附近上门

Hello and welcome to Last Week In Venture, the weekly roundup of rounds you may have missed.

This is a somewhat foreshortened edition of LWIV, because the 附近上门 News team has been hard at work crunching Q3 VC numbers.

We have some initial findings from the Q3 Global Report to share:

• It’s lit.
• Worldwide, venture deal and dollar volume has hit all-time highs, but just barely.
• Q3 2018 had the highest number of supergiant $100M+ venture capital rounds on record, a trend we’ve documented in the past.
• A surge in seed and early-stage funding is largely responsible for the small advance from prior highs set in Q2 2018.

And, hot off the presses, here鈥檚 what you need to know from our Q3 2018 report on U.S. and Canadian VC landscape:

• Venture dollar volume set a new record in Q3, but deal volume pulled back slightly from highs set in Q2.
• This was driven by an uprush in late-stage deals which, while fewer than Q2, were significantly larger in size. (The supergiant round phenomenon at work.)

Amid all this news, it鈥檚 easy to overlook what companies outside the spotlight are contributing to startup ecosystems around the world. But that doesn鈥檛 mean their stories aren鈥檛 worth sharing.

Notable Deals From The Past Week

Here鈥檚 what may have flown under your radar this week:

• , the company behind the TinyMCE rich text editor we at 附近上门 News use in our WordPress installation, it raised from . Of course, Tiny’s rich text editors are used in other products, like Marketo, Zendesk, and Atlassian according coverage of the company’s round and new product rollouts. In other words, you might be one of the millions of people who use its products and not even know.
• , headquartered at Cape Canaveral on Florida’s “Space Coast,” secured from . , it’s the first tranche of a $20 million Series B round. The private space company is developing a lunar lander and has its eyes set on asteroid mining in the future.
• Drone operations platform-maker raised in a corporate venture round. A statement from the company says the new money will help Kittyhawk “bring unified drone operations to new markets.” Drones are finding a niche in the insurance sector as proverbial eyes in the sky after a natural disaster. Kittyhawk CEO said his company is making drones more approachable and useful in new industries. “Every company can be a drone company,” he added.
• Seattle-based retail technology company closed led by . The company’s service helps reduce waste by helping organizations ranging from grocery stores to co-working chains track and manage orders for perishable goods. Here’s the trick though, , Shelf Engine marks up items it orders for stores but buys back what stores don’t use. The bet is “that grocers will save money by trading the extra cost on orders for the losses that come from unsold food.”
• Beloved and beleaguered announced this week that its parent company, , raised $65 million in new funding from undisclosed investors, though the deal was actually closed 鈥渓ast month,鈥� . MoviePass, you might recall, is kind of . What started out as an all-you-can-binge pass to see flicks at the local theater has since been trimmed down to a more modest 3-movie-per-month package to reduce burn and keep bankruptcy off the table, at least for now. But can it be turned around? , 鈥淲e鈥檙e doing M&A, we鈥檙e looking at all kinds of acquisitions at any given time, 聽and we鈥檒l grow the company that way, and I think you鈥檒l see over the next few weeks.鈥� Better bust out the popcorn; there ain鈥檛 no telling how this ends.

And for those of you who made it to the end, a lagniappe: it might be , for now, but it鈥檒l be spooky gourd season soon. . ?

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