The Briefing: Instacart Valued At $39B, Vizio Files To Go Public, And More

Here’s what you need to know today in startup and venture news, updated by the Crunchbase News staff throughout the day to keep you in the know.

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Instacart bags $39B valuation after $265M funding round

As we wait for Instacart to go public, the San Francisco-based company announced it brought in another $265 million in fresh funding from existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company and T. Rowe Price Associates.

The funding increases Instacart’s valuation to $39 billion, according to the company. It also gives Instacart total known funding since its 2012 inception of $2.67 billion over 17 rounds, per Crunchbase data. The company’s previous round was $200 million last October. Existing investors Valiant Peregrine Fund and D1 Capital led the investment

Reuters reported in November that Instacart chose Goldman Sachs to lead a 2021 IPO at a $30 billion valuation.

The new funding will go toward increasing Instacart’s corporate headcount by 50 percent this year, as well as in product development for its business units.

— Christine Hall

Vizio files to go public

Smart TV-maker Vizio filed for an IPO on Monday, revealing that it has sold more than 81 million TVs and nearly 12 million soundbars since being founded in 2002. This is the second time Vizio has filed to go public — it also filed in 2015 before China technology company LeEco announced plans to acquire Vizio in 2016. Those plans ultimately fell through, and now Vizio is once again looking to go public.

The company reported total revenue of about $2 billion in 2020, up about 11 percent year over year. Vizio plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker VZIO.

— Sophia Kunthara

M&A

Agilent to buy Resolution Bioscience for up to $695M: Agilent Technologies  announced an agreement to acquire Resolution Bioscience, a developer of next-generation sequencing-based precision oncology solutions. Under the terms of the agreement, Agilent will pay $550 million in cash at closing and up to an additional $145 million in performance-based milestone payments.

— Joanna Glasner

Health care

Health Gorilla inks $15M: Health Gorilla, a provider of health care application programming interfaces, raised $15 million in Series B financing co-led by IA Capital Group and Nationwide Ventures. The Sunnyvale, California-based company is focused on streamlining access to clinical data and will use the new funding to expand into new business verticals, including insurance, life sciences and government organizations, as well as develop new functionalities for consumer access to medical records, payer-to-payer data sharing and data quality assessments.

— Christine Hall

Data

Cipher Skin raises $5M: Cipher Skin, which makes Cipher Mesh, a network of sensors that can be printed on any textile and wrap around any physical object, from human limbs to bridges and pipes, announced it has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Boyett Group with participation from Draper Capital, Tribe Capital and TKC Capital to grow its product line and expand into new markets. The new round brings total funding to $7.8 million.

— Christine Hall

Fintech and commerce

Czech grocery startup Rohlik raises $230M: Rohlik, a grocery delivery service based in the Czech Republic, raised $230 million in fresh funding as it eyes expansion across Europe. Partech led the financing, with Index Ventures also participating.

— Joanna Glasner

Spark Advisors launches with $3.6M: Spark Advisors, a technology-enabled brokerage that works with licensed independent agents to manage Medicare enrollment and retirement benefits, launched nationwide Tuesday with $3.6 million in funding led by Primary Ventures. Spark manages back-office tasks for agents, such as marketing, sales support and compliance.

— Christine Hall

Agriculture and foodtech

Demetria comes out of stealth with $3M: Demetria, a company using artificial intelligence to digitize coffee aroma and taste along the coffee supply chain, said it emerged from stealth after closing on a $3 million seed round led by Celeritas. The Colombian company, which has presences in Brazil and Israel, is developing a data cloud to identify and track coffee quality with full traceability. The coffee industry traditionally uses a cupping method, a manual, expensive, time-consuming process to determine coffee bean quality, which is inaccessible to the majority of small farmers producing 60 percent of the world’s coffee, according to Demetria.

— Christine Hall

Clean tech

Therma secures $10.2M: Therma, an IoT-powered equipment monitoring and analytics platform, closed on $10.2 million of funding led by Deciens Capital. The San Francisco-based company is focused on the smart cold chain, building IoT-powered temperature monitoring and analytics to prevent food, product and energy waste.

— Christine Hall

Public markets

Oscar Health increases IPO range: Health insurance company Oscar Health could now raise as much as $1.17 billion in its initial public offering after increasing its price range to $36 to $38 per share, according to a regulatory filing made Tuesday. Oscar intends to offer 31 million shares and had initially priced them at between $32 and $34 per share a few weeks ago. The New York-based company filed its S-1 registration document with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 5. The company reported more than $488 million in revenue in 2019, up by around 5 percent from about $463 million in 2018. Its losses also shrunk in that period, from nearly $406 million in 2018 to around $261 million in 2019. The company has approximately 529,000 members across 18 states. Oscar’s health insurance model includes free virtual care appointments and a program for Medicare-eligible adults. The company, which was co-founded by Josh Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital, raised more than $1.6 billion in funding from investors including Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, CapitalG and Fidelity. It is estimated that Oscar’s fully diluted valuation will be approximately $8 billion, Reuters reported.

— Christine Hall

Illustration: Dom Guzman