capital.

But what we care about more than the company’s raw valuation is the revenue multiple that the figure represents. Why? Because while nine-figure startup rounds are still getting done, we’re hearing from investors and founders alike that terms are tightening.

Even more, the public market has dramatically cut the value of software revenues, leading to some concern that late-stage startups are going to suffer when they go back to raise more capital. (This sentiment, for example, was echoed this morning in CNBC.)

A few days ago we noted that the era of startup valuations at 40x ARR was fading and that more conservative metrics were becoming common. With a $4 billion valuation and roughly $100 million ARR, however, Webflow is valued at precisely the number that we cast as a figment of yesteryear.

Are 40x ARR multiples still fair game for startups that have reached revenue scale? The answer is that they may prove increasingly rare, but that Webflow has a few things going for it that are likely affording it a valuation premium. It’s worth weighing Webflow itself in the context of its rich multiple — but perhaps not presuming that other startups will be able to follow its example this year.

So let’s do that.

Webflow and the 40x question

To understand Webflow’s latest round and resulting ARR multiple, we have to do a little historical digging. Pulling from our coverage of the company’s previous round, and a set of notes from an interview with Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin, the following:

Instant delivery startup Getir has announced that it has closed a new $768 million Series E founding round. Following this deal, the company has reached a valuation of $11.8 billion.

Mubadala Investment Company is leading the founding round with Abu Dhabi Growth Fund (ADG), Alpha Wave Global, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global also participating.

Originally from Turkey, Getir has quickly expanded its service across Europe and the U.S. Unlike traditional grocery delivery services, Getir lets your order groceries without having to pick a delivery slot. As soon as you send your order, Getir starts working on it.

Behind the scenes, Getir has built dense networks of micro-fulfillment centers in dozens of urban areas. Those dark stores are operated by Getir and the company also controls and owns the inventory of products.

After that, a delivery person on a bike of moped scooter delivers your order as quickly as possible. It means that you can expect to receive your order in “minutes”, as the company’s website says. More realistically, you should get it 20 to 40 minutes later.

The company has managed to attract 40 million app downloads across nine countries. Overall, Getir manages 1,100 dark stores. That’s why these instant delivery startups have been raising mega rounds of funding. It’s a capital-intensive industry.

Getir is quite dominant in Turkey as it currently operates in 81 different cities. The company covers 48 different cities for all other markets — the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal and the U.S.

“We are defining the ultrafast delivery sector and this latest round of funding is a testament to Getir’s position as industry pioneer. In such an exciting and competitive market we cannot afford to stand still. This investment will enable us to further develop our proposition and technology, as well as invest in our employees to continue to attract the best talent,” Getir founder Nazim Salur said in a statement.

The company competes with Gopuff, Flink, Gorillas, Zapp, Cajoo and more. In other words, it’s an incredibly crowded market and there will be more consolidation moves down the road.

The venture capital market is retreating somewhat from its aggressive 2021 pace, new data indicates.

According to data collected by Carta, a unicorn startup that provides equity management and other services to private companies, round sizes from the Series A to C stages in the United States are in decline, while valuations attached to those deals are also falling. For investors hunting for a deal, the pricing reprieve may be welcome. For founders hunting up their next capital tranche, the news could prove less desirable.

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We’re mere weeks away from the conclusion of the first quarter of 2022, which means in short order we’ll get a deluge of data concerning the domestic and global venture capital market’s performance at the start of the year. But while aggregated data is useful for charting larger and slower-moving trends in the startup market, we care more this morning about near-term changes.

This is for investors putting capital to work now, and startup founders looking to close a new round in short order.

We’re only discussing the U.S. market today, where Carta has the most data and thus the strongest perspective. However, we’ll continue to hunt for data of this sort from the company and its peers as the year progresses. Now, into the data.

How Series A, B, and C rounds are changing in the United States

Let’s start with capital raised per round.

The data here requires very little nuance. Via Carta’s Head of Insights Peter Walker, here you go:

Image Credits: Carta

Note that we’re contrasting the final two months of 2021 with the first two months of 2022, not full quarters. Also, Walker confirmed to TechCrunch in an interview that the above data is based on closing dates, not announcement dates, so we’re not mixing rounds from different periods that would pollute the dataset.

From November and December 2021 to January and February 2022, Series A rounds posted the largest average decline in round size in the United States. This indicates that outlier Series A rounds — in size terms — are becoming less frequent. That the median Series A round also declined likely stems from similar reasons, even if it does belie a less extreme decline than what averaged results detail. Still, Series A rounds on both a median and average basis in the starting months of 2022 remain over the $10 million mark. Slowdown or not, the market is still hot.

