Morning Report: The Hunt For $3 Trillion

Morning Report: Heading into the weekend, let’s observe a potential milestone for the technology industry.

The technology industry currently enjoys a bull cycle. The impacts are obvious. SaaS companies, only recently broadly understood, are doing well. IPOs are also making some progress to get back from the doldrums, and the Nasdaq is hundreds of points over 6,000.

As you can imagine, big tech companies are doing well in the middle of all that. Stacking cash, and testing all-time highs, the biggest companies are up against an interesting threshold, namely the $3 trillion market cap watermark.

Of course, we’re referring to tech’s Big 5, which, in alphabetical order, are Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. According to our little spreadsheet, infused with Google Finance as it is, the Big 5 are worth $2.97 trillion in aggregate. That’s up a minute $220 million today, so things are calm.

But the Big 5 are rapidly approaching thirteen-digit club. If the largest tech companies manage to reach that value mark in the current business cycle, and before its turn, it will be interesting to see if it will be the new Nasdaq 5,000, a prior psychological barrier set during the first dotcom boom, and it was only recently put to bed as hopelessly dated.

From the Crunchbase Daily:

Target puts $75M into mattress maker Casper

• Target is putting a lot of cash into mattresses. The retail giant finalized a $75 million investment in fast-growing mattress startup Casper, according to a Recode report. The financing is reportedly part of a larger funding round that includes existing Casper investors and could total $100 million or more.

Investors perk up for sleep deals

• Venture capitalists seem intent on putting us to sleep lately. In addition to Casper’s big round, investors are putting large sums into a wide range of sleep-focused startups, including restfulness apps, sleep monitoring devices, insomnia therapies and, yes, mattresses. A Crunchbase News analysis found that sleep-focused startups have raised close to $300 million this year.

Faraday Future said to seek $1B

• Electric vehicle maker Faraday Future is looking to raise $1 billion in new investment as it seeks to protect itself from the financial troubles of its main backer, China’s LeEco, according to a Bloomberg report citing unnamed sources.

Featured Image via Flickr user Hermann Kaser under CC BY-SA 2.0. Image has been cropped.