Although US-based internet giants were also busy during the year – Facebook bought WhatsApp, Oculus VR and LiveRail for a combined $21.5bn, while Google paid big money for Nest, Skybox Imaging and DeepMind –2014 marked the point at which the Chinese internet sector took a big leap forward as investors and acquirers, spurred by e-commerce company Alibaba.
Alibaba raised $25bn in a September initial public offering (IPO) that was the largest in history, and in the run-up to the offering looked to fatten up by making a series of significant investments. That strategy sparked a funding frenzy that drew in internet portal Tencent and, later in the year, search engine provider Baidu and smartphone maker Xiaomi, as all four sought to diversify their offerings.
The companies seemed to go head to head from market to market. Tencent bought online map company Linktech inJanuary, and Alibaba responded by acquiring AutoNavi in April. Alibaba led a $250m round for US-based ride-sharing company Lyft in April, before Tencent and Baidu made large investments in Lyft rivals Didi Dache and Uber respectively last month.
Alibaba appeared to emerge as the leader in terms of funds invested. It participated in nine-figure roundsfor Kabam and Tango, and a $1.2bn round for Youku Tudou, while acquiring UCWeb and AutoNavi for vast sums. Inevitably, the acquisition and funding spree slowed in the wake of Alibaba’s IPO, but it illustrated that China’s largest internet companies are now competing with each other on all fronts.
While Alibaba helped to bring Chinese e-commerce to the acquisition stage in 2014, India caught up significantly, with several of its frontrunners making leaps forward.
Diversified e-commerce company Flipkart raised up to $1.9bn in three separate rounds this year, also acquiring rival Myntra. It ended 2014 with a reported $10bn valuation, 10 times what it was worth just under 18 months ago, with $3bn of that reportedly added on between a $1bn round raised in July and a $700m round closed this weekend.
E-commerce marketplace Snapdeal also had a big year, securing $230m from two rounds in the first half of the year before Japan-based telecoms company SoftBank paid $627m for a 30% stake in October. SoftBank, which also held a 34% share of Alibaba prior to its IPO, emerged as the premier investor in India’s startup economy during the year, and in the second half of 2014 it also provided significant funding to Olacabs and Housing.com, as well as $200m-plus investments in Asian companies GrabTaxi and Legendary Entertainment.
The consensus at the end of 2013 seemed to be that the tripling of IPOs by healthcare companies over the year represented a bubble that would deflate this year. Instead the reverse happened. There were 100 life sciences and medical device IPOs in the US this year, compared with 12 in 2012, according to research conducted by Renaissance Capital, and that surge helped spur the market to its largest number of IPOs since 2000. Novartis alone exited five portfolio companies through IPOs and two by acquisition during the year.
Flotations eventually slowed after the fever in the early part of the year but, as Jonathan Norris of Silicon Valley Bank told us, corporates are beginning to invest at series A stage to get better value. That approach could lead to them being more heavily involved in the next round of healthcare IPOs which, as Google Ventures has indicated, could be substantially influenced by advances in data.
Ride-sharing matures
Uber may have grabbed the headlines, often for the wrong reasons, and finished the year as a $40bn company but 2014 was the year the online taxi ordering sector matured. It began life as the eco-friendly ride-sharing industry in San Francisco in 2010 and now looks like a possible replacement for the traditional taxi industry as a whole.
Uber raised a gargantuan $3bn in 2014, but four of its competitors – US-based Lyft, India-based Olacabs, Malaysia-based GrabTaxi and China-based Didi Dache – all closed $200m-plus rounds over the course of the year.
That breadth of funding would be significant in any sector, but the fact that it is taking place in one that is still relatively nascent indicates that investors have already made up their minds regarding its viability and are willing to bet big. It also shows that Uber may well find much of Asia heavier going than it is used to, particularly if other governments end up following Taiwan’s lead and ruling the service illegal.
Big data companies, particularly those centred on the Apache Hadoop system, continued to advance in 2014, with Cloudera, Palantir Technologies and Hortonworks all achieving unicorn status – valued at $1bn-plus – during the year, even if Hortonworks subsequently dropped out after implementing a one-for-two reverse stock split in November. Hortonworks, however, executed the split in the run-up to becoming the first of the new breed of big data companies to go public in a $100m flotation. Its performance since – at the time of writing its share price is hovering just under 150% of its IPO price– suggests its competitors may well find success when they follow suit, though it is unclear which will make the leap first.
Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly has stated unequivocally that the company will pursue an IPO, but the $900m it raised in around backed by Google and Intel in March means it has funds to spare and time to wait.
Palantir closed a $444m round in September, and its secretive nature and close ties to the intelligence community could forestall an IPO, so the next candidate may be MapR, which closed a $110m debt and equity round in June. Platfora, which secured $38m in March from investors including Cisco and Citi, could well close a significant equity round in 2015, but seems unlikely to float before some of its bigger rivals.
Gaming hits a new level
Despite the Gamergate controversy – which alleges sexism and misogynism in the industry – the gaming sector picked up a good deal of steam over the course of the year. Part of that acceleration was due to its increased breadth. Gaming confirmed its place as a spectator industry in 2014, a development best demonstrated in the startup sector by Amazon’s $970m acquisition of gaming video platform Twitch in August. Razer, a developer of precision gaming equipment, closed an Intel-backed round in October at a $1bn valuation, while virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook for $2bn within two years of its crowdfunding round.
The shift coincided with the continual success of social gaming, as evidenced by the $500m flotation of Candy Crush developer King in March and Gumi’s IPO in Japan recently. Mobile gaming increasingly emerged as a priority for Asian corporates in particular.
Messaging services Line and Tango, game producer GungHo and digital entertainment provider Nazara established specialised gaming funds during the year, while Tencent put $500m into CJ Games as established online businesses looked to diversify their offerings and compete with each other on content.
Over-the-top content sets the pace
Last year over-the-top content providers made a real impact on the market, with YouTube network Maker Studios being bought by Disney in March for $500m, a price that could rise to $950m if Maker can reach certain performance targets. Nor was Maker the only online video media company to be acquired Fullscreen Media was bought by Otter Media, a joint venture formed by media technology company Chernin Group and US telecoms firm AT&T, for up to $300m in September, while business-to-business video network Rightster paid £50m ($86m) for UK-based Base79 in July.
As with gaming, the sector is benefiting from a higher demand for content. The low costs of production compared with, for instance, music or television, combined with the graduation of YouTube stars such as Pew DewPie and ZoeSugg to mainstream fame, have added to the sector’s allure, and 2015 could see accelerated growth throughout the sector.
It started as a whisper but as the year went on more and more investors and media sources began to refer to the current venturing climate as a bubble, and various signs appeared to support the notion. One of those was the increasingly high valuations for startups, ranging from Uber, which grew from a $3.5bn company to a $40bn business in just over a year, to anonymous microblogging platform Yik Yak, which has yet to close its seed round but finished the year as a $400m company.
Venture capitalists Bill Gurley and Marc Andreessen on the other hand pointed to the high burn rate of startups, but perhaps the clearest indication of a bubble is the contraction in time between funding rounds. Several companies raised two rounds during 2014 and some, including Yik Yak and Snapdeal, extended that to three. Most of them blanched at saying it out loud, but more than one mentioned it in passing – they did not need to raise money but the market for fundraising was good they did so to ensure they had cash in reserve.
No one knows when it will arrive but the feeling seems to be that winter is on its way, and venture-backed companies are gathering their nuts while the weather is still warm.