Welcome to Edition 001 of the No Cap Newsletter ! The RippleX Fellowship continues to expand and we are excited to introduce a bi-weekly newsletter. We’ll cover industry news, key program learnings, and of course, spotlight a RippleX Fellow doing awesome things! The 30M, 300M, & 3B Startup Building out a startup is no easy task and the goal is always to shoot for the moon, but does this mean that every startup should aim for a $3 billion valuation? Well, not every company is going to be a $3 billion startup and that’s okay. If you bootstrap (never raise VC) to a $30 million exit, that’s the same if you owned 10% of a $300 million company raising VC. The VC market has been on fire lately with investors giving out millions as pocket change, but the reality is that not every startup will be as fortunate. This means that not every company can get to a billion-dollar outcome. You have to have a large enough market, a fantastic product, a solid management team, and of course, adaptive scalability. The VC world revolves around valuation and finding startups with their own magic sauce. A billion-dollar startup is named a unicorn for a reason, not every company can get that recipe perfectly. If somehow they do, there are a variety of different factors that have to align for everything to go according to plan. As of September 2021, there are 847 unicorns around the world and every week the list continues to expand! Let’s dive into the industry Mo’ Money Mo’ Funding Global funding prior to this year could not be imagined to reach $100 billion in a quarter, but things took quite a turn in 2021. In Q1 2021, global funding hit $135 billion moving up to $160 billion in Q3 and these impressive numbers don’t end here. Early-stage investing also continued to climb and peaked at $49 billion with 2005 deals globally in Q3 alone. Read more. Since the start of this year, 427 Canadian startups have raised a total of $10.92 billion in Venture Capital and there is no slowing down. With 34 deals over $100 million, investors in both Canada and the U.S. are lining up to get a piece. Read more. Indian startups are on fire as investments are spiralling in from every direction. A total of $23.5 billion has been invested this year, resulting in 17 unicorns being created in the last 10 months. Read more. Latest news in startups San Francisco-based Alloy has joined the unicorn club last week raising $100 million USD led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. This startup aims to support banks and fintechs to automate onboarding identity decisions and transaction monitoring. Read more. A new unicorn has emerged from Vancouver. Semios, an AgTech startup has raised $100 million led by Morningside Group to support the company develop an IoT network for farmers to monitor and predict crop management. Read more. Vancouver-based Dapper Labs secured $319 million led by a16z, GV, and Version One Ventures. With previous projects including NBA Top Shot and Flow Blockchain, the company aims to continue riding the NFT wave through various new partnerships. Read more. Startups at seed and pre-seed stages continue to attract investors: Welcome, a city guide app which aims to personalize your travel experience receives $3.5 million from Accel. Read more. CostCerified, a YC-backed startup secured $8.45 million in seed funding to create an interactive construction estimator for homeowners. Read more. Cardoor, a car retailing platform has raised $3 million in seed funding. Read more. Read more. Private AI, a language redaction tool has raised $3.15 million in pre-seed funding. Read more. Fellow Spotlight Roger Cawdette - Co-Founder & CEO at Finary Excited to kick off the fellow spotlight with Roger Cawdette from Cohort #3! Roger has definitely had quite an eventful year leading his startup Finary and we are proud to tell you all about it! With the immense rise in popularity for investing, Gen-Zs and Millennials face continuous difficulty in navigating through the information to make actionable decisions. This is where Roger and his team aim to bridge the gap. Finary presents itself as the “Discord of investing” - an online platform that builds communities for young investors to learn and discuss investing. Earlier this year, Finary had secured $3.2 million in Seed funding led by UpFront Ventures as well as joining the YCombinator Winter 2021 cohort! Interested to be featured? Looking to share exciting news? Please reach out to Dom at dom@rippleventures.com. Authored by Turja Chowdhury (Cohort #9).