What a roller coaster of a year!

How things can change in a short time. We looked back in the archives to our first Wrap of 2022 to compare then and now:

Growth rounds & virtual/hybrid collaboration

Than: Multi-billion dollar valuations and capital raises of more than US$400 million by virtual collaboration technology companies – Miro, Airtable and Clickup.

utilities: Growth rounds are out; ‘fit’ start-ups are in. Almost overnight, VC advice went from “grow at all costs” to “ensure you have a two-year cash runway.”

The battle for talent

Than: ‘The Great Reshuffle’ and companies’ need for flexibility and work-life balance to win the battle for talent.

utilities: The tables have turned and thousands of people in technology have been laid off around the world.

Major international VC investment in Australia + rumor about grocery delivery

Than: Grocery delivery startups were the flavor of the month with strong support from international VCs. Sydney-based Milkrun raised $75 million led by Tiger Global and Voly raised $18 million led by Sequoia.

utilities: Voly has closed its shop. Milkrun is rumored to have been looking (unsuccessfully) for deals with Uber, Coles and now-defunct Deliveroo Australia.

Sadly, one of the grocery delivery OGs, YourGrocer, which aimed to help independent grocers, announced last week that it’s also shutting down.

In Europe, Getir bought Gorillas this week for $1.2 billion, valuing the two combined at $10 billion versus $15 billion last year. Gorillas reportedly burned $1.50 per dollar in revenue.

In VC land, the most active US VC firms made just seven investments in Australia in the second half of 2022, compared to 28 and 39 in the previous two halves, according to Cut through enterprise.

Elon

Than: Zero mentions of Elon Musk in the Wrap.

utilities: We can’t get away from the man after his Twitter purchase blew up the internet.

What has remained constant: new venture capital funds, early stage investments, M&A, choppy public markets and Wordle.

The big Aussie VCs raised record amounts. Sydney VC AirTree started the year with a $700 million raise. Blackbird and Square Peg ended the year with A$1 billion and US$550 million respectively.

VCs have been plowing capital into early-stage companies throughout the year, with 80%+ of the three major Aussie VCs (mentioned above) investments in new companies being seed or pre-seed deals. Square Peg even wrote a whole message remind people to invest early.

Local mergers and acquisitions continue. Uber acquired Carnextdoor in January. Now that Aussie-grown product is being rolled out around the world as Uber Car Sharing. saw this month Relay Commerce acquires SmartrMail. Last mile delivery company Drive Yello and cafe ordering app Hey You too merged.

Wordle took the world by storm. This week, Google confirmed it was the most searched term of 2022.

Still relevant:

Local news

Win a market. Australians spent in total $7.3 billion with Uber last year generated $2 billion in revenue and $1 billion in gross profit. Deliveroo, on the other hand, does losing about $3 million a month on its Australian operations before shutting down last month.

In other closing news, online furniture retailer Brosa has gone into administration.

FTX ripples. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested in the Bahamas. Meanwhile, Australian crypto exchanges are fighting to stay amid the FTX outage. Digital Surge went into voluntary administration due to exposure to FTX. Swyftx has announced that this will happen lay off 40% of its workforce (about 90 people) and CoinJar has about 20% cut of his staff.

Chicken dinner winner winner. Women and targeted companies had the most wins Intermission prices ’22. Two standouts, each winning three awards, were Great Wrap (compostable stretch film made from potatoes) and Verve (an ethical super fund for women). In the Deloitte Tech Fast 50Montu (medical cannabis telehealth and training) was declared the overall winner, followed by FrankieOne (risk management for fraud and money laundering) and me&u (restaurant table ordering platform).

New local funds

Melt companies launched Australia’s first dedicated Advanced Manufacturing Venture Fund (e.g., clean technologies, automation and robotics, agriculture, transportation, and space), targeting a $20 million increase by the end of March 2023.

Gas pedal, starting size wants to raise $30 million by early 2023, including for a new Continuity Fund that will allow Startmate to continue supporting its successful alumni as they age.

Community capital launched one new credit fund that donates part of the management fees to charities. The fund aims to provide multi-year grants of between $100,000 and $500,000 per year to 10 to 15 startup organizations with social causes.

In the US of A

Grow up or go home. US VC a16z launched a Growth Statistics Guide benchmark tool for venture capital backed B2B companies.

4/ First, we built a proprietary dataset based on 2014-2021 data from companies that have successfully scaled to help founders benchmark the most meaningful indicators for growth, retention, margin, sales efficiency and operating efficiency. pic.twitter.com/u5focdFguD

— David George (@DavidGeorge83) December 14, 2022

Everyone is leaving Salesforce. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield leaves early January. This comes less than a week after Salesforce was announced as Vice President and Co-CEO Bret Taylor will step down and Tableau CEO Mark Nelson also continues (Butterfield says the quarters are unrelated).

Open iPhone. After fighting ferociously to keep iOS as a closed ecosystem, Apple is preparing allow alternative app stores and side-loading on iOS in response to impending EU requirements. It’s also exploring opening up its camera and NFC stack to developers.

Terrible UX. Hertz will pay $168 million to settle 364 claims related to the company falsely reporting rental cars as stolen. Thanks to a few bugs in Hertz back-end systemshis innocent customers have been held at gunpoint, arrested and even imprisoned.

Prison, continued Theranos Exec Sunny Balwani was sentenced to 13 years in jail for defrauding patients and investors – that’s 2 years more than CEO Elizabeth Holmes.

Chinwag. More than 2 million people have signed up to use OpenAI’s conversational text generation model. ChatGPT. Huge hype and just as much criticism:

“It often seems as if a student confidently answers a question for which he has not attended a lecture. It looks like a confident bullsh*tter. —Benedict Evans

Here’s VC Turner Novak Giving ChatGPT a whirl:

my work is now 100% automated pic.twitter.com/uyk6PurvgH

— Turner Novak 🍌🧢 (@TurnerNovak) December 3, 2022

This wrap is not (yet) written by ChatGPT.

It’s a wrap! Thank you for joining us this year. See you in 2023.

Bex, Gavin and the team at Ignition Lane