The SVB collapse is a double whammy for tech startups navigating an already brutal market

ChartHop CEO Ian White breathed a sigh of relief in late January after his cloud software startup raised $20 million funding round. they started the process six months ago during a brutal period More venture funding down the drain for tech stocks.

For ChartHop’s first round in 2021, White took less than a month to raise $35 million. The market hastily turned against him.

“There was a complete reversal of the pace at which investors were willing to move,” said White, whose company sells cloud technology used by human resources departments.

Whatever comfort White was feeling in January quickly evaporated last week. On March 16 – Thursday – ChartHop held its annual revenue kickoff at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Tempe, Arizona. As White was speaking in front of more than 80 employees, his phone flooded with messages.

White steps off the stage to find hundreds of panicked messages from other founders about the Silicon Valley bank, whose stock was down The firm plunged more than 60% after it said it was trying to raise billions of dollars in cash by investing in deteriorating deposits and mortgage-backed securities at the wrong time.

was a startup executive scrambling to figure out what to do with their money, which was locked up in a 40-year-old firm that has long been known as a linchpin Tech industry.

“My first thought, I was like, ‘this isn’t like FTX or something,'” White said of the cryptocurrency exchange. ripped off at the end of last year, “SVB is a very well managed bank.”

But one bank was running, and by Friday the SVB was done confiscated by regulators in the second largest bank failure in US history. with ChartHop Banks JPMorgan Chase, so the company was not at direct risk for collapse. But White said many of his startup’s customers had kept their deposits at SVB and were now unsure whether they would be able to pay their bills.

while the deposits were finally stopped behind Last weekend and SVB’s government-appointed CEO tried to rreassure customers that the bank was open for business, the future of the Silicon Valley bank remains highly uncertain, further hampering an already troubled startup funding environment.

SVB was a pioneer in so-called venture lending, providing loans to risky early-stage companies in areas such as software, drug development, and robotics, among others. climate technology, It is now widely expected that such capital will be less available and more expensive.

White said the SVB has shaken the confidence of an industry already grappling with rising interest rates and extremely high inflation.

Exit activity for venture-backed startups fell more than 90% from a year earlier to $5.2 billion in the fourth quarter, the lowest quarterly total in more than a decade. PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, The number of deals declined for the fourth consecutive quarter.

Funding in February was down 63 percent from $48.8 billion a year ago, according to a Crunchbase funding report. Late-stage funding is down 73% year-over-year, and early-stage funding was down 52% over that stretch.

David Friend, a tech industry veteran and CEO of cloud data storage startup Wasabi TechnologiesFundraisers hit the market last spring in an effort to find fresh cash as public market multiples cloud software were rolling

Wasabi made its last run a year ago, when the market was humming, IPOs and special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) were booming and investors were intoxicated by low interest rates, economic stimulus and rocket revenue growth.

By last May, Friend said, many of his investors had backed out, forcing him to start the process all over again. Raising money was “very distracting” and took up more than two-thirds of his time, around seven months and 100 investor presentations.

“The world was falling apart as we were putting together a deal,” said Friend, who co-founded the Boston-based startup in 2015 and has launched several other ventures, including the first data backup vendor Carbonite. “At that point everybody was scared. Investors were just pulling their horns, the SPAC market was falling apart, valuations of tech companies were falling.”

Mitra said the market always bounces back, but he feels many startups don’t have the experience or capital to weather the current storm.

In an interview before the collapse of SVB, Friend said, “If I didn’t have a good management team running the company day-to-day, things would have fallen apart.” “I think we were yelling, but if I had to go back to the market right now and raise more money, I think it would be extremely difficult.”

In January, Tom Loverro, an investor at Institutional Venture Partners, shared a thread on Twitter predicting a “mass extinction event” for early- and mid-stage companies. He said it would make the 2008 financial crisis “bizarre”.

Lovro was listening to the period when the market starts in late 2021. The Nasdaq reached its all-time high in November of that year. As inflation began to rise and the Federal Reserve indicated that interest rate hikes were on the way, many VCs told their portfolio companies to raise as much cash as they would need to last 18 to 24 months, because A massive pullback was coming.

In a tweet widely shared in the tech world, Lovro wrote that a “flood” of startups would seek to raise capital in 2023 and 2024, but some would not receive funding.

Next month will be 18 months after the Nasdaq peak, and there are few signs that investors are ready to return to risk-on. Hasn’t been a notable venture-backed tech ipo Since late 2021, none more are visible on the horizon. Meanwhile, late-stage venture-backed companies like Bandage, to curl And instacart are dramatically reducing their valuations.

In the absence of venture funding, money-losing startups have had to cut their burn rates to extend their cash runway. According to the website, since the beginning of 2022, around 1,500 tech companies have laid off a total of 300,000 people. pruning.fyi,

Cruz Consulting provides accounting and other back-end services to hundreds of tech startups. According to the firm’s consolidated client data, which it shared with CNBC, the average startup had a runway of 28 months in January 2022. It came down to 23 months in January this year, which is still a historic high. In early 2019, it was less than 20 months.

Madison Hoskinson, an investor at Costanoa Ventures, said more companies will go down this year than usual.

“It’s definitely going to be a very heavy, very transformative year in terms of the viability of some of the early stage startups,” he told CNBC.

Hawkinson specializes in data science and machine learning. it is one of the few hot spot In startup land, that’s largely because of the hype around OpenAI’s chatbot called ChatGPT, which went viral late last year. Yet, being in the right place at the right time is no longer enough for an aspiring entrepreneur.

Hawkinson said that founders should expect “critical and heavy due diligence” from venture capitalists this year rather than “quick decisions and swift movements.”

The enthusiasm and hard work remains, he said. Hoskinson hosted a demo event for artificial intelligence companies in New York earlier this month with 40 founders. She said she was “surprised” by their polished productions and positive energy amidst the darkness of the industry.

“Most of them stayed till 11 pm,” she said. “The event was supposed to end at 8.”

Matt Blumberg, CEO CylinderThat said, founders are optimists by nature. They bolstered the peak of the pandemic in 2020 by helping startups hire executives, board members and mentors, and now work with thousands of companies making venture investments.

Even before the failure of SVB, he saw how difficult the market had become for startups after consecutive record-shattering years of funding and an extended stretch of VC-subsidized growth.

“I coach and mentor a lot of founders, and this is a group that can’t sleep at night,” Blumberg said in an interview. “They’re gaining weight, they’re not going to the gym because they’re stressed or working out all the time.”

VCs are asking their portfolio companies to get used to it.

Bill Gurley, The long term benchmark partner who supported Uber, Zillow And stitch fixSaid Bloomberg’s Emily Chang said last week that the frothy market before 2022 is not coming back.

“In this environment, my advice is very simple, which was the fantasy we lived in for the last three or four years,” Gurley said. “Guess it’s normal.”

Laurel Taylor recently got a crash course in the new normal. Her startup, Candidly, announced A $20.5 million funding round earlier this month, just days before SVB became front-page news. Candid’s technology helps consumers deal with education-related expenses like student loans.

Taylor said the fundraising process took them about six months and involved many conversations with investors about unit economics, business fundamentals, discipline and the path to profitability.

As a female founder, Taylor said she has always faced more scrutiny than her male counterparts, who for years enjoyed Silicon Valley’s growth-at-cost mantra. More people in her network are now seeing what she’s experienced in the nearly seven years since she started Candidly.

“A friend of mine, who is male, laughed and said, ‘Oh no, everyone is behaving like a female founder,'” she said.

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