Monday, June 27, 2022

TechCrunch

TechCrunch

What’s a fintech even worth these days?

Posted: 27 Jun 2022 08:27 AM PDT

It’s not news that times have changed in the world of fintech. After financial technology startups saw their fortunes rise during the venture capital boom that loosely wrapped as 2021 came to a close, they’re now suffering from a slump of a similar scale.

The damage is not unidimensional. Instead, pain around the fintech sphere is varied and multifactorial. Today, I want to run through some key data points that are jostling around my head. These include the latest from Coinbase and Klarna, where neobanks sit in the current valuation climate, and what the changing market means for venture capital dollars that poured into the sector globally during the last few years of heady private-market investment.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The gist, as you can work out from the above, is that fintech was the hottest thing around last year, a fact that may now turn into a venture capital and startup headache.

TechCrunch reported earlier this year, citing CB Insights data, that as global venture capital funding rose to $621 billion in 2021 from a comparatively modest $294 billion in 2020, fintech investment itself rose to $131.5 billion from 4,969 deals, up from $49 billion invested into 3,491 deals in 2020.

So the money at stake here is in the hundreds of billions in terms of invested capital, and likely trillions when we consider the value of startups that raised while times were good. (Recall that Crunchbase estimates the total value of all global unicorns at $4.6 trillion, though that number likely includes some zombie valuations no longer pertinent in a more conservative investing market.)

Refreshed about the capital that went into fintech, let’s now digest the less-than-winsome news blowing off the high seas of startups building financial technology.

What’s fintech revenue worth?

As software valuations rose during the 2020-2021 venture capital peak, every company out there wanted to be a tech company at least and a software company at best. That’s because the value of software revenue, measured on a per-dollar basis, rose sharply. Every dollar of software revenue that a company could lay claim to could yield as much as $30 or $50 or even $100 in value.

So, folks worked to either build software incomes or rebrand their other revenues as such. This is an issue for many fintech companies because it has been noted recently that much of their income was not software, but instead something else that software facilitated. The two substances, however, are not the same.

After several bruising months, industry analysts see Zendesk sale as pressure release

Posted: 27 Jun 2022 07:28 AM PDT

When Zendesk announced it had been acquired by a consortium of private equity firms on Friday for $10.2 billion, it seemed a sudden and jarring end for a company that had once pioneered customer service in the cloud, especially since the organization had recently vowed to stay independent.

But there had been a lot going on with Zendesk leading up to Friday's announcement, including a battle with activist investor Jana Partners over a number of issues. For starters, the company turned down a $17 billion offer in February, which you will note is substantially higher than the final selling price, and Jana was not happy with that outcome

At the time, however, Zendesk concluded it was worth far more. A TechCrunch analysis concurred. But the market has shifted dramatically in the months since, and the company's value plunged.

“It does feel like something dramatic needed to happen to change the trajectory they’ve been on the last few years, and maybe this is it.” Brent Leary, principal analyst at CRM Essentials

If that weren't enough, the company was also trying to expand its offerings by buying Survey Monkey parent Momentive in a $4.1 billion deal. That attempt was quashed by investors led by Jana. Zendesk saw the acquisition as an opportunity to expand the platform into customer experience, projecting much faster revenue growth, but investors didn't see an obvious fit and were displeased by the cost.

Further, Jana was attempting to take over board seats and was pressuring Zendesk to call a delayed annual meeting to bring that particular issue to a head.

The whole ordeal came to a conclusion on Friday. We spoke to several industry analysts, who, for the most part, given the events leading up to the sale, were not surprised by this ending. Most suggested it could bring some relief to the beleaguered company.

Rocket Lab’s CAPSTONE mission to the moon is key to establishing a lunar space station

Posted: 27 Jun 2022 07:25 AM PDT

"Going to the moon is no joke." So said Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, just days before the planned launch of CAPSTONE, a watershed mission for both NASA and the private space industry.

The mission is important, though you might not assume so based on the stats of the CAPSTONE CubeSat on its own: It's about the size of a microwave oven and weighs in at just 55 pounds. But the end goal of the spacecraft's roughly six-month stint in lunar orbit is to chart a favorable trajectory for a crewed station that will orbit the moon. Once established, that platform, dubbed Gateway, could unlock a whole new chapter in human space exploration.

Consider CAPSTONE (which stands for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) the first in-space step in NASA's Artemis program, an ambitious plan to return humans to the moon by the middle of this decade. The Gateway platform could be used as a way station for lunar landers, a resupply junction for astronauts exploring the moon — or even a transfer point for missions to Mars and beyond.

Image Credits: NASA

The mission isn't just a big deal for the Artemis program and public space exploration: Notably, it's the result of a patchwork of collaboration between private industry and the space agency. The list of partners on NASA's website for the mission includes:

And, of course, Rocket Lab for the launch services.

CAPSTONE is launching aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from the company's site on New Zealand’s remote Māhia Peninsula. "This is the highest mass and the highest performance Electron has ever had to fly by quite some margin," Beck said. "The vehicle is absolutely stretched to its limits with respect to performance."

In addition to actually launching the mission, Rocket Lab developed a special variant of its Photon spacecraft for this endeavor, which it's calling the Lunar Photon. That spacecraft will conduct a series of orbits over a period of around six to eight days, increasing the velocity and apogee of the orbit over time. Then, Photon will perform the final burn, called the trans-lunar injection, which will set it on its course to the moon. Around 20 minutes after the injection, Photon and CAPSTONE will separate and the CubeSat alone will conduct the remaining maneuvers to reach its target orbit around the moon.

“The moon is a long way away,” Beck said, referring to the complexities of Photon’s maneuvers. “You’re traveling at huge velocities. So it only takes a smallest fraction of an angle error or a velocity error, and you just shoot way past where you need to be.”

“It’s like firing a bullet millions of kilometers, and it’s got to be exactly in the right place.”

An unusual orbit

The exact orbit that CAPSTONE will be exploring is called a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO). That orbit, in the shape of a necklace, will bring CAPSTONE as close as 1,000 miles to the moon’s surface and as far away as 40,000 miles. Although the shape is odd, it’s a very stable orbit, which means greater efficiency and less use of propellant. NRHO was up against competing orbits, including low lunar orbit and distant retrograde orbit, as the ideal trajectory for Gateway; but as NASA explains, NRHO is a “best of both worlds” option that'll provide astronauts with easy access to the lunar surface, a continuous line of sight to (and communication with) Earth and access to deep space.

But testing the NRHO orbit is not the only point of the mission. The CubeSat will also help NASA understand navigation, or how to generate an accurate estimation of Gateway’s trajectory, and station-keeping.

“Because the NRHO is marginally stable, Gateway and CAPSTONE will both require a gentle ‘nudge’ about once a week to stay in orbit,” Ethan Kayser, CAPSTONE mission design lead at Advanced Space, explained in a Reddit post. “CAPSTONE will be using the same strategy to design and execute these stationkeeping maneuvers, which occur once each revolution.” The eight propulsion thrusters built by Stella Exploration will be key to conducting these maneuvers.

CAPSTONE will arrive at its lunar orbit on November 13. After a roughly six-month orbital mission, NASA plans to crash the spacecraft into the moon at the end of its life. The launch is set to take place during an instantaneous launch window at 5:55 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 28, so be sure to follow TechCrunch for live coverage and reporting on the outocome of the mission launch.
at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

guest post needed

Hi I hope you're doing well. I'm reaching out to discuss the possibility of publishing articles on your website. Along with guest ...