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Hundreds of millions of dollars later, the California startup that tried to disrupt pizza delivery has gone belly up. Zume, which had raised a total of $445 million since its founding in 2015, ceased operations last month and is liquidating its assets, according to a report from The Information. Once based in Mountain View but most recently headquartered in Camarillo, the firm planned to cook pizzas in the back of a massive truck, with robots, while en route to customers’ homes. In 2016, Zume delivered its first pies, and positive reviews rolled in on Yelp. But Bloomberg reported that the...

While in graduate school Matt Schwartz had an epiphany. At the time, he was learning about the food system as part of Stanford University’s Earth Program and also participating in an internship with food tech investor Dave Friedberg, and it was this combination of advanced education with a front-row seat to food tech innovation that helped him to see the future. “That’s when I came to believe that things were heading towards fresh,” Schwartz told me this week in a Zoom interview. “That we need to move towards a more nutrient-dense form of eating, a less calorie dense form of...

WASHINGTON (SBG) — America's largest publicly traded companies are increasingly throwing their weight behind progressive social and political issues. One investment fund has rejected "woke" corporate culture and created an exchange-traded fund (ETF) for conservatives. William Flaig has worked in investment management for over 25 years and is the founder and CEO of American Conservative Values ETF (ACVF), a $25 million fund that avoids investing in large-cap companies it determines have a liberal activist agenda. "A lot of products have come out that seem to focus on issues that don't really resonate with politically conservative investors," Flaig said. So he...

The round included existing investors as well as the former CEO and COO of Twitter.Fast-growing pizza tech platform Slice has raised $40 million from existing investors as well as two former Twitter executives. The Series D round was led by Cross Creek, with contributions from KKR, GGV Capital and Primary Ventures. But the highlight was the addition of former Twitter CEO Dick Costilo and COO Adam Bain through their 01 Advisors venture. “We are so grateful to Cross Creek for leading this round and giving us the opportunity to bring on the 01 team as we enter this next stage...

Li Xueren/Xinhua via APAs more and more information comes to light about Hunter Biden, so do many of the questionable business dealings in which Hunter had engaged. While Burisma has made headlines for the last several years, recently much more has been revealed about Hunter’s engagement in Chinese business dealings – and they’re infinitely more troubling than anything having to do with Ukraine or Burisma. Prior to his tagging along on the Big Guy’s trip to China in December 2013, Hunter Biden and his associates Devon Archer, James Bulger, and Michael Lin had held numerous meetings with executives from Bohai...

Insect farming startup Ÿnsect has extended its Series C funding to $372 million – the largest amount ever raised by a non-American agtech business. The new capital will fund completion of the largest insect farm in the world, due to open in Amiens, France in early 2022. The facility is slated to generate 100,000 tonnes of insect products annually, as well as create 500 direct and indirect jobs. The investment will also let the company expand beyond Europe and Asia into the United States, with the support of its first US-based investors, Upfront Ventures and FootPrint Coalition; and grow its...

Chelsea Clinton is reportedly entering the venture capital scene. That's according to Axios' Kia Kokalitcheva and Dan Primack, who reported Thursday morning that Clinton is in the "very early stages" of forming a new fund called Metrodora Ventures, named after one of the first women to write a medical text. Axios reports that Clinton is still determining whether she wants to become a full-time VC, but noted that the name of the fund was registered in April, there's a draft pitch deck being passed around, and Metrodora Ventures has its own Twitter account, created in July. On Twitter, the firm...

Palo Alto, CA  ~  Wednesday, February 12, 2020 “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)”*: The Role of Venture Capital in a Competitive EconomyRemarks as Prepared for Delivery Good morning.  On behalf of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Rock Center for Corporate Governance, I want to welcome you to Paul Brest Hall and Stanford University.  I am Makan Delrahim, and I have the privilege of serving as the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust at the Department of Justice.Today’s event is part of our on-going effort at the Department of Justice to understand the...

“the group is accomplishing this all behind the scenes — without any prior public scrutiny” Democrats are fond of claiming that they want big money and so-called ‘dark’ money taken out of politics. Yet a Silicon Valley-based group is quietly pumping over a hundred million dollars into efforts to help Democrats in 2020, mostly through voter registration. Funny, it doesn’t sound like anyone on the left is complaining about this. Theodore Schleifer reports at Recode: How Silicon Valley’s secretive donor group plans to beat Trump Mind the Gap, the secretive group quietly reshaping big-money politics in Silicon Valley, is aiming...

Larry Fink’s recent letters to CEOs and investors were certain to press buttons, because they dealt with BlackRock’s plans to address climate change. Yet the reactions, Fink tells Barron’s, have been positive even as climate change has become a political football. “I received one of the great letters of my career from a client in a red state,” says the CEO of BlackRock (ticker: BLK). “This client was very thankful. This client said, ‘We have a 10- to 20-year investment horizon. We now need to look at how we think about investing.’ ” BlackRock puts climate-risk analysis at the heart...

