April was another strong month for global venture funding, with venture capital and growth investors putting up $48 billion. That makes April the second-highest month on record for investment in private companies, according to data from Crunchbase.
The first highest was March of this year, which saw $54 billion in investments. And funding across all stages rose as compared to last year: early-stage funding by 50 percent, seed-stage by a third and late-stage was nearly double.
Among the most active investors was the hedge fund Tiger Global, which made 93 investments between January and April, exceeding its investments for the whole of last year. Crunchbase noted that the firm was April’s most active investor, putting money in 32 companies.
Crunchbase also recorded a significant number of new unicorn startups, 39 in April, which comes out to roughly two new companies joining their list for every working day that month. Most of these firms (28) are headquartered in the U.S., along with six in India. But the highest-valued of these companies comes from Indonesia, where the delivery firm J&T Express entered the unicorn club with an $8 billion valuation.
These types of firms led to the mammoth level of fundraising for the entirety of Q1 of this year. As PYMNTS reported in April, the first quarter of the year saw record-setting levels of startup funding, with investors putting $72.7 billion into fledgling tech firms’ growth-stage rounds. That is the highest total in the history of Crunchbase’s figures, close to double that of the first quarter of 2020, with investments increasing 57 percent from the previous quarter. The quarter also saw 194 funding rounds of $100 million or more for unicorns, something that was once rare but is now fairly common.
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