Venture investors are raising the stakes, choosing to ignore warnings that the good times won’t last forever and betting bigger than ever in a slew of massive early-stage venture rounds this week.
Mystery company Magic Leap raised over half a billion on Tuesday in the largest Series B round on record, followed by Koudai’s second-largest Series C round to date announced on Thursday.
With help from Mirantis‘ and Tokopedia’s $100M rounds announced on Wednesday, startups have collectively raised over $2 billion in venture funding in the past 5 days to capture the third highest weekly investment total this year.
Magic Leap’s $542 million cash influx is the 5th largest venture round recorded by CrunchBase to date – topped only by later-stage rounds for Uber, Flipkart, Groupon and Cloudera.
Electric vehicle network provider Better Place (which filed for bankruptcy after blowing through nearly $1 billion in venture funding) is the one of the only startups to raise an early-stage round even close to this amount.
Zynga too saw its fair share of failure after raising a whopping $300 million Series B back in 2010 from Softbank and Google.
But its not time to panic for Magic Leap just yet – its investors are well-versed in big spending. A16z invested in Groupon’s $950M pre-IPO round (joined by KPCB) as well as a few $200M+ late stage rounds for Pinterest and Lyft. Co-investor KPCB got in on late stage funding for Uber and Zynga (following the lead of Google, another Magic Leap co-investor).
The high roller that outdoes them all, most frequently seen in these massive venture rounds, is T. Rowe Price. The Baltimore-based investment management firm has poured billions into mega-rounds for Living Social, Zynga, Dropbox, PureStorage, Airbnb, and Twitter, to name a few.
Check out Graph Insights and the CrunchBase Investor Leaderboard to discover some of your own connections.
Photo via Flickr user Reuben Ingber.