When most employees get fired, they leave with only their personal items and a strong dose of embarrassment. No severance. No gold watch. No retirement party. Just a terse, “Don’t bump your butt on the door on your way out!” It matters not that the employee may have been a solid contributor to the company for many years.  Such is not the case if you are among the chosen few who are blessed to work for very generous boards of directors. Witness the recent events under the Golden Arches. CEO Steve Easterbrook was pushed out for admittedly having a sexual...

President Trump wants to reform immigration to be based on merit, rather than lotteries, anchor babies, and chains of poor, unskilled, uneducated relatives, all with their hands out asking for public assistance from American taxpayers. Merit means immigration based on what the immigrant can bring to, rather than take from, America. President John F. Kennedy, the last great Democrat, articulated the policy well in his 1961 Inaugural address, when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Trump’s vision is to apply this principle to those who are...

The high-profile entrepreneur helped start Draper Fisher Jurvetson.Famed venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson is leaving his job at Draper Fisher Jurvetson in the wake of an investigation into sexual harassment. Jurvetson is the highest-profile venture capitalist to be forced from his job amid an industrywide evaluation of how Silicon Valley treats women. Jurvetson sits on the board of two of tech’s flashiest companies, SpaceX and Tesla, and the news has already stripped him of those posts, at least temporarily. DFJ announced the move in a letter to limited partners on Monday. The firm released a statement to Recode that read: As...

Tom Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's first venture capitalists, died this week. The New York Times reported on Thursday that the financier died at 84 at home in Tiburon, Calif., of natural causes. The firm he helped co-found, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, confirmed the news to NPR. Perkins and Eugene Kleiner co-founded a venture capital firm in 1972 — "at a time when parts of Silicon Valley were still largely fruit orchards," as the Times points out. The firm later grew into a behemoth, propelling a new approach to investment, the Times reports: "Perkins and his partners popularized a...

Universities may want to adopt a basic rule to avoid mission creep: When you have failed in your basic task, it is probably not a good idea to enter into new ventures outside of that undertaking. With graduation rates that could at best be described as anemic and skill mastery among graduates which might be characterized as pathetic, universities are venturing into the world of venture capitalism. “Universities across the country have developed entrepreneurship programs in recent years aimed at encouraging students and faculty to turn promising business ideas into actual companies,” Steven Overly reported in the Washington Post on...

Venture capital investment in American life-sciences innovation is suffering an alarming decline. The number of new biotechnology and medical device companies receiving start-up financing has now fallen to the lowest levels in 18 years, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In recent decades, the cost of developing a single new medicine has grown more than 10-fold, to $1.5 billion. On average, each new drug spends 15 years in development. And only two in 10 successfully commercialized medicines ever earn a return on investment. Start-ups have played a vital role in the development of an entire generation of cutting-edge new therapies that have revolutionized...

Mitt Romney is indisputably a very rich man. And if he is elected president on Nov. 6, he will become one of the wealthiest people ever to hold the office. But exactly how wealthy is Romney? The figure that gets tossed around is $250 million in net worth — meaning the total value of his assets, financial and others, minus any debts. It’s a big number, but frankly, it seems low. Given the industry in which he made his fortune (private equity), the era when he made it (the 1980s and 1990s) and the wealth of his peers in that...

Global Blood Therapeutics Inc., a San Francisco-based developer of oral medicines to treat chronic blood-based diseases, has launched with $40.7 million in Series A funding from Third Rock Ventures. www.globalbloodtx.com Invuity, a San Francisco-based developer of surgical visualization and illumination technology, has raised $25 million in Series D funding. Valence Advantage led the round, and was joined by return backers Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and InterWest Partners. www.invuity.com Thismoment, a San Francisco-based provider of social content management software for brands, has raised $22 million in Series C funding led by Trident Capital. The company previously raised over $11 million...

Despite a growing backlash from his fellow Democrats, President Obama has doubled down on his attacks on Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital. But the strategy could backfire in ways Obama has not anticipated. After all, if Romney's record in private equity is fair game, then so is Obama's record in public equity — and that record is not pretty. Since taking office, Obama has invested billions of taxpayer dollars in private businesses, including as part of his stimulus spending bill. Many of those investments have turned out to be unmitigated disasters — leaving in their wake bankruptcies, layoffs, criminal...

Campaign 2012: Newark's mayor succumbs to administration thought control after going off-script and praising the private-equity firm that succeeded in creating net jobs, unlike presidential investment Solyndra. The White House must have had a bad case of the vapors when Newark Mayor Cory Booker, viewed in some quarters as a practical, non-ideological problem-solver, praised the record of Mitt Romney's former private firm Bain Capital, before a national audience on NBC's "Meet The Press," and eschewed attacks of a type he found "nauseating." "I have to just say from a very personal level, I'm not about to sit here and indict...