What Startups Are Getting Funded Right Now (First Month After US Declares National Emergency)

The Signal: To answer the question, “What startups are getting funded right now?”, we compiled a list (Google Sheet here) of 168 startups that have closed an investment round since March 11, the day President Trump announced a European travel ban (and the NBA canceled its season). The funding information is collected from Dan Primack’s indispensable (and free) business newsletter Pro Rata.

To be sure, these deals were largely in the works before the US implemented its quarantine measures. And the funding environment will undoubtedly change in the weeks and months to come. Having said that, the list of recently funded startups does provide a view into the types of business opportunities available.

Over this span, the industries that have received the most funding are Biotech (16% of total), Health Tech (14%), and FinTech (10%). California (30%) is home to the largest majority of these companies followed by the UK (8%), Massachusetts (7%), New York (5%), and China (5%).

The Opportunity: As previously noted, these funding rounds are a limited snapshot of an extremely fluid situation. None of these companies started as a direct response to the current crisis but some are certainly benefitting from a so-called “coronavirus tailwind” (we didn’t make this up), which will accelerate growth across select industries.

Moving forward, the recent skew towards health and biotech investments is likely a long-term trend.

Balaji Srinivasan — one of the earliest and most astute commentators on the current crisis and former general partner at venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz — believes that “the 2020s will be the decade of biomedicine… almost everything else may crash, but budgets for this will be unlimited… what the internet was to software, or crypto was to finance, the virus will be to biomedicine.”

He recommends that entrepreneurs interested in the space join the likes of Illumina (biotech and genomics), Roche (pharma and diagnostics), and GSK (pharma), and deep dive into the biohacking movement to “learn new skills.”