It’s shaping up to be an uneasy year in Silicon Valley. Funding has slowed, downrounds are kicking in. Once high-flying startups are cutting perks and laying off staff. They’re also afraid to pursue exits via public markets, leaving the tech IPO market a wasteland.
It’s shaping up to be an uneasy year in Silicon Valley. Funding has slowed, downrounds are kicking in. Once high-flying startups are cutting perks and laying off staff. They’re also afraid to pursue exits via public markets, leaving the tech IPO market a wasteland.
Now, investor skepticism is affecting even the biggest and richest startups. On Friday, investment firm T. Rowe Price $TROW disclosed markdowns for at least a dozen privately held tech companies, including Uber $UBER and Airbnb $ABNB.
For the quarter ended March 31, mutual fund filings show T. Rowe cut the value of its stakes in both Uber and Airbnb by 6%. Uber’s latest round of funding, which T. Rowe took part in, was thought to value the ride-hailing company at $62.5 billion. Airbnb raised a $1.5 billion round last summer—one that T. Rowe was also involved in—which lifted its valuation to $25.5 billion.
Other companies took much greater hits. T. Rowe slashed the value of its stake in Evernote by 75.7%, in Cloudera, a data analytics company, by 36.7%, and in database company MongoDB $MDB by 23.4%.
WeWork notably bucked the trend, though T. Rowe still values its stake below the $16 billion price the shared office-space company raised money at in March.
In late February, Fidelity Investments marked down many of the startups held in its funds, among them, billion-dollar “unicorns” Blue Apron, Dropbox, and Zenefits.
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