This year has been a spectacular one regarding big funding rounds for startups. It’s a year when you just sleep for a night and lo and behold wake up to the news of big funding rounds that were announced just in the few hours you slept.

Just on Monday in this new week, several $100 million+ rounds for startups were announced, with some rounds amounting to around $100 million and others going to as high as over $1 billion.

In this piece, we present to you a summary of the biggest new funding rounds of this week. They include;

Ro – Ro, an online pharmacy startup, has raised $500 million in Series D funding that values it at $5 billion. It’s now raised a total of nearly $900 million in outside funding with the addition of the new round.

GoPuff –

Food, snacks, and alcohol delivery app GoPuff has raised a whopping $1.15 billion in a new funding round valuing it at $9 billion, double its valuation from a previous round five months ago.

GoPuff’s new round came from a mix of new and existing investors including Fidelity, D1 Capital Partners, Baillie Gifford, Eldridge, Reinvent Capital, Luxor Capital, and SoftBank Vision Fund 1. It came shortly after the company made use of the majority of its last funding round to finance a $350 million purchase of liquor chain BevMo!.

Airwallex – Australian cross-border payments startup Airwallex has raised a fresh $100 million in funding valuing it at $2.6 billion. The new round was complementary to a previously announced Series D round of $200 million, now summing up the total from that round to $300 million.

US-based investor Greenoaks led Airwallex’s new round, joined in participation by Australia’s Grok Ventures, Skip Capital, and ANZi Ventures. With it, Airwallex has now raised a total of nearly half-a-billion-dollars in funding.

Eat Just – Eat Just, a company making alternative plant-based proteins such as eggs and mayonnaise, has raised a fresh $200 million round led by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar. 

Other participants in the round included private investment firm Charlesbank Capital Partners and Vulcan Capital, the investment arm of the estate of late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. With it, Eat Just has now raised a total of over $650 million in funding.

Dataminr – Dataminr, a real-time information discovery platform, has closed a $475 million round valuing it at $4.1 billion. Investors that chipped into the round include Eldridge, Valor Equity Partners, Michael Dell’s MSD Capital, Reinvent Capital, ArrowMark Partners, IVP, Eden Global, and Morgan Stanley.

Telegram – the popular (privacy-focused) chat-app has raised over $1 billion from selling convertible bonds. The funding round was reportedly in the works for a few months before now as Telegram’s costs soared higher due to increasing usage but with no current business model generating enough to pay for its costs.

Orca Security – Israeli cloud security startup Orca has raised a $210 million Series C round valuing it at $1.2 billion. The round was led by Alphabet’s CapitalG along with Redpoint Ventures. With it, Orca has now raised nearly $300 million since it was founded two years ago.

Other bits:

Save for big funding rounds, there are other notable happenings from the tech world to note. They include;

AWS’s new CEO

Amazon’s cloud computing division, AWS, is getting a new CEO by the name of Adam Selipsky as its current CEO Andy Jassy steps into a bigger role to lead Amazon. Selipsky is the current CEO of Salesforce-owned Tableau and happens to have been a Vice President at AWS before he left to join Tableau.

Selipsky will now be returning to AWS to take a higher position as the CEO of where he was once a Vice President.

Prince Harry’s startup gig

Fresh off noticeable royal drama, Prince Harry of Britain has landed a gig as the ‘Chief Impact Officer’ of BetterUp, a billion-dollar mental health startup. It’s on the face of it a cushy role where he brings a strong network and strong brand recognition to the table.

BetterUp offers coaching and mental health services to enterprises for their employees. It raised a $125 million funding round valuing it at $1.7 billion just last month.

Microsoft may buy Discord

A Bloomberg report says that Microsoft is holding talks to buy chat app Discord for over $10 billion, citing “people familiar with the matter”. It’s said that Discord has been talking to potential buyers and Microsoft is the frontrunner on the buyer’s side.

A $10 billion+ purchase of Discord would be one of Microsoft’s biggest acquisitions and one of the biggest in the gaming world of Discord. Though it’s not confirmed and there’s no guarantee that such a deal will take place.

Discord has exploded in popularity over the past year amid the pandemic. It raised a $100 million round valuing it at $7 billion late last year.

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