$300M Here, $600M There

Morning Markets: A quick reminder that things are pretty bonkers right now.

There were two rounds this morning that stood out from the usual mix of new capital events. Egnyte’s comparatively-paltry $75 million doesn’t make the cut.

In today’s market, $75 million just isn’t that much money. You have to raise a lot more than that to spike our eyebrows.

But two companies did make a mark, and both before breakfast on the West Coast. First, an Airbnb competitor raised $300 million. According to Reuters, it’s last round was in the neighborhood of $120 million at a unicorn valuation.

And a vegetable delivery company is close to closing or has closed a round in the range of $600 million to $800 million. At the upper end of that interval, the two companies picked up a billion dollars between them.

And now, our little test. The firm’s names, in alphabetical order, are Meicai and Xiaozhu. Which is the vegetable company, and which is the Airbnb challenger?

Did you have to guess?

I only know because I helped edit Savannah’s story on the vegetable delivery firm this morning. Regardless, the two capital events underscore how bonkers the market is today. Venture volume globally, and at home and abroad, is setting records, and the component rounds that comprise those totals are record-setting themselves.

But by tomorrow, I doubt that nearly any of us reading this sentence will be able to remember the two companies that we just discussed.

We’ll have updates to our regular coverage relating to super- and hypergiant rounds in the coming weeks, and we have a special project touching down this week (hopefully) that takes a look at a new, slightly smaller cohort of funding events. All this sums to an incredibly heated moment in tech.

Today, it’s impossible to imagine things slowing down. Later, it will be impossible to remember how they got moving so fast.

Illustration Credit: Li Anne Dias