A massive crypto hack, EU’s tech troubles, and Coast’s fascinating $40M round

A massive crypto hack, EU’s tech troubles, and Coast’s fascinating $40M round

Top News

• A quarter-billion-dollar crypto hack: An Indian crypto exchange called WazirX saw $230 million worth of assets drained after “a security breach in one of its multi-sig wallets,” CoinDesk reports. The losses were nearly half of the exchange’s total assets. Crypto is seeing some political winds blow in its favor, but security remains an unsolved issue in blockchain-land.

• EU tech loses out: Meta has a new multi-modal AI model coming, but it won’t make a splash in Europe, where the tech giant doesn’t plan to release it. Why? Regulations. Alex points out that Meta’s move follows Apple’s choice to feature-lock Europe, making it a trend worth tracking.

• Coast lands $40M: Mere months after raising $25 million, fintech startup Coast is back with a new, larger funding round. The company is building a Ramp, or Brex-like service for companies that manage vehicle fleets. Gas cards are not new, but melding modern fintech solutions with gas cards, it turns out, is a great place for a startup to operate. How can we tell? We reckon venture capitalists in 2024 don’t do back-to-back rounds if the underlying metrics aren’t stellar.

TWiST500

News that Coast secured $40 million more so quickly after its last fundraise instantly made it a startup to watch and, therefore, worthy of TWiST500 inclusion. We simply do not see that pace of investment often in the current era.

Part of what seems to be exciting investors is that Coast is seeing more spend from customers for non-fuel expenditures. That means that its cards are expanding from a gas-focused root to a more diversified plant.

Tortured analogies aside, moving from fuel cards to general fleet operator finance means that Coast’s TAM is growing while its ability to yank more revenue from existing customers also expands. That’s a winning combination if you are trying to determine how big the startup could become in a few years. (Recent growth has been good, too, with TechCrunch’s Mary Ann Azevedo writing that “the startup grew about “10x” in both annualized revenue and payment volume in the last 18 months.”)

Apart from adding Coast to the TWiST500, it’s new inclusion made me double-check to see if we had added Ramp and Brex and Airbase to the list. No, it turns out. So, today we’re expanding the TWiST500 to include the major corporate spend companies. You can view the whole TWiST500 here.

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This Week in Startups

E1981: Liquidity is back! David Weisburd and Jason Calacanis had Jamie Rhode (Screendoor), and Matthew Mulvey (Liquid 2 Ventures) on to chat about the potential Google-Wiz deal and the importance of cash returns in venture, how emerging managers and secondary markets impact VC today, and why LP focus on larger funds could make it harder for smaller, younger funds to stay afloat.

E1980: A news roundtable after a historic weekend. Jason and Alex talked social media in the wake of a weekend of political violence, what some venture folks hope to get out of a second Trump administration, the Google-Wiz deal, and how Sequoia is working to cash out some of its LPs who are sitting on Stripe equity that they cannot sell.

E1979: In this news roundtable, Jason and Alex dug into StubHub’s IPO, how cooling inflation could lead to rate cuts — a potential boon for venture capital results — and OpenAI’s five levels of AI. The Microsoft-aligned company thinks that it is still pretty early in its progress in building artificial intelligence software. To close, the pair added a host of new companies to the TWiST500.

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