We all love the story of a charismatic leader. We flock to their interviews and share their quippy tweets and bold pronouncements. We’ll even tolerate their more bizarre eccentricities, as long as their company is doing well.
Ozy Media’s Carlos Watson perhaps knows this well. After losing support from investors and even his crisis communications manager (who quit after just four days on the job), Watson is using one of the final weapons left in his arsenal—his often-cited charm—in an effort to reopen the business that his board just a week ago said would shut down.
It’s just that the charm offensive, after a cascade of allegations around fraud and toxic company culture, is now looking awfully, well, disconnected from reality.
As my colleague Jessica Mathews writes, Watson has been emailing employees, asking them to come back after the company went dark. “Last week was brutal and heartbreaking on so many levels,” he wrote, calling for sympathy in that missive before saying he believed the company had a “credible path forward.” But as one employee sums up: “It’s kind of a joke…. “I don’t know that more than two or three people have a ton of faith in the company.”
Charisma is an important attribute in a leader, but Watson may find that using it to prop up a business facing serious allegations of fraud is more likely to break that particular weapon to pieces than it is to bring the company successfully back from the dead.
PRINCE HARRY’S NOW AN EXEC AT A $4.7 BILLION COMPANY: If you work in tech, one way to really maximize your compensation is to find a hot startup with the potential to dramatically boost the value of your equity. On Friday, employees at BetterUp got a sense of that: The employee coaching startup told me that it had just raised funding at a $4.7 billion valuation. That comes just a few months after the company crossed the unicorn threshold and became a $1.7 billion company with a funding round earlier this year. The eventual plan, says CEO and co-founder Alexi Robichaux, is to IPO—though he gave no timeline.
It is worth noting that Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, was hired as BetterUp’s chief impact officer near the start of the year. It’s unclear what his compensation package looked like. Read more about that here.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
P.S. JOIN US: For a thoughtful discussion about A.I.’s massive impact on business, make sure you attend Fortune’s upcoming Brainstorm A.I. conference, the definitive gathering for all things artificial intelligence. The conference will be in Boston on Nov. 8 and 9, with a slate of speakers that will include Dr. Lynne Parker, Director, National A.I. Initiative, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; PepsiCo chief strategy and transformation officer Athina Kanioura; and Alexa AI Amazon’s head scientist, Rohit Prasad. Apply to attend here.
Jessica Mathews compiled the IPO and SPAC sections of this newsletter.
VENTURE DEALS
- Chronosphere, a New York City-based app monitoring tech company, raised $200 million in Series C funding. General Atlantic led the round and was joined by investors including Addition, Greylock, Lux Capital and Founders Fund.
- Rebel Foods, an Indian cloud kitchen company, raised $175 million in Series F funding. Qatar Investment Authority led the round and was joined by investors including Coatue and Evolvence. The deal values it at $1.4 billion.
- Gretel AI, a maker of synthetic data for training machine-learning models, raised $50 million in Series B funding. Anthos Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Section 32, Greylock, and Moonshots Capital.
- Getsafe, a German insurtech, raised $63 million. Investors included Earlybird and Abacon Capital.
- BrightHire, an HR and hiring software startup, raised $20.5 million in Series B funding. 01 Advisors led the round and was joined by investors including Index Ventures and Zoom Apps Fund.
- PERSUIT, a New York City-based legal tech company raised $20 million in Series A funding. OpenView led the round.
- Cord, a London-based maker of tech for adding collaboration tools to products, raised $17.5 million in funding. Index Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including NFX, Stride, Elad Gil, Jeff Morris Jr., Charlie Songhurst, Guy Podjarny, and Matt Robinson.
- Alembic, a San Francisco-based marketing tech company, raised $9.5 million in seed funding. KB Partners and OCA Ventures led the round.
- RoboTire, a Michigan-based robotics and automotive manufacturing company, raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. Discount Tire led the round and was joined by investors including Automotive Ventures, Detroit Venture Partners and 640 Oxford Ventures.
- Energetic Insurance, a Boston-based insurance startup, raised $7 million in Series A funding. Schneider Electric Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including MS&AD Ventures, MCJ Collective, and Atlantic Global Risk.
- Trioscope, an Atlanta-based animation studio, raised $5.3 million. BITKRAFT Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Sony Innovation Fund, Transcend Fund, Cordillera Investment Partners and Thomas Vu/Axis Mundi Capital.
- PideDirecto, a Mexico-based e-commerce tech maker, raised $5.3 million in seed funding. JAM FUND led the round and was joined by investors including Soma Capital, Acacia Ventures, Kube VC, Flexport, and Y Combinator.
- Otto, a Dallas-based car loan startup, raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Uncommon Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Pelion Venture Partners, 1930 Capital, Bloom VP, and Spacecadet Ventures.
- Prisidio, a Chicago-based maker of secure personal-data storage products, raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Chicago Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including OCA Ventures and Origin Ventures.
- Now, the invoicing startup co-founded by Lara O’Connor Hodgson and Stacey Abrams, raised $4 million. Brigade Capital Management and Virgo Investment Group led the round.
- MEandMine, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based edtech, raised $2.1 million in seed funding. Wistron led the round.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- 1-800 Contacts, backed by KKR, acquired Ditto, an Oakland, Calif.-based virtual try-on tech company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Ara Partners acquired Fluitron, an Ivyland, Penn.-based industrial gas compression and dispensing equipment company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Riskonnect, backed by Thoma Bravo, acquired ICIX, a California-based ESG monitoring company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Insurity, backed by GI Partners, acquired Maprisk, a geospatial data and analytics software business. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Permira invested in Motus, a reimbursement software company. Shareholder Thoma Bravo will reinvest. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
EXITS
- Microsoft acquired Ally.io, a Bellevue, Wash.-based OKR software company. Ally has been backed by investors including Accel and Founders Co Op. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Otonomo Technologies (Nasdaq: OTMO) acquired Neura, a mobility analysis company, for about $50 million.
IPO
-AutoStore, a Norwegian warehouse robotics company, is planning for a valuation of up to $12 billion from a public listing in Oslo, per Reuters. Thomas H. Lee Partners, SoftBank Group, and EQT own the firm.
- Pyxis Oncology, a Cambridge, Mass.-based cancer treatment company, raised $168 million in an offering of 10.5 million shares priced at $16 per share—it had previously planned to offer 9.5 million shares. The company reported a loss of $12.8 million in 2020 and has yet to post revenue. Pfizer Ventures, BVF Partners, Perceptive Advisors, and RTW Investments back the firm.
- IsoPlexis Corporation, a Branford, Conn.-based disease detection company, raised $125 million in an offering of 8.3 million shares priced at $15 per share. The company generated gross profit of $5.4 million in 2020 and reported a net loss of $23.3 million. BlackRock, Danaher, and Northpond Ventures back the firm.
- FlexEnergy Green Solutions, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based green energy solution technology company, filed for an IPO. The company posted $23 million in revenue in 2020 and reported a net loss of $7 million. FlexEnergy Power Solutions owns the firm.
SPAC
- Starry, a Boston-based fixed wireless broadband company, plans to go public via a merger with FirstMark Horizon Acquisition Corp., a SPAC. A deal could value the firm at $1.7 billion.
- Semper Paratus Acquisition Corp., a blank check company focused on companies in the transportation, supply chain and logistics industry, plans to raise $300 million in an IPO. The SPAC is led by former UPS CFO Richard Peretz and CEO of business restructuring advisory firm Diemacher, B. Ben Baldanza.
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