Venture Debt

This Week's Deeptech Rounds Aren't All Made of the Same Money

Three deeptech companies announced funding this past week, and if you only read the headline numbers, they’d blur into the same story: hard-tech startup raises tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Look at how each round is actually built, though, and they’re telling three different stories about who’s willing to bet on what, and how. One is half debt, collateralized against a backlog you can go check. One has no new investor in it at all, and the company says so itself. One isn’t venture capital in any conventional sense. The size of the check is the least interesting number in all three.