ICOs Boom In September, Raising Nearly $500M

Morning Report: Bitcoin is out of the news at the moment, but the ICO market is looking hot once again.

As IPOs, unicorn chaos, and Amazon’s reality TV show draw attention in the tech world, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have fallen out of the news cycle.

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There’s a notable correlation between the price change of bitcoin, and the amount of interest around the topic. So as bitcoin sleeps around $4,000, it isn’t a surprise that the media and the public are waiting for new movement.

But initial coin offerings (ICOs), sales for new tokens on top of the popular blockchains, are back and nearly better than ever. As we reported previously, the summer ICO boom looked like it was tapering off just two months ago. It seemed that August was bringing the correction.

August did end up being a local minimum, but the descent was short-lived. Here’s the new chart of ICO revenue over time, inclusive of September (we gave it a few days in case new numbers needed to trickle into the dataset), from CoinSchedule:

September puts us nearly back to where we were over the summer. Throw in a fresh Nasdaq Composite all-time high this morning alongside the booming global VC market, and the good times are still in full swing.

Just don’t look down.

From the Crunchbase Daily:

Top VCs add female partners

• Women are making more inroads in VC. The percentage of female investment partners at the top 100 venture firms rose 17 percent in the past year-and-a-half, with women now holding 8 percent of those positions, Crunchbase reports. Women also now hold 15 percent of the partner roles at accelerators and corporate venture firms, a 25 percent improvement in 18 months.

Dialog Semiconductor to acquire Silego

• Amid continuing consolidation in the semiconductor space, Germany’s Dialog Semiconductor said it is acquiring Silicon Valley-based Silego Technology, a venture-backed developer of configurable chips, for up to $306 million, Reuters reports.

Navient buys Earnest for $155M

• Student loan servicing giant Navient announced that it is acquiring Earnest, an online lender focused on student loans, for $155 million in cash. San Francisco-based Earnest, founded in 2013, previously raised $119 million in venture funding and about $200 million in debt financing.
• Crunchbase is publishing a series of stories highlighting investment trends and funding totals for the third quarter of 2017. You can find all our Q3 articles here.