Series B round data is similar, with a sharper average decline than median round-size shift. An even smaller median decline, however, than we saw with Series A rounds means that the Series B market is changing, but not as much for most companies raising. Series C data is more extreme, with round sizes falling more sharply in median terms than average, implying that outlier rounds at the venture stage are changing, but that we’re seeing more movement among smaller deals than with Series A and B rounds.

Turning to valuations, the data here is similar, with one particular caveat. From the same source:

Security companies typically start by focusing on one particular problem, but the biggest ones like Palo Alto Networks, FireEye and Symantec have shifted to a horizontal approach typically gaining functionality over time through acquisition. SentinelOne, which went public last June appears to be taking a similar tack, and yesterday the company announced it is acquiring Attivo Networks for $616.5 million .

With Attivo, the company gains access to its identity management, an approach that has become ever more important as companies shift to the cloud. The pandemic has of course accelerated this approach, and SentinelOne needed to cover this functionality. SentinelOne COO Nicholas Warner sees the acquisition as a natural addition to his company’s platform, especially in light of the need to offer more protection outside the confines of an office environment.

“The shift to hybrid work and increased cloud adoption has established identity as the new perimeter, highlighting the importance of visibility into user activity. Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) is the missing link in holistic XDR (Extended Detection and Response) and zero trust strategies,” Warner said in a statement.

While that is a mouthful of security tech jargon, there is an element of truth to it all. Companies do need to be able to monitor users on their systems more carefully, looking for extraordinary activity, and the acquisition does in fact add this missing element to the SentinelOne platform.

Attivo Networks CEO Tushar Kothari sees the companies as a good fit, and a way to continue to build on the startup’s initial vision inside a larger public company. “For Attivo, this acquisition is not an exit. An exit, by its very nature, implies a change in direction or act of deceleration. Joining forces with SentinelOne is just the opposite: an opportunity to continue on Attivo’s current path without slowing down,” Kothari wrote in a company blog post announcing the deal.

SentinelOne went public last June raising $1.2 billion. Last year, it purchased Scalyr, a high speed logging company for $155 million. Attivo launched in 2011and raised over $60 million along the way. Its last raise was a modest $11 million in 2019, according to Crunchbase data.

SentinelOne stock is up over 14% in early trading today.

Shares of U.S.-listed Chinese companies, and especially technology concerns, are ripping higher this morning. Driving the day’s trading were comments from Chinese government official Liu He concerning both foreign-listed Chinese shares and the pace of reform in the country’s economy.

Yesterday, The Exchange noted that a selloff of Chinese equities had steepened in recent days; uncertainty regarding the Chinese government’s COVID-19 policies, its closeness to the increasingly ostracized Russian government, rapid-fire regulations on major tech companies, and a shift in government thinking regarding its economy — the “common prosperity” effort — had rattled investors.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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Today, however, in light of the pronouncement, things are looking up for Chinese companies, at least in valuation terms. For example, the NASDAQ Golden Dragon China Index, comprising 93 different U.S.-listed Chinese companies, shot nearly 18% higher this morning. Alibaba and Baidu are up 17% apiece, shares of Bilibili are up 30%, and so on.

What’s changing?

The comments in question — here, in Chinese — indicate, per a CNBC translation, that the “Chinese government continues to support various kinds of businesses’ overseas listings.”

For holders of foreign shares of Chinese companies, that’s a relief given market concern that companies could be forced to delist. The document also notes that regulatory work should be completed rapidly — more welcome news. Other topics were mentioned, including monetary policy, the country’s real estate market and Hong Kong.

That the Chinese government is potentially retreating from the posture it struck last year when it was busy going after Chinese tech companies’ business models, labor practices, data policies and capital sources is incredibly important. Not only for the companies directly impacted by the day’s news, but also startups looking to build in the country.

Recall that we saw an early indication yesterday that the pace of venture investment in China is slowing in the first quarter. No single factor can claim the full mantle of responsibility for that change. But many contributed to it, and if China is willing to keep open more avenues for exits — foreign IPOs — while creating more regulatory room for companies to build, well, it’s a good recipe for more startup activity.

The Chinese venture capital market once challenged the United States’ VC market in activity terms. Those days are now years past. But leading status or not, there are a lot of folks who want to build in China, so we’re tracking their fortunes.